Carl Adolph Douai

Karl Daniel Adolph Douai (1819 – 1888), known to his peers as "Adolph", 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.

Karl Daniel Adolph Douai was born February 22, 1819, in Altenburg, Thuringia in the Duchy of Saxon-Altenburg, the son of a school teacher. The Douai family was of French extraction, having fled to Dresden after the fall of the French Revolution.

The Douai family was poor and Adolph went to work at the age of 8. Nevertheless, as a boy he was well educated, graduating from the Altenburg Gymnasium and the University of Leipzig, where he studied philology and history. 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 4 feet 8 inches (1.42 m) tall at age 19.

While at university, Douai found the stipends insufficient and therefore sought to supplement his income by writing. In a short autobiography published at the time of his death, Douai claimed to have authored several novels and two theological papers during his undergraduate years.

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