The first time I ever heard of Joseph Weydemeyer was way back in 1978 – ancient history now. A friend and mentor, Pastor Ennio Cugini, who was a Reformed Baptist pastor in Rhode Island and also a historian, sent me a picture from the Communist newspaper, the Daily World. It was an old photograph of well-known Marxist Joseph Weydemeyer in his Yankee officer’s uniform. The short commentary with the photo listed some of Weydemeyer’s Marxist accomplishments as well as his being an “officer in the Union Army.” That information in the Communist newspaper was my introduction to the fact that there had been communists and socialists that had infiltrated the ranks of Mr. Lincoln’s armies (with his blessings).
What passes for “history” in those humanist seminaries we still call public schools had never prepared me for that blunt fact, and I doubt if the vast majority of youngsters even in this day have the remotest clue that Abraham Lincoln welcomed communists and socialists into his military, or that the Republican Party of that day was full of them also.
My first thought, way back in 1978 was “What was this Communist doing in the Union Army?” Little did I know back then! I had no clue that Weydemeyer was far from being the only Communist there. It was nearly a decade before I was able to come up with any great amount of information about this, and when I did, what I found was the beginning of the book that Walter Kennedy and I co-authored, Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists. This has recently been reprinted by Shotwell Publishing in South Carolina under the title Lincoln, Marx, and the GOP. Check it out.
There had been a couple books written about some of this way back in the mid-1950s, but they were pretty much out of print by the time I came along. So, Walter Kennedy and I had to do lots of digging for information about this. Thankfully, the internet was a big help. We learned all about the “Forty-Eighters” who were the socialist and communist revolutionaries that sought to make shipwreck of Europe in 1848-49. It turned out that when they couldn’t quite do that in Europe, though they gave it the good old college try, they came over here, often to escape prosecution in their native countries. Unfortunately, they often had more success here than in Europe. The research for the book Walter Kennedy and I wrote took over two years.
Since Weydemeyer was the earliest Communist who wore the Yankee blue I’d learned about I thought an article about him might be worthwhile because it would demonstrate how dedicated to the principles of Marxism those people really were (and still are). Our book noted of Weydemeyer that “Some of Weydemeyer’s more notable accomplishments in New York were the publication of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, assisting in organizing the New York Communist Club, and publishing a German language newspaper Die Revolution. Moving to St. Louis, Missouri in 1860, Weydemeyer soon thereafter offered his services to the darling of the Forty Eighters, Maj. General John C. Fremont when war broke out.”
All these activities would have taken lots of time and effort. But, then, Weydemeyer was into Marxism for the long haul. He wasn’t just tinkering around as so many often did He was actively into promoting Marxist change in and for America. But, then most of the Forty Eighters who came over here before the War of Northern Aggression were like Weydemeyer and were willing to do “whatever it took to get the coon.”
The Communist Club that Weydemeyer helped organize had, as one of its main goals, what it called “nationalizing the means of production.” What this amounted to, shorn of all the Marxist sophistry, was the abolition of private property and taking that property and claiming its true ownership in the name of “the people.” Doing this was supposed to automatically create heaven on earth for everyone – if you were naive enough to believe the Marxist doublespeak. Actually, all it really did was to create a lot of extremely well-off Marxist dictators while ordinary people went begging. Stealing private property is forbidden in Holy Scripture.
There is another book out there, if you can still find copies of it called Joseph Weydemeyer: Pioneer of American Socialism written by Karl Obermann and published back in 1947 by International Publishers, which was an outfit controlled by the Communist Party in this country.
So, as you can see, Joseph Weydemeyer was the consummate Marxist of the mid-19th century, both in Europe and in this country. Unfortunately, there were a lot more like him here after the leftist revolts in Europe folded. This country is much the worse for them having been here. So, those naive people who tell you we never had a Communist problem here until the 1930s are about a hundred years off the mark.
Another book you might want to check out is Benjamin Gitlow’s The Whole of their Lives. Gitlow deals with Communist activity in this country around the time of the First World War. Gitlow had been a Communist and broke with them and wrote this book exposing what they were doing in this country in the early 1900s. The title of this book gives you some idea of the life of Weydemeyer in the mid-1800s. The Communists have been here for a long time, and they have done lots of damage. They do indeed dedicate “the whole of their lives” in service to their humanist deity in their efforts to enslave the world – all in the name of “freedom.” Freedom for them and slavery for the rest of us. It’s past time for America to wake up! Even today, we are voting these Marxist types into Congress because we won’t take the trouble to check out where they are really coming from. If we continue on this path, the freedom we lose will be our children’s!
