From agora to assembly line

: socialist translations of Greco-Roman antiquity in the United States (1919-1939)

Abstract

This thesis examines working-class engagement with ancient Greek and Roman culture in the United States through the Little Blue Books (LBBs), a series of inexpensive publications produced by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius of Girard, Kansas, from 1919. Selling over two hundred million copies by 1935, the LBBs democratised access to classical culture for readers historically excluded from it by class, education, and institutional gatekeeping. Focusing on the series at its peak of cultural and commercial prominence in the 1920s and 1930s, this thesis analyses three translators of ancient texts for the series – Miriam Allen deFord (1888–1975), Alexander Harvey (1868–1949), and Henry M. Tichenor (1858–1922) – and argues that their political affiliations, biographical formations, and historical circumstances within the American socialist tradition profoundly shaped how they presented antiquity to their working-class readership.

This thesis treats each translation not as a neutral transmission of meaning but as a politically charged intervention that constructs a dual allegory, reactivating unresolved antagonisms in the ancient source text to speak to early-twentieth-century American capitalism. Through close comparative reading against the original Greek and Latin texts and
contemporaneous translations, biographical analysis and historiography, and the place of classical culture in American life, this thesis identifies the specific strategies – selection, omission, lexical substitution, and editorial framing – by which each translator advanced this project.

This thesis establishes that the LBBs represent a significant and largely unrecognised tradition of leftist classical reception in the United States. Rather than passively receiving the ancient world, working-class readers encountered it through translations that actively repurposed classical authority, mobilising antiquity not to maintain capitalism, but to challenge it. In doing so, this thesis makes a dual intervention into classical reception studies and American labour history by demonstrating the prevalence of antiquity in the cultural life of the interwar left and working class.

Date of Award	2 Dec 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Henry Stead (Supervisor) & Gillian Mitchell (Supervisor)