 Original logo of International Publishers, used from the time of the firm's establishment in 1924 throughout the decade of the 1930s. | |
| Founded | 1924 |
|---|---|
| Founder | |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | New York City |
| Publication types | Books |
| Nonfiction topics | Marxism |
| Official website | intpubnyc.com |
International Publishers is a book publishing company based in New York City, specializing in Marxist works of economics, political science, and history.
International Publishers Company, Inc., was founded in 1924 with funds given the project by Abraham A. Heller. [1] Heller was the radical son of a wealthy jeweler doing business in Paris. [2] He expanded his fortune as head of the International Oxygen Company, a welding supply company that operated a trade concession in Soviet Russia during the time of the New Economic Policy in the early 1920s. [3] A lifelong socialist, Heller had previously been a heavy financial donor to the New York Call, the Socialist Party's New York daily newspaper. He had been instrumental in funding the purchase of the headquarters building for the Rand School of Social Science. [4]
The company began with a capital stock of $50,000, paid in by Heller, with the stock subsequently split with Trachtenberg as compensation. [5] Alexander Trachtenberg, a left wing member of the Socialist Party of America associated with the Rand School of Social Science and its publishing house, who joined the Communist movement at the end of 1921, served as manager of International Publishers from its inception through the 1940s. [5]
The law firm for incorporating International Publishers was Hays, St. John & Buckley of 43 Exchange Place, whose partners included Arthur Garfield Hays. [6] [7] According to testimony before the U.S. Congress by Trachtenberg, in addition to his initial $50,000 investment, Heller continually made up losses incurred by International Publishers during its first 15 years. Over that period, his investment climbed to a total of some $115,000. [2]
The idea of forming International Publishers seems to have come from Heller and Trachtenberg. Initial assistance came from the Communist Party (then the Workers Party of America), limited to supplying advice and addresses of radical bookstores around America. [8] In a letter dated June 1924 from the party's head Literature Department, Nicholas Dozenberg, cautioned Trachtenberg that Charles H. Kerr & Co. of Chicago had already published many standard titles by Karl Marx, thus limiting the prospects of successful new editions of the same works. [8] Instead, Dozenberg encouraged Trachtenberg to concentrate on "books not yet published in English written by popular Russian writers like Lenin, Zinoviev, Radek, and others." [8]
In the fall of 1935, International Publishers launched a new program called the "Book Union." This was a radical book-buying circle, modeled on the Book of the Month Club. [9] The Book Union first offered an anthology entitled Proletarian Literature in the United States, nearly 400 pages long and edited by current or future editors of The New Masses : Michael Gold, Granville Hicks, Joseph North, [10] and others. [9] The Book Union collected a $1 annual fee from its members, who then received a discounted volume in the mail each month. The Book Union obliged members to buy 2 of 12 selections during the year. [9] Purchase of four books in a year entitled members to a bonus premium. [9] Despite its aggressively low pricing, the Book Union proved less successful than the Left Book Club operated by Victor Gollancz Ltd in England and seems to have been terminated after just a few years.
On September 13, 1939, International Publishers Secretary and Treasurer Alexander Trachtenberg was called before the so-called Dies Committee of the US House of Representatives, the Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities. Committee members grilled Tractenberg on his own history, the sources of funding behind International Publishers, and the company's relationship to the Communist Party. Trachtenberg characterized the relationship of International Publishers to the Communist Party as merely one of "buyer and seller." [11]
Trachtenberg indicated that International Publishers did not own presses but used the services of a company called Van Rees Press on a contract basis. [12] The firm also exchanged printed sheets for publication with its British sister organization, Lawrence & Wishart, and bought sheets for binding from the forerunner of the official Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow. [13] He estimated that some 10% of International Publishers' books had made use of such sources but that a lowering of duty rates on bound books had largely eliminated the economy of importing unbound sheets. [14]
Trachtenberg estimated annual sales by International Publishers at $75,000 to $80,000. He noted that the company had a staff of four. [15]
During the 1960s and 1970s, International expanded its publication of inexpensive trade paperback books under the title "New World Paperbacks." A number of titles bore this as an alternative company logo.
International Publishers has been party to the publication of a number of titles of lasting scholarly importance.
During the 1920s, International Publishers produced the first English-language editions of important works on Marxist theory by Karl Kautsky (Foundations of Christianity, 1925; Are the Jews a Race? 1926; Thomas More and His Utopia, 1927), Leon Trotsky (Literature and Revolution, 1925; Wither England? 1925; Wither Russia? 1926), Nikolai Bukharin (Historical Materialism, 1925, The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, 1927; Imperialism and World Economy, 1929); and Joseph Stalin (Leninism, 1928).
International Publishers worked in conjunction with the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow on three separate publishing initiatives involving the works of V.I. Lenin: an aborted Collected Works project begun in 1927; [16] a 12-volume Selected Works project issued 1934-1938 in green bindings; [17] and a revised, 12-volume Selected Works edition published in blue bindings in 1943. [18] International also joined with the Communist Party of Great Britain's publishing house, Lawrence and Wishart and Progress Publishers (Moscow) to publish the massive, 50-volume Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, a project launched in 1975 and completed only in 2004. [19]
International Publishers was an early reissuer of John Reed's legendary chronicle of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World. Originally published by Boni & Liveright in 1919, an International Publishers edition came out in 1926 and — except for a time during the reign of Joseph Stalin, when the book fell out of official favor — it has been a mainstay of the publishing house's catalog ever since.
International Publishers has also published a considerable number of memoir accounts by leading Communist Party participants, including those of William "Big Bill" Haywood (1929), Nadezhda Krupskaya (1930), William Z. Foster (two volumes, 1937 and 1930), Ella Reeve Bloor (1940), Joseph North (1958), W.E.B. Du Bois (1968), Benjamin J. Davis (1969), John Williamson (1969), William L. Patterson (1971), Hosea Hudson (1972), Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (reissue, 1973), Art Shields (two volumes, 1983 and 1986), Gil Green (1984) and Angela Davis (paperback reissue, 1988).
International Publishers was also a frequent publisher of prolific labor historian Philip S. Foner and published his landmark, 10-volume History of the Labor Movement in the United States (1947–1994) as well as his massive five-volume collection The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (1950–1975). The company also published the work of Herbert Aptheker, a historian specializing in African-American history.
Francis Xavier Waldron, best known by the pseudonym Eugene Dennis and Tim Ryan, was an American communist politician and union organizer, best remembered as the long-time leader of the Communist Party USA and as named party in Dennis v. United States, a famous McCarthy Era Supreme Court case.
Earl Russell Browder was an American politician, spy for the Soviet Union, communist activist and leader of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Browder was the General Secretary of the CPUSA during the 1930s and first half of the 1940s.
Victor Perlo was an American Marxist economist, government functionary, and a longtime member of the governing National Committee of the Communist Party USA.
David Riazanov, born David Borisovich Goldendakh, was a Russian revolutionary, historian, bibliographer and archivist. Riazanov founded the Marx–Engels Institute and edited the first large-scale effort to publish the collected works of these two founders of the modern socialist movement. Riazanov was a prominent victim of the Great Terror of the late 1930s.
"The Civil War in France" is a pamphlet written by Karl Marx, as an official statement of the General Council of the International on the character and significance of the struggle of the Communards in the Paris Commune.
The League of American Writers was an association of American novelists, playwrights, poets, journalists, and literary critics launched by the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in 1935. The group included Communist Party members, and so-called "fellow travelers" who closely followed the Communist Party's political line without being formal party members, as well as individuals sympathetic to specific policies being advocated by the organization.
Max Bedacht Sr. was a German-born American revolutionary socialist political activist, journalist, and functionary who helped establish the Communist Party of America. Bedacht is best remembered as the long-time head of the International Workers Order, a Communist Party-sponsored fraternal benefit organization.
Louis C. Fraina was a founding member of the Communist Party USA in 1919. After running afoul of the Communist International in 1921 over the alleged misappropriation of funds, Fraina left the organized radical movement, emerging in 1926 as a left wing public intellectual by the name of Lewis Corey. During the McCarthy era, deportation proceedings were initiated against Fraina-Corey. After a protracted legal battle, Corey died of a cerebral hemorrhage before the action against him was formally abandoned.
The Lovestoneites, led by former General Secretary of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) Jay Lovestone, were a small American oppositionist communist movement of the 1930s. The organization emerged from a factional fight in the CPUSA in 1929 and unsuccessfully sought to reintegrate with that organization for several years.
The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), popularly the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives, created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist ties. It became a standing (permanent) committee in 1945, and from 1969 onwards it was known as the House Committee on Internal Security. When the House abolished the committee in 1975, its functions were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee.
During the ten decades since its establishment in 1919, the Communist Party USA produced or inspired a vast array of newspapers and magazines in the English language.
Alexander "Alex" Bittelman (1890–1982) was a Russian-born Jewish-American communist political activist, Marxist theorist, influential theoretician of the Communist Party USA and writer. A founding member, Bittelman is best remembered as the chief factional lieutenant of William Z. Foster and as a longtime editor of The Communist, its monthly magazine.
Alexander "Alex" Trachtenberg was an American publisher of radical political books and pamphlets, founder and manager of International Publishers of New York. He was a longtime activist in the Socialist Party of America and later in the Communist Party USA. For more than eight decades, his International Publishers was a part of the publishing arm of the American communist movement. He served as a member of the CPUSA's Central Control Committee. During the period of McCarthyism in America, Trachtenberg was twice subject to prosecution and convicted under the Smith Act; the convictions were overturned, the first by recanting of a government witness and the second by a US Circuit Court of Appeals decision in 1958.
Nicholas "Nick" Dozenberg was an American political functionary with the Communist Party USA in the 1920s. Late in 1927 Dozenberg was recruited into the underground Soviet military intelligence network, for which he worked for more than a decade under the pseudonym "Nicholas Ludwig Dallant." Apprehended by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in December 1939, Dozenberg cooperated with the investigation fully, giving oral or written testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) on three separate occasions. Never charged for espionage, Dozenberg pleaded guilty to a charge of passport fraud in 1940 and received a comparatively light jail term of one year and one day. He lived a quiet and private life following his release from prison in 1941.
James S. "Jim" Allen, born Sol Auerbach (1906–1986), was an American Marxist historian, journalist, editor, activist, and functionary of the Communist Party USA. Allen is best remembered as the author and editor of over two dozen books and pamphlets and as one of the party's leading experts on African-American history.
Vladimir Alexandrovich Bazarov was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, journalist, philosopher, and economist. Born as Vladimir Alexandrovich Rudnev, Bazarov is best remembered as a pioneer in the development of economic planning in the Soviet Union. He was one of the Russian Machists, as Lenin dubbed the term, and was a close friend to Alexander Bogdanov.
Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov was a Russian revolutionary, philosopher and Marxist theoretician. He was a founder of the social-democratic movement in Russia and was one of the first Russians to identify himself as "Marxist". Facing political persecution, Plekhanov emigrated to Switzerland in 1880, where he continued in his political activity attempting to overthrow the Tsarist regime in Russia. Plekhanov is known as the "father of Russian Marxism".
Donald Angus Cameron, publicly known by his middle name, was an American book editor and publisher. Cameron scored his first success handling The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer for Indianapolis publisher Bobbs-Merrill Company in 1936. He moved to Little, Brown and Company in 1938.
The Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute, established in Moscow in 1919 as the Marx–Engels Institute, was a Soviet library and archive attached to the Communist Academy. The institute was later attached to the governing Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and served as a research center and publishing house for officially published works of Marxist thought. From 1956 to 1991, the institute was named the Institute of Marxism–Leninism (IML).
Abraham Aaron Heller, best known as A.A. Heller, was a Russian-American who served as commercial director of the Russian Soviet Government Bureau as of 1919 and co-founded International Publishers with Alexander Trachtenberg in 1924.
