134 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
astic effort to put his ideas into practice on the friendly soil of
America. Like so many of the Forty-eighters, however, he con
tinued to be interested in the affairs of the Continent, and for years
his heart was torn between the old and the new fatherland. Like
scores of other refugees, including Schurz, Heinzen, and many
other leaders of distinction, he expected the revolution to break
out again in Germany at almost any moment. Finally, after many
months of waiting and sober reflection, he concluded that the
failure of 1848 was due primarily to the mistaken effort to unite
the proletariat with the bourgeoisie in the name of democracy, and
that two thirds of the leaders of 1848 "represented the old money
bags." "We tried in '48 to emulate the French Revolution too
much, and the birth turned out to be a bastard... ."As time went
on, he made some unfortunate, uncomplimentary remarks about
"the men of phrases" and especially about the Jews, who he
claimed did nothing but talk in 1848, and constituted four fifths
of the leftists of Berlin.
Weitling brought with him to the United States a number of
copies of the revolutionary papers published during the glorious
days of 1848-49, and these he preserved among his personal pos
sessions as mementos of that chapter in his public career which
now spanned two continents. Among them was a file of Das Volk
("The People"), edited by Born. It reported the two congresses in
Berlin which Weitling had attended. Among them also was Der
Volksfreund ("Friend of the People"), a labor paper edited by
Gustav Adolph Schloeffel and Edmund Monecke, who advised
their readers to be unafraid of "the spectre of communism"; the
paper of the Arbeiterverein of Cologne; and Der jüngste Tag, eine
freie Zeitung aus Hesseland ("The Judgment Day, a free journal
from Hesse"), which espoused Weitling's theories about labor,
money, and exchange.
When Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot, arrived in the
United States and received a tremendous ovation from the Ameri
can people as one of the heroes of the suppressed nationalities of
Europe, Weitling cautioned against the strong spirit of national-