Unfortunately i’m for from my library at the moment (on much needed vacation). Email me your request, and I’ll deal with it on return.

yours, mike e

I’m going to enjoy telling this to all my friends over, what else, beer and hemp!

“I have on my bookshelf a rare little book that gathers articles and histories from these German immigrant newspapers — and it is clear how they started to articulate deeply revolutionary views that spoke for a highly conscious and engaged working class population.”

Could I trouble you for the title and author of this book? Thanks!

Howsoever, thank you for your excellently written (as well as informative) article. And thank you for interacting with us posters subsequently.

I think you touch on another very important dynamic of U.S. history to analyse and expose: how the often oppressed immigrant workers of the 19th century (and the 20th century Jewish ghettoes too), became “white people” — and in that process sometimes became quite conservatized.

It is not just a matter of “pass their sentiments along” (as I’m sure you know) from the civil war days over the following century. Because the ideas the grab people’s imaginations and loyalties have a great deal to do with their political experiences and conditions (and how those conditions change over time).

Too bad they didn’t pass their sentiments along to descendants. Here in the Heartland you speak of there have been communities, known to some of us as Dutchtown, Germantown, etc., which produced some of the most rabid racists and racism I witnessed as a child in the 1950s.

Didn’t Weydemeyer have to flee Europe when the communist revolution failed? Coming to America to practice capitalism (journalist, publisher, surveyor, briefly a military man until hospitalized for a “nervous disorder”), but keeping in touch with Marx/Engels?

But help me understand your point: Why can’t we call someone a communist before 1917?

First there were many communist currents before the Leninist one… including some that preceded capitalism, like Thomas Muncer’s primitively communist movement of german peasants, and something roughly similar in the Ottoman empire under Sheik Bedreddin (whose revolutionary movement spread the watchword “share everything but your lover’s lips).

there were utopian communists before Marx.

And the movement in St. Louis included some who embraced the recently written “manifesto of the communist party.”

so i think groupings among these workers were clearly communist (and even some who were explicitly Marxist.)

Wydemeyer wrote a piece in a New York newspaper on “the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” in 1852 (ten years before he was an officer in these armed events).

so…. those are my reasons for calling them communist. Was that so wrong?