George Rapp's Harmony Society 1785-1847
Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972. Revised Edition. Hardcover with Dust Jacket. Second and substantially revised and expanded edition. 713pp. Sewn binding in orange cloth, gilt spine lettering. Ex-library; exceedingly clean and sharp with sound binding and no evidence of use; DJ with a tape repair to fore head and small stains to spine. Shipped professionally in a box. Long out of print and scarce in trade. 'When George Rapp died in 1847, the capitalistic press of Pittsburgh lauded him as the 'greatest communist of his age.' This was the year that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were commissioned to write the Communist Manifesto. At the time of his death Rapp could look back upon three American communities his Society had built and which had attracted the admiration of the entire Western world, for George Rapp was the founder of the most successful of all communist groups in America's history—one which provided social and spiritual security, with prenatal care and post-mortem burial, more than a century before the New Deal. Before Brook Farm (1841) and Alcott's Fruitlands (1843) began, Rapp's Harmony Society had been flourishing for almost forty years, and the enormous success of the Society, which believed itself to be the embodiment of the Sunwoman of the Apocalypse, actually inspired both, for Rapp's Society was not just another German-American musical society, but a solid communist establishment that endured in Pennsylvania and Indiana for a full century on a very simple agreement consisting of six points. This agreement three times was upheld by the United States Supreme Court. If to Karl Marx and his followers religion was the opium of the people, to George Rapp it was the essence of life. Yet one looks in vain in American high school or college textbooks for an account of America's own greatest com-munist. That this was not always so is proved by F. Cuming's Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country, published in 1810, John Melish's Travels in the United States of America in the Years 1806-1811, and George Flower's Letters from Lexington and the Illinois, published in London in 1819 and describing Rapp's second town as 'Harmony, that wonder of the West.' Lord Byron, Goethe, Lenau, Kipling, and most western travelers knew better, and have written about George Rapp's great achievements. The present volume is an extensive revision, with new illustrations, of the first edition, in which for the first time a history of the Harmony Society is presented based on a study of the original records of the Society in this country and abroad. A whole new chapter has been added about the schismatic group under Count Leon and the stay of the German poet Lenau with the Harmony Society in 1832, which made a lifelong impression on him and his work.' (Publisher's blurb). VERY GOOD / Good. Item #513276
Price: $100.00