Marx's Meal Ticket

Along with stories on a wife-beating and a temperance rally one Saturday in 1851, Horace Greeley's New York Tribune printed a smoldering account of social upheaval and political intrigue in Europe. Under the headline: REVOLUTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION, the Tribune dispatch carried the staccato byline: Karl Marx.

Thus opened one of the least-known chapters in the life of Communism's founding father. This week Marx's ten-year stint as London correspondent for the Tribune is described in detail for the first time in the bimonthly American Heritage. Drawing heavily on Marx's previously untranslated correspondence, Author William Harlan Hale, 46, Greeley's biographer and now a staff writer for the Reporter, traces a strange saga of journalism.

Free & Easy. In any era, the black-bearded Rhineland revolutionary and the squeaky-voiced Whig editor would have made improbable bedfellows. The Tribune, as Hale explains, was a "great New York family newspaper dedicated to the support of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, temperance, dietary reform, Going West and ultimately, Abraham Lincoln." Marx, arrogant, embittered, exiled from his native Germany, was dedicated to the overthrow of 19th century capitalism.

Yet so highly did Greeley regard his correspondent's outpourings that many of Marx's more than 500 Tribune articles appeared without byline among the paper's celebrated editorials. Says Hale: "Much of what the Tribune's subscribers took to be the work of Greeley was the work of Marx." Marx's opinion of "das Lauseblatt [that lousy rag]" was consistently low, and at first his command of English was poor. So many of the articles he passed off as his own (for $5 each) were ghostwritten for him by his financial angel and literary factotum, Friedrich Engels who was in Manchester managing a textile mill owned by his wealthy German father.

Tail Twister. In the uneasy years before the Civil War, sweeping schemes for social reform were "far from subversive," Author Hale points out. Greeley himself advocated a more equitable distribution of wealth. As editor of an independent, successful newspaper, he "stood at the center of the turbulence as a barometer, a bellwether, a broker of notions and ideas." Though Marx's dispatches were laden with doom-fraught prophecies of social breakdown, Greeley's young managing editor, Charles A. Dana (later famed as owner-editor of the old New York Sun), happily assured his London correspondent: "They are read with satisfaction by a considerable number of persons and are widely reproduced."

Marx and Legman Engels made an extraordinarily productive reporting team. Writes Hale: "With Teutonic diligence, they dredged up from diplomatic dispatches, statistical abstracts, government files, the British Museum, gossip and newspapers in half a dozen languages, a mass of information on going topics such as had never reached an American newspaper before." Marx wrote on political developments in England, France, Spain, the Middle and Far East, "the whole world, as seen from his Soho garret." Editor Greeley, notes Author Hale, "was a perennial twister of the British lion's tail," and had an eager accomplice, in Anglophobe Marx. Some of Marx's bitterest tirades for the Tribune, e.g., his dispatch on the plight of British workers during the depressed 18503, were bodily incorporated into his Das Kapital.*

Yankee Bums. Finally, when a slump hit New York in 1857, the Tribune started cutting back on all foreign coverage. Though kindhearted Editor Dana still gave them hackwork writing jobs. the comrades were convinced that they had been betrayed and exploited: "Diese Yankees sind dock verdammt lausige Kerle [Those Yankees are damned lousy bums]." Marx's last signed dispatch appeared in the Tribune in December 1861.

The most intriguing aspect of Marx's first and last association with the U.S. press, Hale suggests, is that "the Tribune was not only Marx's meal ticket but his experimental outlet for agitation and ideas during the most creative period in his life. Had there been no Tribune sustaining him, there might possibly--who knows?--have been no Das Kapital. And had there been no Das Kapital, would there have been a Lenin and a Stalin? And without Marxist Lenin and Stalin, in turn, would there have been . . .?"

* One Marx prediction, in the Dec. 31, 1853 Tribune, is not included in any official collection of Marx's work: "The people of the West will rise again to power and unity of purpose, while the Russian Colossus itself will be shattered by the progress of tne masses, and the explosive force of ideas.''

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