Adolph Douai

Karl Daniel Adolf Douai (1819 – 1888), known to his peers as "Adolf", was a German Texan teacher as well as a socialist and abolitionist newspaper editor. Douai was driven from Texas in 1856 due to his published opposition of slavery, living out the rest of his life as a school operator in the New England city of Boston. Douai is remembered as one of the leading American Marxists of the 19th century as well as a pioneer of the Kindergarten movement in America.

Biography Early years The public square of Altenburg, Thuringia as it appeared in 1839, when Douai was 20.

Karl Daniel Adolf Douai was born in Altenburg, Thuringia, on February 22, 1819, to Carl Eduard and Eleanora Douai. The Douai family was of French extraction, having fled to Dresden after the fall of the French Revolution.

Douai's family was poor and he went to work at the age of 8. He worked variously in his boyhood years as a newsboy, as an assistant to his father in teaching peasant children, as a crocheter of home manufactured wollen shawls, among other small jobs. Douai was poorly nourished as a child and short of stature, standing just tall at age 19. moved to New Braunfels, Texas, in 1851. There he helped to raise funds to launch the Neue Braunfelser Zeitung, a publication edited by his friend Ferdinand Lindheimer, on November 12, 1852.

Douai also attempted to establish another school, but the efforts of the free-thinker Douai were impeded by a local Catholic priest, who spoke out against the schoolmaster, prompting parents to withdraw their children from his school. Douai subsequently fell ill with cholera, resulting in the termination of the school.

In the fall of 1877 there was a short-lived plan for Douai to serve as English-language translator of Das Kapital, the magnum opus of Karl Marx first published in 1867. In January 1878, the German-language socialist daily newspaper the New Yorker Volkszeitung (New York People's News) was established, and Douai began to write extensively for the publication. It was there that Douai gained his greatest public fame as a journalist and publicist.

Death and legacy On January 21, 1888, Douai died in Brooklyn, New York, after having suffered chronic "throat trouble." He was cremated and a public memorial was held January 23 at the Brooklyn Labor Lyceum.

An unpublished typescript of an English translation of Adolph Douai's autobiography resides at the San Antonio Public Library.