CHAPTER X
X. On Tour for the Cause
AS A JOURNEYMAN Weitling had traveled widely in France,
Switzerland, Austria, and the German states, much of the
road on foot, after the custom of itinerant craftsmen. In the
United States, in the half-dozen years that mark his activity on
behalf of an American labor movement, he made no less than
seven journeys into the interior. In fact, he was traveling so much
of the time that his newspaper and the Arbeiterbund suffered be
cause of his long absences from New York. His last five trips were
concerned either directly or indirectly with the colony in Iowa,
where he struggled to apply his principles of communal organiza
tion. The first two were undertaken primarily as propaganda for
the Workingmen's League which he proposed to create as a na
tional organization as soon as an adequate number of local Ge¬
meinde had been organized, and as an attempt to obtain subscribers
for Die Republik der Arbeiter. Weitling made detailed reports on
these journeys, and although they were concerned chiefly with
the progress of his organization, much that he wrote throws light
on other aspects of American life in the 1850's, and particularly on
the nature of the German immigrant communities.
When Weitling began his propaganda tour he expected that his
name, his European reputation, and the importance of his message
to the Germans in the United States would ensure adequate pub
licity in the German-language press. He was bitterly disappointed
to find that the competition for space—with better-known figures
such as Gottfried Kinkel and Louis Kossuth, fellow refugees who
