When the German communist Wilhelm Weitling stopped in Economy, Pa. during an 1851 U.S. tour, he remarked on the strange, plain-living Germans who had built a home there.
“If now someone asks me whether I could live among such people, I must admit: Yes!” the writer Karl J.R. Arndt quoted Weitling, a utopian-revolutionary communist whose ideas influenced the workers’ movement and drew criticism from Karl Marx.
The Harmony Society — whose members are known as Harmonites, Harmonists or sometimes Economites — left its mark in two local towns in Butler and Beaver counties. Members practiced celibacy, eschewed worldly pleasures and held their possessions in common. While they’re remembered as decidedly apolitical Christian pietists, they left their mark on the socialist movement, early communists and even one of the first U.S. Hegelians.
