The Utopian Communist: A Biography of Wilhelm Weitling

CHAPTER XIV

FAREWELL TO REFORM

AFTER nearly thirty years of agitation for the causes in which

he had believed and sacrificed, Weitling returned to New York to eke out an existence by taking up the needle and shears of the tailor again. His remaining years were spent in efforts to satisfy interests which his restless spirit had been forced to neglect during the years devoted to reform.

Relatively little is known about the personal life of Wilhelm
Weitling. Most of his time and energy, until he was nearly fifty,
were devoted to the cause of the workers and to his theories of
social reconstruction. He had been a wanderer in six countries and
not until he was forty-six years of age, long after most men ex­
perience the stabilizing and sobering effects of family responsi­
bilities, was Weitling ready to abandon the life of a roving propa­
gandist and settle down in New York to lead the life of an
ordinary German craftsman and rear a family. In the city which
had welcomed him as a refugee and had served as the headquarters
of the organization he expected would control the American labor
movement, he lived inconspicuously for the rest of his days as a
simple citizen. He withdrew almost entirely from all public
activity, and was quickly forgotten by most of the German crafts­
men whose champion he had been.

Among the manuscripts which Weitling preserved, there are
a number of poems, evidently written in the early 1840's, which
do not appear in his published collection of Kerkerpoesien. They
include several sentimental lyrics which may have been inspired