The Utopian Communist: A Biography of Wilhelm Weitling

IN AMERICA 161

clippings on the subject, but we have no knowledge of what atti­
tude he took on the specific controversies of the war and recon­
struction.
The issues of land reform, free soil, and free homesteads at­
tracted considerable support among immigrant groups during
Weitling's public career. Kriege, as pointed out in an earlier
chapter, was closely associated with the German land reformers
in the 1840's, and voiced their demands in the Volkstribun. Weitling believed that the state should own the public domain, and he
opposed individual ownership no matter how it might be acquired.
Despite great pressure to induce him to support free homesteads,
he advocated a system by which tillers of the soil would pay a
"use price" into the public treasury. On several occasions he was
challenged to public debates with the "land reformers," and once
he signed one of their petitions, but he continued to regard their
proposals as totally inadequate. His difficulties in maintaining his
position in the face of the growing desire of his German com­
patriots to "vote themselves a farm" perhaps are illustrated best
by pointing out that in 1852, Die Republik der Arbeiter requested
the Germans to petition Congress for homestead legislation; a
year later, it sharply criticized a system which would perpetuate
individual ownership, and in 1854, it reversed itself again and
endorsed the homestead bill. In the meantime, in 1851, Weitling
had outlined his own plans for a "rural credit bank."

As far as reforms of special interest to labor are concerned, Die

Republik der Arbeiter gave much space to the activities of labor

groups in the 1850's and to descriptions of the miserable conditions

under which many laborers were compelled to work. Weitling

deplored the lack of a federal employment service and proposed

that his Arbeiterbund perform that function for German crafts­

men. In his Nothruf an die Manner der Arbeit und Sorge, re­

printed in his paper on July 29, 1854, he denounced the United

States as a "babylon of capitalists, merchants, lawyers and preach­

ers" who live "by thievery, fraud, misrepresentation and hypoc­

risy," and he produced figures to show what it cost the American