288 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
labor movement took on new life among the Germans in New
York in the 1860's; there were German labor papers in Chicago,
New York, San Francisco, and other leading cities, and the Ger
man radical groups kept in close touch with events abroad and
celebrated the anniversaries of the European revolutions in the
United States; but Weitling remained out of the public eye. His
friend Sorge, a Forty-eighter who became general secretary of the
First International, an organization whose headquarters Marx
eventually moved to New York in order to escape the influence
of Bakunin and his followers, belonged to the New Yorker Kommunisten Klub, founded in 1857 by freethinking communists.
Though it repudiated all religious faith, it included a number
of non-Marxians in its membership. Weitling refused to take any
part in its propaganda, though he seems to have attended an oc
casional meeting probably more for the sake of sociability with
old friends than for reasons of politics. In the many reports of
the great hunger parade in New York in 1857, when several
thousand destitute workers marched past the offices of the lead
ing newspapers and into Wall Street carrying banners bearing
the inscription "Work-Arbeit," there is no reference to Weitling,
either as one of the demonstrators or as one of the "several fierce
Dutch and Irish orators" who addressed the crowd from the steps
of the City Hall.
Weitling continued, however, to receive letters from former co
workers here and abroad. In 1855, for example, a tailor who had
returned to Germany after two years' residence in Baltimore
wrote from Hanover to say that he had shipped a box of printed
matter containing revolutionary plays "too radical" for publica
tion in Germany. One of the plays was dedicated to a settler
residing in Communia, and Weitling was asked to arrange for the
publication of his fellow tailor's manuscripts. His reply was that
he had seen this fellow but once in Hamburg, that he was greatly
irked by his request for a loan of twenty-five dollars, and that he
resented having to pay sixty-two cents postage due to get the
material out of the New York post office.