Ironic: Republican Horace Greeley may be said to have subsidized Karl Marx's

[JDPriestly]

writing of Das Kapital.

OK so I love history and know more about it than maybe the average American, I'm not a historian, and I have a lot to learn. If this rather funny historical fact is well known, please accept my apologies for posting it.

Someone posted a speech by John F. Kennedy in which Kennedy joked that had Horace Greeley given Marx a raise when Marx was struggling to support a family on the meager wages of the Tribune, Greeley's newspaper, we might not have had to deal with Communism. (Anyway, Kennedy joked about Greeley and Marx and I have taken great liberty in telling about his joke.)

"On Saturday morning, October 25, 1851, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, entrenched after a decade of existence as America’s leading Whig daily, appeared with twelve pages rather than its usual eight. The occasion was too noteworthy to be passed over without comment by the paper itself. So a special editorial was written—probably by Greeley’s young managing editor, the brisk, golden-whiskered Charles A. Dana—to point it out.

. . . .

“The first act of the revolutionary drama on the Continent of Europe has closed,” it began upon a somber organ tone: “The ‘powers that were’ before the hurricane of 1848, are again the ‘powers that be.’” But, contributor Marx went on, swelling to his theme, the second act of the movement was soon to come, and the interval before the storm was a good time to study the “general social state … of the convulsed nations” that led inevitably to such upheavals.

He went on to speak of “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat”—strange new words to a readership absorbed at the moment with the Whig state convention, the late gale off Nova Scotia and with editor Greeley’s strictures against Tammany and Locofocoism. “The man goes deep—very deep for me,” remarked one of Greeley’s closest friends, editor Beman Brockway of upstate Watertown, New York. “Who is he?”

Karl Marx, a native of the Rhineland, had been for a short time the editor of a leftist agitational newspaper in Cologne until the Prussian police closed it down and drove him out. At thirty, exiled in Paris, he had composed as his own extremist contribution to the uprisings of 1848 an obscure tract called the Communist Manifesto. At least at this moment it was still obscure, having been overtaken by events and forgotten in the general tide of reaction that followed the surge of 1848 abroad. Thrown out of France in turn as a subversive character, he had settled in London, tried unsuccessfully to launch another left-wing journal there, spent the last of his small savings, and now was on his uppers with his wife and small children in a two-room hovel in Soho, desperately in need of work.

. . . .

http://www.americanheritage.com/content/when-karl-marx-worked-horace-greeley

Surely, history has played a whimsical joke on American. An early leader of the Republican Party and Karl Marx so closely linked.

Who would have guessed?

This just strikes me as such a cosmic prank.

What do you think?

It's almost as if Horace Greeley, a Republican at his time (of course far more liberal than today's Republicans) unknowingly underwrote the penning of Das Kapital. Unbelievable.