214 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
Solomon arrayed in all his glory," and the New Yorker Allgemeine
Zeitung, always critical of the founder of the Arbeiterbund, re
ferred to the latter's "rhetorical manner which suggests that of a
Methodist preacher."
More serious than such unfriendly references to this bizarre
celebration was the response of about 800 German workers in
March, 1853, to a summons in the New Yorker Staatszeitung to
meet in Mechanics Hall, 160 Hester Street, to discuss plans for a
rival Allgemeiner Arbeiterbund. The new movement emanated
primarily from Joseph Weydemeyer, an ardent young disciple of
Marx who had come to New York to become the leading propa
gandist for the Marx-Engels group. For a time, Weydemeyer had
considered taking over Die Republik der Arbeiter, but Marx had
advised him to have no traffic with its owner and publisher.^17 The
Marxists had neither an organ nor an official representative among
the German-Americans until Weydemeyer assumed the leader
ship of their group in New York and undertook to defend Marx
from the relentless attacks by former associates such as Heinzen,
Willich, and Weitling, all of whom were now in America. Wey
demeyer, the official spokesman for the Marxists, organized a club
known as the Proletarian League shortly after his arrival in the
United States and in 1852 founded the short-lived Die Revolu
tion, remembered only because Marx contributed his famous es
say on "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" to this
little radical sheet. Though attacked immediately by Weitling for
advocating a piecemeal program of mere political patchwork,
Weydemeyer persisted in his efforts to recruit a following among
the Germans, and his Allgemeiner Arbeiterbund soon became a
dangerous rival to the older organization.
Weydemeyer's Bund was content, at least for the present, with
a program of essentially bourgeois reforms. All of them could be
achieved by political action, including the ten-hour day, land re-
(^17) See Franz Mehring, "Neue Beiträge Zur Biographie von Karl Marx und
Friedrich Engels," Die Neue Zeit, XXV (1907), 99.