Some feared that—as the radical author and former cotton-mill worker Ethel Carnie put it in a letter to the Cotton Factory Times in 1914—too much culture would “chloroform” working people, distracting them from the task of agitating to bring about real changes to their lives. For such readers, working-class people would do better to read Karl Marx, not Kongzi or shrimp biographies, and to turn to revolutionary political action to change their living conditions.
