If you are at all interested in Communism and its history, you may be astounded by this article. It proposes that but for Horace Greeley and The New York Tribune's support for Marx at a time when he was practically penniless, Communism may not have become the doctrine that inspired Lenin, Stalin, Mao, et al.
There is also some interesting history of Progressivism in America around the middle of the 19th Century.
The author, William Harlan Hale, is the author of a biography of Horace Greeley entitled "Horace Greeley Voice Of The People" which was published in 1950.
Articles published by The Tribune under Marx's name are online. The early articles on "Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany" were written by Engels and are here. Later articles which were probably mostly written by Marx are here.
Now let's put this together with something else: JFK's speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Association on April 27, 1961. JFK gave the speech the title, "The President and the Press". This was 2 weeks after the Bay of Pigs invasion in which Kennedy withdrew air support after the invasion had commenced thus ensuring mission failure.
This is the beginning of the speech. It is an introduction to the main body. It has a different take on Marx and Greeley as you will see. The whole speech can be read here.
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: I appreciate very much your generous invitation to be here tonight.
You bear heavy responsibilities these days and an article I read some time ago reminded me of how particularly heavily the burdens of present day events bear upon your profession.
You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx.
We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per installment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labeled as the "lousiest petty bourgeois cheating."
But when all his financial appeals were refused, Marx looked around for other means of livelihood and fame, eventually terminating his relationship with the Tribune and devoting his talents full time to the cause that would bequeath the world the seeds of Leninism, Stalinism, revolution and the cold war.
If only this capitalistic New York newspaper had treated him more kindly; if only Marx had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different. And I hope all publishers will bear this lesson in mind the next time they receive a poverty-stricken appeal for a small increase in the expense account from an obscure newspaper man.
I have selected as the title of my remarks tonight "The President and the Press." Some may suggest that this would be more naturally worded "The President Versus the Press." But those are not my sentiments tonight.
It is true, however, that when a well-known diplomat from another country demanded recently that our State Department repudiate certain newspaper attacks on his colleague it was unnecessary for us to reply that this Administration was not responsible for the press, for the press had already made it clear that it was not responsible for this Administration.
Nevertheless, my purpose here tonight is not to deliver the usual assault on the so-called one party press. On the contrary, in recent months I have rarely heard any complaints about political bias in the press except from a few Republicans. Nor is it my purpose tonight to discuss or defend the televising of Presidential press conferences. I think it is highly beneficial to have some 20,000,000 Americans regularly sit in on these conferences to observe, if I may say so, the incisive, the intelligent and the courteous qualities displayed by your Washington correspondents.
Nor, finally, are these remarks intended to examine the proper degree of privacy which the press should allow to any President and his family.
If in the last few months your White House reporters and photographers have been attending church services with regularity, that has surely done them no harm.
On the other hand, I realize that your staff and wire service photographers may be complaining that they do not enjoy the same green privileges at the local golf courses that they once did.
It is true that my predecessor did not object as I do to pictures of one's golfing skill in action. But neither on the other hand did he ever bean a Secret Service man.
My topic tonight is a more sober one of concern to publishers as well as editors.
I want to talk about our common responsibilities in the face of a common danger. The events of recent weeks may have helped to illuminate that challenge for some; but the dimensions of its threat have loomed large on the horizon for many years. Whatever our hopes may be for the future--for reducing this threat or living with it--there is no escaping either the gravity or the totality of its challenge to our survival and to our security--a challenge that confronts us in unaccustomed ways in every sphere of human activity.
This deadly challenge imposes upon our society two requirements of direct concern both to the press and to the President--two requirements that may seem almost contradictory in tone, but which must be reconciled and fulfilled if we are to meet this national peril. I refer, first, to the need for a far greater public information; and, second, to the need for far greater official secrecy.
The speech itself essentially is a plea to the press to be careful reporting news that could involve national security. Was it also a plea to cover up essential elements of the Bay of Pigs fiasco like Kennedy's withdrawal of air support? 18 months later we were playing nuclear chicken in Cuba. Nikita Khrushchev had measured Camelot and decided a test of wills was in order.
It is somewhat ridiculous to blame Marxism on Horace Greeley. The American Heritage editor surely meant this as a joke.
It is true that John Kennedy, like Barack Obama, had a much too intimate relationship with the press.
I miss some of the old ways of dealing with these problems; namely, exiling subversives and undesirables. There are boatloads of people, leftists and muslims first and foremost, that America should be exiling as subversive, beginning with the foreign born. America the beautiful could be beautiful once again -- in a generation or so -- if we put our minds to it.
1848 inspired more bad writing, poetry, drama, opera, and polemics than any previous event in world history. It was the 1968 of the Nineteenth Century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848
Thanks for the history lesson!
See: The Republican Party Red From The Start: By Alan Stang