THE WORKINGMEN'S LEAGUE 195prison. They were tried finally on December 3, and the contro
versy was ended when they accepted pleas of guilty to assault and
rioting.
The labor demonstrations of the 1850's and the prominent role
played by immigrants in the growing demands for higher pay and
shorter hours startled conservative Americans. The sudden rise
of organizations like the Sozial Reformer, the Freie Gemeinde, the
Arbeiterbund, the Ouvrier Cercle, and the "Polish Democrats"
seemed to foreshadow an organized assault upon property by
recent arrivals whose poisonous propaganda was hidden under a
foreign tongue. Brisbane addressed the German tailors and advo
cated putting an end to "the servitude of capital," and there was
much talk of a general strike and "revolution" at the meetings of
certain foreign-language groups. In 1853 a new French paper,
Le Republicain, dedicated to the programs of Brisbane and Con¬
siderant made its appearance in New York.
To conservatives who regarded the demand for homesteads as
communistic, the situation was most alarming. James Gordon
Bennett's New York Herald predicted that bands of the discon
tented soon would be marching on Wall Street to plunder the
banks; and he lumped socialism, Fourierism, and infidelity into
one great mass of iniquity. Bennett described Brisbane as "a genu
ine, red republican and dyed-in-the-wool Fourierite of the French
class" and warned good native Americans to avoid all such foreign
"theoretical nonsense." To the Herald, socialism was "all non
sense, humbug, cant, hypocricy, rascality and visionary," and men
like Weitling were ridiculed for their inadequate command of the
English language and accused of "playing and working upon the
feelings of the brave, noble, simple, honest-hearted Germans."^8
Other New York papers, such as the Courier and the Enquirer,
ranted in much the same terms against a labor movement which
they viewed as a communist assault on the pillars of society.
The one notable exception to such newspaper attacks was
Greeley's Tribune. Horace Greeley had reached his position of
(^8) New York Herald, April 19, 27,1850.