|
|
|
"The Bourgeoisie Will Fall and Fall Forever": The New-York Tribune, the 1848 French Revolution, and American Social Democratic Discourse
Adam-Max Tuchinsky
Political reforms cannot reach those deeply-rooted Evils.... Politics may guarantee us the Right to vote, but it cannot guarantee to the Working Classes the Right of Labor, to the Child, the Right of Education, and to All, justice and encouragement.
|
| —Albert Brisbane, New-York Weekly Tribune, March 5, 1842 |
|
|
| During the late 1950s, there was a small but significant run of articles about Karl Marx's decade-long tenure as European correspondent for Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune. William Harlan Hale published "When Karl Marx Worked for Horace Greeley" in the popular historical magazine American Heritage, and Morten Borden published "Some Notes on Horace Greeley, Charles Dana, and Karl Marx" in Journalism Quarterly. In the thick of the Cold War, the "American career" of Karl Marx must have seemed anomalous, and despite recent seminal works in the history of the American Left, the fact that, starting in 1852, Marx was a featured correspondent in the most influential and widely circulated newspaper in the antebellum United States still seems somewhat odd. Marx eventually published over 400 articles under his own name, some 125 of them ghostwritten by Friedrich Engels, in what was arguably the central (if also the most unreliable) organ of both the Whig and Republican parties. Even though those parties were more diverse than their conventional image as the servants of aristocratic and business interests suggests, it would stretch revisionism to its limits to imagine Marx as the voice of either. "Few episodes in journalism seem more singular and unlikely," Hale concluded, "than this association of the frowning ideologist of Soho on the one hand and, on the other the moonfaced, owlish Vermont Yankee known affectionately to legions of readers in North and West as 'Uncle Horace.'"1 |
1
|
|
The specter of Marx hovers over accounts of the American Left, both polarizing historical conceptions of ideology—into liberal and socialist traditions—and producing a remarkable historical consensus. Traditionally, leftist historians pondered, "Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?" Even among non-Marxists, Marx's vision of class conflict, revolution, and the abolition of private property remains the stick against which the "realism" of leftist discourse is measured. So-called consensus school historians likewise assumed that in the United States the absence of a feudal past and an established church combined with high wages, available land, and abundant quantities of roast beef to ensure the triumph of a liberal tradition, understood as a commitment to a limited state, private property, and market enterprise. Even latter-day revisionists, who have unearthed alternative traditions such as Atlantic republicanism to refute the persistent American myth that "capitalism," to quote the historian Sean Wilentz, arrived with "the first shiploads of white men," end up mirroring the liberal triumphalism of the consensus school: Their narratives climax with the tragic displacement of some original order—be it communal subsistence or civic virtue—by the market and its attendant liberal legitimation.2 |
. . . |
There are about 15554 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
