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.
A celibate commune
Much has already been written about the Harmonites, whose lives can still be studied in the quaint town of Harmony and in Old Economy Village, a well-preserved historic site. Led by the independent-minded preacher George Rapp, they left the German state Württemburg at the start of the 19th century in search of a new home.
Rapp’s followers bought a plot in Butler County, where they set about constructing houses, farming and distilling whiskey. Soon after their arrival, they signed an agreement to share all property in common and work toward their common benefit — making the society arguably one of the first U.S. experiments in small-c communism (they also agreed to cease all sex, even between spouses).
Dissatisfied with their location, the Harmonites relocated a few years later to the state of Indiana, where they settled on a malarial spot they called New Harmony. It was there that they made their acquaintance with Robert Owen — one of the most influential figures in early socialism.
Meeting Robert Owen
Following the success of his model factory town in New Lanark, Scotland, the Welsh-born Owen was keen to test his cooperative ideas in the American frontier. Owen was no revolutionary, but his ideas of efficient factory management, universal education and communal ownership were already gaining influence in the British workers’ movement.
Owen’s arrival afforded the Harmonites the chance to leave their swampy Indiana home and return to Pennsylvania. In late 1824, he met with Rapp in Pittsburgh (to some local fanfare), and Rapp agreed to sell the Indiana property to Owen’s socialist followers. “I am well pleased with him and his plans,” Rapp said of Owen, who he hoped could provide inter-communal cooperation and an economic boost.
Owen’s colony fared little better than Rapp’s. Despite the arrival of several noted scientists, the town fell into infighting as residents — many of them middle- to upper-class intellectuals — failed to develop a robust economy. The Owenite settlement didn’t last even five years, although Owen’s socialist ideas would become the basis of Britain’s cooperative movement and its early labor movement.
“Life of virtue”
In 1825, the Harmonites settled in their long-term home in modern-day Ambridge. Working to build an orderly society, they soon developed a reputation for efficiency and thrift — so much so that Pittsburgh craftsmen and merchants complained that the settlement undercut their prices when selling to outsiders.
It was in this era that Peter Kaufmann, a German-born social reformer and philosopher, arrived among the Harmonites. Kaufmann was among the first thinkers to carry Hegel’s philosophy into the United States, and his work to establish a Philadelphia “labor-for-labor store” marked an early attempt to change capitalist social relations.
Kaufmann became a teacher at Economy, as described by Loyd D. Easton in his 1966 book “The Ohio Hegelians.” Kaufmann praised Rapp’s followers:
It is the duty and theory of every member of this community to show by practice in reality that he believes. And so the life of virtue of the first Christians is renewed again here, and the image of Christ the Savior is expressed and painted here in every individual more or less.
Easton further quotes: “(E)very member of this community is nobilitated by the exalting feeling for pure and disinterested friendship towards their fellow members and even towards all mankind.”
Kaufmann was sufficiently affected by his time with the Harmonites that he left to form his own German utopian society in Ohio. After leaving that community, he wrote accounts of other German-American model towns and detailed an 1830s split that briefly threatened the Harmony Society’s survival.
A revolutionary visits
A communistic society of German immigrants proved a natural draw for Wilhelm Weitling, the Magdeburg-born tailor whose Christian-tinged revolutionary writings had won allies in the workers’ movement all over Europe. Weitling’s activities led him across Europe and into the communistic League of the Just.
After spending time in prison and earning the respect, then skepticism of a young Marx for his utopian communist thought, Weitling settled in the United States, where he crisscrossed the country and worked to establish his own utopian colony.
During his travels, he stopped in Pittsburgh and Economy in 1851, as detailed by Carl Wittke in “The Utopian Communist” (Wittke cites Weitling’s magazine Die Republik der Arbeiter, which I’ve been unable to find).
[In Pittsburgh] he met a street-corner preacher who denounced all religions and advocated a socialist ‘Jesusville.’ . . . Not far away from this expanding industrial center was the German communist colony of Economy. Weitling interviewed its governing elders and visited their clean, prosperous village of brick and frame houses. ”Ah, if the Arbeiterbund only had this place,’ he sighed, as he inspected hotel, stores, meeting house, communal laundry, vineyards, mills and the great house and garden of Rapp, the leader of the community.
At that time — some 17 years after the elder Rapp’s death — the settlement had a couple hundred residents, whose work and business acumen had earned them millions of dollars’ worth of property and substantial investments in other concerns including oil wells (the investments all communally held, of course). Weitling noted that “their stocks yield more than their labors,” Wittke reports.
The Harmonites were no strangers to politics: Rapp had once exchanged letters with Thomas Jefferson and clashed with President Andrew Jackson’s local allies, who accused the preacher of controlling the settlement’s vote. But they were no radicals, and Weitling’s beliefs (let alone Marx’s) would have been far from their own.
Weitling remarked on their peculiar religious beliefs and their insistence on celibacy, and decided he would likely be expelled if he ever considered joining. Still, the settlement seems to have had an effect as he worked to build his own town in Communia, Iowa.
Final years
In its later decades, Economy’s population shrank as few new members joined and the celibate early recruits failed to carry on families. They maintained their practice of sharing, however — including with outsiders.
In the 1870s, writer Charles Nordhoff stayed there and described the regular presence of jobless men served by the community.
[I] was told that they feed here daily from 15 to 25 such tramps, asking no questions, except that the person shall not have been a regular beggar from the society. A constant provision of coffee and bread is made for them, and the house set apart for their lodging has bed accommodations for 20 men. They are expected to wash at the stable next morning, and thereupon receive a breakfast of bread, meat, and coffee, and are suffered to go on their way.
Nordhoff asked whether the society’s members ever felt taken advantage of, perhaps by an underserving visitor. “Yes, probably,” came the answer. “But it is better to give to a dozen worthless ones than to refuse one deserving man the cup and loaf which we give.”
The society’s last members died around the turn of the 20th century, and the now cash-strapped society was dissolved, its property eventually turned into an educational village. It remains among the first examples of a “communistic” society by settlers in the country, and influenced philosophers and revolutionaries alike.
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