William Alexander Linn, Horace Greeley Founder and Editor of The New York Tribune

[83] of the socialist doctrines, but he refused to disassociate himself from the experiments while they were being tried, and the attacks on him helped to advertise him and his paper, and increased its circulation among those who could not regard as inherently wrong a cause supported, or countenanced, by men like George Ripley, Charles A. Dana, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Parke Godwin. In February, 1841, Greeley wrote to Weed that he took a wrong view of the political bearing of the Fourier matter, explaining: “Hitherto all the devotees of social reform of any kind have been regularly repelled from the Whig party, and attracted to its opposite. It strikes me that it is unwise to persist in this course, unless we are to be considered the enemies of improvement, and the bulwarks of an outgrown aristocracy in this country.”

In a letter to R. W. Griswold, Greeley said: “I do not regard either office or money as a supreme good; and, though I never had either, I have been so near to each as to see what they are worth, very nearly. I regard principle and self-respect as more important than either.” When the Courier and Enquirer, in April, 1844, spoke of the Tribune as “the organ of Charles Fourier, Fanny Wright, and R. D. Owen, advocating from ”