The Utopian Communist: A Biography of Wilhelm Weitling

IN AMERICA 163
provided a cultural nourishment and camaraderie which German
immigrants sorely missed in puritanical America, and Weitling be­
lieved that such organizations could serve to bridge the gap and
end the misunderstandings between Germans and Anglo-Saxons.
But the editor of Die Republik der Arbeiter never forgot that
he proposed to live "by and for a principle." He agreed with the
comments of another German refugee in the New Yorker Sonn¬
tagsblätter, that "the beer-drinking, song-singing German Ge-
müthlichkeit, as soon as a job and lager beer are available, wants
[from its press] only entertaining daily news which it can take in
without reflection or exacting cerebration... ." Weitling knew
that German-language papers could not exist without advertising
and that therefore a journalist might be forced to sacrifice some of
his independence, but he himself refused to make the slightest con­
cessions of principle. He was particularly irritated by the great
interest of the Germans in lodges organized purely for social pur­
poses, and he was among the first to expose this "Logen-Humbug"
with its "colored rosettes and ribbons and secret follies," its silly
aprons and "stupid faces." Yet these lodges furnished much of the
advertising and provided most of the job printing for the German-
language press. Weitling exposed their ridiculous antics and
demonstrated how they wasted men's time and robbed them of
money which could be put to better use. He spoke his mind with
laudable courage, but thereby he alienated the financial support
of the only group with the resources to keep a German-language
press alive.
Weitling was equally disillusioned about the Turner move­
ment. Theoretically, it was devoted to the cultivation of the body
and to the development of the mind. Many Turnvereine, at least
during their earlier years, were centers of radical and liberal
thought, counting among their members some of the best intel­
lectuals of the German immigration. However, the transition to
societies emphasizing the social and the convivial to the gradual
exclusion of more serious intellectual interests was easy to make,
and it was not long until many Turnvereine developed a far greater