If you examine Wikipedia’s page on who is regarded as a socialist in politics, present and historical, there are numerous names that come up. Today, we have the most people who identify as socialist as we ever have had in Congress. However, the most curious entry historically is Horace Greeley. There are several historical facts that suggest that he was. First was the fact that Karl Marx at one point worked for Greeley’s newspaper, The New York Herald Tribune. Another is that Greeley would in his paper include articles advocating for utopian socialism. However, Greeley being a socialist has interesting historical implications. After all, if he was a socialist, this means a major backer of the Whigs and the Lincolnian Republican Party was a socialist and that the candidate for president of the Liberal Republicans and the Democrats in 1872 was a socialist. The implications beg the question if this is in fact an accurate portrayal of Greeley.

Greeley certainly was not a socialist in the three months he was in Congress as a Whig, evidenced by his DW-Nominate score of 0.429 (higher than the “grim reaper of socialism” Mitch McConnell), and he was also inclined to put in his paper articles on matters that stoked his curiosity. Indeed, journalist William Harlan Hale (1957) wrote of Greeley’s editorial policy as having a “hospitality and willingness to give free run to new ideas…”. While Greeley and the Tribune certainly did have an ideology, their ideology isn’t the only political matter that would make print. Indeed, Greeley seems to have been quite an open-minded person about numerous matters, but this didn’t mean he and Marx were in accord. Hale (1957) noted about Marx regarding his employer, “Marx disagreed with many of the Tribune ’s policies—although he avoided an open break, fearful of losing his meal ticket. One particular anathema to him was the idea of a protective tariff. Yet Greeley, whose dallyings with socialism had never interfered with his enthusiasm for American business enterprise, felt that protectionism was just the thing. When he heard this, Marx erupted darkly to Engels, “Das alles ist very ominous””. The protective tariff was one of the foundational policies of the Republican Party and a policy long opposed by figures on the American left as being highly favorable to business interests. Marx himself didn’t figure prominently in Greeley’s life nor was he considered of great influence; Greeley did not include a single mention of him in his memoirs (Hale). Furthermore, although it is true that Greeley did place the label of socialist on himself, it didn’t mean perhaps what you think it does. Another mark against Greeley being a socialist was his opposition to worker’s rights (Garvey).

Greeley’s So-Called “Socialism”

Greeley’s “socialism”, as described by his biographer Lurton D. Ingersoll, would be regarded as heretical by socialists as it does not entail at all the ownership of the means of production by government and lacks an emphasis on redistributing wealth. As Ingersoll (1873) writes in his biography of Greeley, “His socialism was guilty of this charge; it made him “a leveller.” It made him entitled to this eulogium: he proposed to level up, not down. He did not propose to take riches from the rich; there never was a moment when he advocated any rapacity of any sort: he did propose to give comforts to the poor, and this by means of Association supplying the place, to a large extent, of capital. He certainly did sometimes inveigh against organized Society with fierce invective, but with no more intention of tearing society up by the roots than he had of eradicating slavery from America by force of arms when he sustained the Wilmot Proviso in 1848” (152-153). Indeed, Greeley’s “socialism” sounds a lot like what many young people naively believe it to be based on its proponents’ messaging; simply seeking to uplift the less fortunate. Ultimately, I contend that Greeley had as much in common with today’s socialists as the philosophy of “Nationalism” of Edward Bellamy, author of the best-selling 1888 socialist utopia novel Looking Backward, 2000-1887, has with the philosophy of those who don MAGA hats.

References

Brophy, L.P. (1948, July). Horace Greeley, “Socialist”. New York History, 29(3), 309-317.

Retrieved from

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43460290

Garvey, G. (2012). Horace Greeley and the Politics of Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. Civil War Book Review, 14(1).

Retrieved from

https://repository.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2657&context=cwbr

Greeley, Horace. Voteview.

Retrieved from

https://www.voteview.com/person/3773/horace-greeley

Hale, W.W. (1957, April). When Karl Marx Worked For Horace Greeley. American Heritage, 8(3).

Retrieved from

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

Ingersoll, L.D. (1873). The life of Horace Greeley: founder of the New York Tribune, with extended notices of many of his contemporary statesmen and journalists. Chicago, IL: Union Publishing Company.