Pasts that could have been - the Marxist who helped found the Republican party

 The Trajectory of the Republican party is a sad thing. It is now Trump's plaything. But did you know - kids out there - that one of the co-founders of the R party in 1854 was a certain Joseph Weydemeyer, a friend and correspondent of Karl Marx. He knew Marx from the old newspaper days in Germany, fled, like him, from the German repression, founded a Marx oriented Workers Party in Cleveland in 1851, and then helped create the Republican party in its first convention in Chicago in 1855.

To think: at one point, Lincoln's party, which Marx supported, could have become the American Labour party. Ah, the possibilities! But that spirit died with Harrison's administration, and though sparks of it flamed up in Theodore Roosevelt's - who, as a Progressive, proposed a major re-organization of the American economy, from requiring corporations to incorporate with a national Commerce department to bills that would have required all corporations that issue stock to make that stock exactly equal to earnings plus assets - no market value! One of the best ideas to be lost in the rise of the American plutocracy ever - by Hoover's day the die was cast.
Bring back Joe Wedymeyer - or Dear Weywy, as Marx called him.