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

“ [84] day to day the destruction of our existing social system, and substituting in its stead one based upon infidelity, and an unrestricted and indiscriminate intercourse of the sexes,” the Tribune began its reply, “We do not copy the above with a view to defend ourselves from the cowardly falsehoods of the escaped State-prison bird,” etc. As late as February 10, 1848, replying to some criticisms in the Herald and the Observer, the Tribune said: “Should the Tribune get much further ahead of the Herald in circulation and business, we shall expect to hear that Fourier was a Fiji cannibal and the original contriver of Asiatic cholera.”

In 1846 the Courier and Enquirer accepted a challenge by the Tribune to a discussion of Fourierism, and its articles were written by Greeley's former assistant, Henry J. Raymond, who had joined its staff in 1843. Raymond denied that the condition of the laboring classes was as bad as the Fourierites pictured it, and called the new doctrines hostile to Christianity, to morality, and to conjugal constancy. After the close of this debate the Tribune practically dropped the subject. Greeley's conviction, in the light of his later years, was that the social reformers were right on many points, and that Fourier