Cover of Karl Marx
Gunny G: And So, The Question Arises As To Just When Communism/Socialism Came To America?
I have seen many stories and claims as to when and where Communism, or Socialism, first reared its head here in the good old USA, but lately, I have noticed, there seems to be increasing information on this topic that may tend to confuse the issue somewhat. Much of this information has been around for a long time, but gone unnoticed by myself and apparently most others as well.
About the first time most Americans heard of communism, myself included, was during The Senator Joe McCarthy thing back in the late ’40s. Of course, information on Socialism was available long before that, but I suspect few paid much attention to it.
Not that long ago an article appeared by Alan Stang titled Republican Party Red From The Start… The article emphasized that the Republican Party had been influenced by Marxists beginning shortly after many of them from the 1848 revolution in Europe had immigrated to America. This was by the early 1850s just prior to the election of Abraham Lincoln.
By the Civil War, many of these had found their way into government positions, including the new Union Army; and most of them were sympathetic to Northern politics, and unfriendly to the Southern cause.
Anyway, Stang’s book sparked my interest and I soon found other books on this topic, i.e., the “forty-eighters,” Lincoln, socialism, big government, etc.
In addition to Stang, there are books /and online articles by such authors as Dr Thomas DiLorenzo, Al Benson and Kennedy, Clyde Wilson, etc.–real eye-openers!
LewRockwell.com has a listing of numerous authors who write regularly on these, and related topics, with online archives for each writer.
Karl Marx, surprisingly, had become acquainted with Horace Greeley, and in 1851 he became a writer for Greeley’s New York Tribune, and this continued for about ten years. And so the ideas of Marx himself had its foot in the USA doorway at that time.
And so, I was surprised by this information not only that such things had occurred, but that so little, apparently, was known of this. I had read before where writers had made reference to some form of socialism being practiced by both the Puritans and Pilgrims way back in the colonial days of our country, and the Indiana Connection, but, again, little attention was paid as being at all relevant to modern times Communism.
Communism, by the way, can be loosely known by many names, including Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Marxism, Leninism, etc. And many more names too, but for purposes of my little spiel here the above will do.
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