In October of 1845, having been silenced by government censors—and on the run from possible extradition—Karl Marx once thought about moving to Texas. Earlier that year, he had been expelled from Paris at the behest of Prussia’s King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Marx, along with his wife Jenny and their infant daughter, eventually fled to Brussels, where they were joined in exile by Friedrich Engels and a cadre of other dissident intellectuals. But the political and intellectual environment of Brussels was no match for Paris, and, as a condition of his exile, Marx had pledged to the Belgian government that he would not publish anything about politics. So, on October 17th, 1845, Marx wrote to Prussian officials in Trier, his hometown, to request an emigration certificate to the United States.
It’s not clear how serious Marx was about coming to America. His intent in applying for emigration might simply have been to keep the Prussian authorities from extraditing him by renouncing his citizenship. But Marx biographer Saul Padover, and more recently the historian Robin Blackburn, have suggested that he was specifically interested in Texas. While it may be hard to imagine that antebellum Texas would have been hospitable to the founder of modern communism, the connection turns out to be closer than one might think.
During the 1840s, more than 10,000 Germans came to Texas through a colonization program known as the Adelsverein, or German Emigration Company. They would settle large tracts of land in the Texas Hill Country north of San Antonio, establishing towns like Fredricksburg and New Braunfels. In some of these settlements, German intellectuals, feminists, and “free-thinkers” formed utopian communities based on socialist ideals. One of these settlements was Bettina, a commune founded on the north bank of the Llano River by followers of the utopian socialists Étienne Cabet and François Marie Charles Fourier. And Edgar von Westphalen, Marx’s brother-in-law and drinking buddy from his student days in Berlin, emigrated to another experimental community, Sisterdale.
A much larger wave of German dissidents would come to the U.S. in the decade after the uprisings of 1848-49: the so-called Forty-Eighters. As revolutions were defeated in Europe, more utopian socialist communities sprouted across the American countryside, including La Réunion, founded by Fourier’s French and German devotees in Dallas County, Texas. After 1848, a number of Marx’s contemporaries and comrades from the Communist League arrived in the U.S. Many immigrants who had participated in the German revolution would later play vital roles in the labor and anti-slavery movements.