Karl Marx’s Buddy Joseph Weydemeyer–History You Never Learned In School

Years ago (over 40 now), a friend and Mentor, Rev. Ennio Cugini, who was the pastor of a church in New England, sent me a picture right out of the Communist Daily World newspaper of a man named Joseph Weydemeyer. Rev. Cugini kept track of Communist activities and history and read their newspapers so he could keep track of their current party line and agendas. He had a radio broadcast for many years and he exposed Communist activities and how they effected not only the media but also politics and education for his listening audience. In other words, he connected the dots for those who listened to his program.

The picture he sent me of Comrade Weydemeyer was informative, in that Weydemeyer, in that old photo, was dressed in a Union Army officer’s uniform. The caption under the photo listed many of Weydemeyer’s communist accomplishments, taking care to note that he had been an officer in the Union army. My first reaction to this was “What was this Communist doing in the Yankee army?” Little did I know at that time! And I wondered if there had been any other Communists in the Union armies. Subsequent research would reveal that there had been quite a few, not that any history books I had ever read mentioned that fact. They were all mute on this issue.

Weydemeyer was unique, though, in that he had been a close personal associate of Karl Marx. This had been noted by writer Joseph Sullivan in an article in “Columbiad” magazine back in 1997. Weydemeyer was a tireless advocate of communism and had left Europe (just ahead of the authorities) and arrived in New York in 1851. While in New York he was able to oversee the first printing of the “Communist Manifesto” in this country and he also assisted in organizing the New York Communist Club, in addition to publishing a German language newspaper. Mind you, this was in the 1850s, not the 1950s.

Weydemeyer formed the first Marxist organization, the Proletarian League of New York in 1852 and started yet another leftist newspaper in 1853. So as you can see, this close friend of Marx was a decisive force for the spread of Marxism in this country in the 1850s–almost a hundred years earlier than most history books even mention the subject of communism.

He moved to St. Louis in 1860, just as the War Between the States was about to commense. When that war broke out he volunteered to serve under one of the most leftist-oriented native-born Yankee generals ever known–John C. Fremont. Fremont just loved the Forty-Eighter socialists from Europe and had several of them in his command. To this day Weydemeyer is lauded as a pioneer of modern American communism–one reason his photograph was in the Daily World newspaper.

Starting with Weydemeyer, I began, in the 1990s to research to see how many communists, socialists, and others of a leftist ilk had fled from Europe after the failure of the 1848-49 revolts there and ended up in this country. As research progressed I found a whole batch of them, somewhere in the neighborhood of over 4,000, and many of them became generals and other officers in Mr. Lincoln’s armies. Others became politicians. Some even helped write the Republican Party Platform in 1860. Others became journalists and “educators” and you can guess what point of view they “educated” from. It was the wife of one of these Forty-Eighter socialists, Carl Schurz, that established the first kindergarten in this country. Don’t forget, in the Communist Manifesto (that Karl Marx wrote for the League of the Just–it was really not his brainchild) he advocated “free education for all children in public schools.”

Anyone giving us the history of communism in this country and not dealing with all this either has not done the homework or he hopes you haven’t and won’t. There was much leftist influence in the early Republican Party and we are never informed of this. The first Republican presidential candidate in 1856 was, guess who, the socialist-loving John C. Fremont. In the 1860s and 70s the real leftist radicals in this country were Republicans–not Democrats and Republicans like today.

We have so much faulty history in this country we need to throw out and replace with accurate history that we need to be about doing that so we will have a correct perception of where we should be going.