50

Studies of the Max Kade Institute

the often savage polemic tone of these gatherings.35 The result was
that the paper engaged in head-to-head confrontations with clerical
writers in the Catholic Sonntagsblatt or the Tages-Chronik. Yet the
most violent wars were with the Lutheran leader C. F. W. Walther,
editor of Der Lutheraner, and his followers.36 In one such dispute,
a seminarian from Concordia Seminary published an anonymous
pamphlet denouncing the "Fleshly Religion of the Free Men."37
When all other arguments failed, Schmidt denigrated the author as a
mere Stephanite, the dregs of the German emigration, and a scandal
to all decent moral men. Such men should be happy they had not
been stoned for their conduct after their arrival with Bishop Martin
Stephan. He went on to characterize the Old Lutherans as a moral
cesspool which stank even worse than the St. Louis levee on a hot
day.38 The censoriousness of the freethinkers moved even Friedrich
MUnch to protest his misgivings about the stridently anti-Christian
tone of much of the paper. Schmidt replied to this firmly, though
with more courtesy than he could usually muster when dealing with
a critic.39 He was, after all, speaking to one who was already a noted
member of the rationalist community.
In mid-1851 formal coOperation between the Freie Minner and
the English-speaking group called the "Social Reformers" had been
ushered in by exchanges of greetingsY but by the autumn this
connection had grown to include the publication in the Freie Blitter
of a series of tracts in English, followed by German translations,
which advocated reforms to reverse the overconcentration of wealth
in thehandsofthefew.41 These articles meticulously examined
the structure and volatility of property-holding in St. Louis and
demanded an expansion of workers' cooperatives, restriction of the
use of professional lawyers in public courts, and discussed the need
for sexual equality, education for women, and the liberalization of
marriage laws. In letters to the journal, other members of the Social
Reform Association attacked the readiness of the clergy to defend
capital and reject self-help by labor. The publication of articles by
the Social Reformers went together with the experiment of using
the Verein schools as centers of tricultural progressive education,
bringing together Anglo-American, German, and French-speaking
creole children.42 The Verein declared itself ready to provide the
columns of its paper to the Social Reformers until they could afford
to publish their own journal.43