196 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
influence after a long hard journey which had started with his
indenture as a boy apprentice to a master printer. As a young man,
he had worked twelve hours a day and had lived in a boarding-
house with a group of shoemakers. Mindful of these early hard
ships and of his association with many honest craftsmen, he cou
rageously presided in 1850 over the first meeting of the Printers'
Union in New York and in due time established a plan of profit
sharing and employee participation in the ownership of his paper.^9
Greeley was a friend of George Ripley, and he had read Brisbane's
Social Destiny of Man, the best exposition of Fourierism in Amer
ica. Such questions had been discussed in the Tribune as early
as 1842. Charles A. Dana covered the Revolution of 1848 for
Greeley's paper and engaged Karl Marx as a regular contributor,
paying him five dollars an article until the panic of 1857, when his
honorarium was cut in half. Of all the important New York
papers, the Tribune alone dealt sympathetically with the rising
labor movement and endeavored to report it accurately. Its col
umns were open to discussions of the theories of Marx, Brisbane,
and Proudhon, and its editor personally contributed time and
money to the early labor movement. Not until the arrival of Jenny
Lind did the labor news disappear from the front page of the
Tribune. Then even Greeley surrendered to the glamour of the
Swedish nightingale.
Weitling became deeply involved in the labor troubles of the
1850's because his fellow craftsmen and fellow countrymen
played such an important role in them. Yet he distrusted all spo
radic strikes, and was suspicious of leaders who did not have com
plete blueprints for the future. Moreover, he was dubious about
the amalgamation of the working class and petite bourgeoisie
which he saw developing steadily under American conditions. The
piecemeal methods of the American reformers lacked that "com
mon unity" which he desired. From his standpoint, it was essen-
(^9) See Henry Luther Stoddard, Horace Greeley, Printer, Editor, Crusader
(New York, 1946), passim; Don Seitz, Horace Greeley (Indianapolis, 1926),
passim.