THE AMERICAN JOURNALISM OF MARX AND ENGELS

To readers of the New York Herald Tribune during the middle of the last century, Karl Marx was merely the man who wrote the dispatches from London. Hired by Richard Henry Dana, the Tribune's editor (and not fired until over a decade later when an offended Horace Greeley decided to let him go), the young author of The Communist Manifesto (1848), occasionally aided and spelled by his comrade Friedrich Engels, wrote in English nearly 500 articles on the European and world political scene. Christ Himself, writing with a Jerusalem byline, could have given the Romans no less. The growth of German revolutionism, the course of English Imperial rule, Russia's and China's political demesne, English attitudes toward slavery and Anglo-American relations during the Civil War are the subjects investigated here. Marx sheds light on every one and political journalism is transformed into a higher, brilliant art. But the light consists of sparks from Marx's ideological engine. The deeper themes of the destructive nature of capitalism and the inequities of class are what eventually drove Greeley to shelve his finest reporter. That Tribune readers were never stirred to the barricades seems less important than the value of these important documents--and the irony that every penny they spent was subsidy for the modern age. They appear in book form for the first time and are important if not imperative.