PREFACE

T

HERE were many varieties of radicals, reformers, and

intellectuals among the German Forty-eighters who

migrated to the United States in the middle of the last

century. Some, like Carl Schurz, the best known of this group

of German liberals, became completely adjusted to the American

scene and rose to positions of eminence and trust in their adopted

fatherland. Others, like Karl Heinzen, represented the militant,

uncompromising radicals who remained the same irrepressible

crusaders in America which they had been in Europe, were never

completely at home in the United States, but nevertheless played

an important role in many of the reforms of their time.

Wilhelm Weitling, also a Forty-eighter, belonged to the ex­

treme left wing of the German immigration. A simple artisan,

entirely self-educated, he had won fame in the radical movement

of Europe long before he migrated to the United States. His

books and his propaganda for a communist Utopia were known

in western Europe before Karl Marx leaped into prominence

with his Communist Manifesto and became the outstanding

spokesman of proletarian revolution.

Weitling belonged to the working class. He was not a uni­

versity man and he knew the sufferings of the poor from per­

sonal experience. He served a jail sentence in Switzerland be­

cause of his convictions. He was one of the most important fig­

ures in the history of pre-Marxian socialism. His philosophy of

history and his brand of communism were very different from

Marx's doctrines of economic determinism and the inevitability

of the proletarian revolution, for Weitling, though an agnostic