U.S. Communist Party

[Rob Wick]

In the 1930s, Ida Tarbell considered writing an article on correspondence between Lincoln and Marx. She had read in either an article or a book by Daniel Hoan, the second Socialist mayor of Milwaukee (the first was Emil Seidel, who was elected in 1910 and hired as his secretary a young poet named Carl Sandburg) that a number of letters between the pair existed. In 1936, Tarbell wrote Hoan asking him about the source of the claim. Hoan replied that his source was a number of Socialist newspapers. He thought the letters were in the Astor Library (which became the New York Public Library), but a search there discovered correspondence of Marx and Frederich Engels to various people, but not Lincoln. Tarbell went so far as to write the State Department, which had no information other than the letter which Eva mentions. Tarbell doubted any other letters existed, and never wrote the article.

Best
Rob