The Triumphs and Travails of American Marxism

"More surprisingly, Marx's gifts as an essayist and social observer led The New York Tribune to appoint him as its London correspondent. Between 1853 and 1861, he contributed 487 articles to the Tribune, a journal with around 200,000 subscribers in the 1850s, making it the second-most-read American newspaper. In the years that followed, movements and parties would rally under the banner of his socialist politics."

"Later, he would correspond with many of his contemporaries who traveled across the Atlantic, including a set of comrades who would go on to publish two of his outstanding early works: The Communist Manifesto, coauthored with Friedrich Engels, published in German and French in 1838 and in English in 1850, and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, first published in German, in New York, in 1852."

Karl Marx never visited the United States but maintained a long intellectual engagement and fascination with American freedom. He applied to emigrate to Texas as a young man yet remained involved in European debates among the Young Hegelians in the 1840s. Marx corresponded with transatlantic contemporaries and saw two early works published abroad and in New York. His journalism for The New York Tribune reached hundreds of thousands of American readers. Subsequent movements and parties in the United States rallied under socialist politics, shaping labor, intellectual life, and political debates from the Civil War through the 20th and 21st centuries.

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