When a Socialist Became the Secretary of the Interior

      I have noted in recent articles the impact that socialists and communists had in the history of this country well before the twentieth century–going all the way back to the 1840s. Lots of historians–so called–will seldom, if ever, acknowledge this. Even less will they make mention of the basic socialist foundations of the “conservative” Republican Party. This is history we are not supposed to be taught. And mostly, we aren’t. We have to find this out for ourselves by doing the homework.

      One thing that does aid us is that more and more, the socialists are not bashful in admitting their impact on our earlier history. Where the historians ignore it, the socialists brag about it. Donnie Kennedy and I, when we wrote our book Lincoln’s Marxists, the first edition of which was called Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists found this to be true. Incidentally, the first edition of our book is still available.

I just recently came across an article entitled https://worldhistory.us/american-history/impact-of-the-forty-eightors-on-the-amer… that was quite frank in what it admitted. It was published in August of 2018. In part it noted: “For the German-American Forty-Eighters, the best political instrument to ply their revolutionary ideals was the new Republican Party…As a result, the German Forty-Eighters became a significant voting bloc in the Republican Party.

      Another German Forty-Eighter, Carl Schurz, a farmer and abolitionist from Wisconsin, helped pave the way for Lincoln’s presidential victory…Schurz mobilized a large part of the German-American vote for Lincoln in the general election…Unfortunately, the German-American reputation as fighters suffered during the course of the war. Schurz, who was awarded with a command by Lincoln, led German-speaking units at the battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. His soldiers retreated pell-mell in those battles.” Germans supplied around 750,000 of the Union’s 2.5 million soldiers. That was in the neighborhood of 30%. Not all of those were Forty-Eighters, but a fair number were.

      The article opines that the War of Northern Aggression would have happened whether the Forty-Eighters were there or not but it says “…the outcome might have been a bit different.

      As for Carl Schurz, his propensities for socialist activities continued and he ended up becoming the Secretary of the Interior in the Hays administration. Pretty lofty position for a German socialist to occupy in the federal government. In our book Lincoln’s Marxists we provided a bit of information about Schurz and his time in the Interior Department. It was not Schurz at his best.

But even more harm was done by his wife, Margarethe Meyer Schurz. It was she who introduced the idea of kindergartens into America. She was a disciple of Friedrich Frobel, the founder of the Kindergarten movement. It is worth noting that, when the socialist revolutionaries were driven out of Germany and legitimate government was restored, kindergarten were banned in that country. When I first started this blog back in November of 2011 I did an article dealing with the socialist origins of the kindergarten movement. Like so many other socialist agendas it came into existence in the 1800s, not the 1900s in this country. And our children are not the better off for it. Yet, along with the rest of the public school movement we seem to have embraced it.

      Now, with Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project, along with the whole transgender movement some are beginning to see what the public schools have been doing to their children and lots of them don’t like it. Let us hope they realize they need to get their kids out of those indoctrination centers we call public schools.

      It should, by now, have begun to dawn on people that a lot of the problems we have in this country were introduced here by European socialists of one stripe or another. And when they arrived they found home-grown American socialists who were more than willing to aid them in the destruction of our God-given liberties. That’s what socialism is really all about.