The Library has a number of "made up" sets of pamphlets bound together locally. Often the only thing they have in common is the subject, or sometimes the author. There are Pamphlets on Civil Liberties, Pamphlets on Peace, and Pamphlets on Cookery (a personal favourite). Lately I've been cataloging a volume of pamphlets put out by the Independent Labour Party of Great Britain between roughly 1900 and the 1930s. Not to be confused with the Labour Party we know today, the Independent Labour Party was a Socialist party formed in 1893. The party went through a number of incarnations, including disaffiliating itself from the main Labour Party in 1932 and reaffiliating in 1975. As Michael Byers writes (viewed at the the Glasgow Digital Library "Red Clydeside" pages)
The distinctive features of the ILP were that it stood for the political independence of labour rather than its previous political partnership with liberalism, and that it was committed to achieving equality in society by the application of socialist doctrines. From its inception the main objective of the party was "to secure the collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange".
I've found these pamphlets fascinating to peruse, because whether or not one agrees with the collective ownership they advocated, the writers had in mind an objective that many of us still endorse: a better world for everyone and not just those who are rich. In the pamphlet What a Socialist Town Council Would Do is the "Children's Charter". Under a Socialist town council, the pamphlet says, "No child would be unfed", "No child would be unattended in illness", "No child need be ignorant", "No child need be homeless". The pamphlet goes on to lay out a program of housing and medical care for the aged and the sick, along with a plan of schemes of public work for the unemployed, and gives an overview of how this is all to be accomplished. Other pamphlets from this era mention "a living wage", something still seen as radical and still being fought for by many groups.
My favourite from this volume is Socialism for Beginners, written by Katharine Bruce Glasier. She writes charmingly and persuasively in this little pamphlet, dedicated to her son,
I think I had better begin our pamphlet on "Socialism for Beginners" with the question: "What do Socialists want?" When I have answered it I am sure every happy child and kind-hearted man and woman in the kingdom will cry "I want that too." For, listen, we Socialists want that there should be plenty of good food and warm, bright-coloured clothing for everyone, not only on Christmas Day or on Sundays, but on every day in the week, and that every father and mother in the land with their children should have a comfortable home to live in with a pleasant garden near, so that fresh air and sunshine may come in at the windows. With Socialists it is "first things first". We ask the rulers of our day as Jesus asked those of His day "Have you fed the hungry, clothed the naked, cared for the fatherless and widow?"
During these same decades, groups in the United States were also trying to improve the life of the "working class". Take a look, for instance, at some of the Pamphlets on Housing. For most of us in the U.S. and U.K., conditions in general seventy to a hundred years on are much improved. Yet in all the world there still don't seem to be any countries in which even one or two of these goals of adequate food, shelter, warmth, and clothing for all (let alone education and employment for all) have been truely fulfilled.
February is the month of Love—the month of Valentine's Day, a holiday of which I am much enamoured. It is also the month of the State Employee's Food Drive, which locally will benefit Food for Lane County. Even though some state employees themselves have recourse to food boxes, as a group we University of Oregon employees, both faculty and staff, tend to be generous, and to help "feed the hungry and cloth the naked" throughout the year by participating in various charitable drives. While urging you to continue this loving tradition, I also urge you to ponder why it is still necessary in our country. The words of many of these British Socialist tracts sound like something that might be found on the internet or in the "letters to the editor" of any newspaper today:
Every intelligent Liberal and Tory knows that there could be food and clothing and shelter for all if the resources of the country were used for the benefit of the community. They know that a nation that can be organised for war can be organised for peace; but they are unwilling to face the consequences of their knowledge, because if they did there would be an end to the unearned privileges of the rich.
—Jowett, F. W. Socialism in Our Time, London, Independent Labour Party, 1926.
Other pamphlets in the volume of miscellaneous publications of the ILP include titles such as Socialism and Human Nature; The Workers' Hell; The Capitalist Press : Who Owns it and Why; Socialism & Service; and Women and Socialism. Although written so many years ago, they still make provocative reading. On the shelf in Knight Library at JS3111.A95 1924.