ON TOUR FOR THE CAUSE 171
meeting house of these pietists who lived by "inspiration," without
the services of preachers, and described the believers as "more
noble than the Freie Gemeinde" Apparently he took no offense
at the religious spirit that pervaded the colony. He merely com
mented that here the principles of Marx and Engels were realized,
not through atheism, but by faith in a divine law of communism.
Weitling enjoyed the food set before him, saw his first poppy
field in America, and studied with great satisfaction the prosperous
economy which not only satisfied the wants and desires of the
members of the colony, but produced a surplus for a lively trade
with near-by Buffalo, as well. He learned that men worked twelve
hours a day in the mills without supervision and were content to
satisfy all their wants from a common store. His only unfavorable
criticism was prompted by the lack of interest in the arts and let
ters: although Weitling was forced to rate the colonists as men and
women of average intelligence, the colony had no newspaper, no
theater, no library, no musical organizations, and no dancing. The
secret of their success as a community lay not only in the character
and piety of the members, but in their cautious policy with refer
ence to the admission of new members; their approval of marriage
and parenthood; and the fact that the whole group avoided dis
sension and disunity by accepting the authority of an aged prophet
who acted by divine inspiration. While men were rioting in near
by Buffalo over a fugitive slave, here men and women were living
in "a Christian communist community," separated from, and at
peace, with the world.^1
Returning from this pleasant Utopian interlude to the stern
reality of trying to enlist a badly divided German element, a hos
tile press, and a skeptical "aristocracy of intelligence" in his high
cause, Weitling began to consider some day establishing a colony
of his own. This interest grew rapidly into a determination to put
his communist system into practice somewhere in America. Ap
parently he already knew of the region in Iowa which was to be
(^1) For a complete history of this society, see Bertha M. H. Shambaugh, Amana
That Was and Amana That Is (Iowa City, 1932).