Horace Greeley's "New-York Tribune": Civil War-Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor (review)

While Horace Greeley's long and distinguished editorship of the NewYork Tribune has won him an enviable place in the annals of American journalism, his political and social views have defied easy classification. Greeley was at once an admirer of Charles Fourier, the French socialist and critic of market-based economic relationships, and the 1872 presidential standard-bearer for the Liberal Party, the first political organization to endorse a market-based critique of government intervention. Adam Tuchinsky contends that historians have missed the central theme of Greeley's long public career—namely, his embrace of "liberal socialism" (x), a "social democratic" alternative to the "individualistic" liberalism that Louis Hartz identified in the 1950s as the dominant current in American public life (15). This alternative liberalism combined Fourier's socialism, which Greeley dubbed "associationalism," with the free-labor ideology of the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln.

Tuchinsky's monograph is neither a cradle-to-grave biography of Greeley nor a comprehensive history of mid-nineteenth-century American socialism. It is rather a history of their relationship as it found expression in the pages of the Tribune. How was it, Tuchinsky asks, that the "leading ideologue" of the Whig and Republican Parties identified himself throughout his public career as a socialist (ix)? To answer, Tuchinsky locates Greeley's Tribune in the rapidly changing political economy of the nineteenth-century United States. Among the topics that he explores with sensitivity and intelligence are the Tribune's flirtation with transcendentalism, its endorsement of the revolutions of 1848, and the paper's position on public issues ranging from marriage to land reform.

Each of these topics was informed, in Tuchinsky's view, by Greeley's creative fusion of Fourierism and free labor. Like Fourier, Greeley deplored the social consequences for working people of the "untrammeled" operations of the market (xi). And like the free-labor radicals of the pre-Civil War Republican Party, he feared the "external" challenges that southern slaveholders and foreign manufacturers posed to the moral autonomy of the American worker (xii). Greeley's Tribune thus established the "intellectual basis" of the liberal impulse to protect working people from the "vagaries and consolidated power of markets and capital" (2).

To recover this ethos, Tuchinsky assiduously mines Greeley's Tribune. Yet even readers who find merit in Tuchinsky's revisionism may suspect that it smacks of special pleading to rest such a sweeping argument on a selective evidentiary base. Not all Whigs were northerners, and not all Republicans took their cues from the Tribune. To be fair, Tuchinsky takes pains to underscore the ideological divisions within the Whig and Republican Parties. Yet it remains an open question if a close reading of Greeley's Tribune can overturn deeply entrenched assumptions regarding the main contours of the American political tradition.

Such caveats do nothing to detract from Tuchinsky's larger point. Whigs and Republicans were indeed more ambivalent about unregulated markets than many historians have acknowledged, especially if those markets encouraged speculation. And the global cotton market—dependent on slave labor and fueled by the machinations of sharp-trading New York City merchants—was the foundation for a political economy that many Whigs and most Republicans deplored.

Even if one accepts Tuchinsky's characterization of the Whigs and Republicans, a problem remains. And this is Greeley's willingness to embrace the Liberals by accepting their nomination for president in 1872. Here Tuchinsky, like every Greeley biographer before him, finds himself perplexed.

To gain perspective on Greeley's apparent change of heart, it may be useful to return to the 1840s, the decade in which Greeley's social philosophy emerged. To what extent might Greeley's critique of the unregulated workings of the competitive market—or what we today might call globalization—have been shaped by the defining political event of that decade—namely, the run-up to the...