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Nineteenth-century Marxism's roots reach back into the Middle Ages. How is it not, then, "old European"?

Only as an antagonist. You are the first person I have EVER heard suggest that Marxism had anything substantial to do with Old Europe except as a reaction to it. The socialists I mentioned come hardly a generation away from Marx, and have nothing to do with Europe proper.

Marx was a revolutionary because he wanted to destroy the old order in Europe, which at the time was still the center of western civilization.

I do not know if you are including England as part of Old Europe, but we had, until the present day, retained some of the best English legal traditions, such as Common Law (versus Napoleonic Code, which part of its own revolution) jury trials, etc. Americans like Oliver Wendell Holmes went to work on that right away.

I would say that the one European thing Americans adopted way to well is a modern thing in a "new" country: the German approach to public education. There couldn't be an America without a healthy mix of Greek, Roman, English ideas mixed together along with the contributions of France (whom Jefferson was fond of).

You are the first person I have EVER heard suggest that Marxism had anything substantial to do with Old Europe except as a reaction to it.

That's not impossible, but it's impossible that nobody has ever tendered the same thought. Marx and all the other idealists and romantics hark back to Thomas More and his Utopia, do they not? Imagineering (to borrow a 20th-century word) a place of peace, harmony and justice -- and death to dissenters -- based on ..... what? Nothing?

No, on Aristotelian concepts of society retooled for a better model based on, inevitably, Socrates and Plato. That's all More had to work with, after all. And Marx pointed backward to More, and to the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire, a universal and holy suprastatal realm that aspired to dispense divine justice along with temporal policy.

Or have I missed something?

I would say that the one European thing Americans adopted way to well is a modern thing in a "new" country: the German approach to public education.

Some of those German ideas about the venerability of authority have been like a plague of broomrape in American soil: parasitic and toxic. German authoritarianism did a lot to fill the ranks of Abraham Lincoln's stealth-revolutionary army, and now it oozes from our governmental departments as well. We took a lethal draught when we imported all those docile, tractable, manageable German immigrants.

(Says he, being 100% of Anglo-Celtic descent.)