THE WORKINGMEN'S LEAGUE
and the New York Tribune published contributions by Brisbane
on this and similar themes, beginning in 1842. William Ellery
Channing, George W. Curtis, Thomas W. Higginson, Charles A.
Dana, the poet Whittier, and the novelist Henry James also were
involved in various noble schemes which would reconstruct the
world more in accord with their hearts' desire, affording the prin
ciples of freedom and equal opportunity for all.
Proposals dealing with profit sharing, co-operatives, and new
systems of currency, banking, and exchange were widely current.
As early as 1827, Josiah Warren, the Bostonian who is known as
the first American anarchist, opened a "time store" where labor
could be exchanged for labor in the purchase of goods and serv
ices, and in 1846, he published his Equitable Commerce, a treatise
on how to eliminate profit. Weitling was familiar with Warren's
theories, and his own objectives were strikingly similar to those
of some of these early American reformers.^2 Many of his followers
among the German immigrants, however, were far more radical
than the average American craftsman of the 1850's, who was turn
ing away from the vague humanitarianism of the prophets of
Utopia to a more practical trade-unionism. Among the adherents
of Weitling's Arbeiterbund were former members of the Euro
pean League of the Just, the Young Germany movement, the
Communist Club of London, and Kriege's Social Reform Associa
tion.^3
There were local labor societies in the United States before- From 1834 to 1837, the cost of living for the average worker
had risen sixty-six per cent, and laborers resorted to sporadic
strikes to improve the standard of living and to combat the evils
that seemed to stem from the factory system. Mathew Carey, a
Philadelphia publisher, issued his "Appeal to the Wealthy of the
(^2) See Henry E. Hoagland, "Humanitarianism, 1840-1860," Documentary His
tory of 3 Labor in the United States (New York, 1918), I, Part IV.
See also F. A. Sorge, "Die Arbeiterbewegung in den Vereinigten Staaten,"
Die Neue Zeit, I (1890-1891), 497-502, 542-47; II, 193-202, 232-40; C. F. Huch,
"Die Anfänge der Arbeiterbewegung unter den Deutschamerikanern," Mitteil¬
ungen des Deutschen Pionier-Vereins von Philadelphia, XVII (1910), 39-52.