Cooperatives and the Trend Toward Associationalism

Stuart Chase's pamphlet about the rise of the consumer cooperative movement, Story of Toad Lane, printed by the Cooperative League circa 1926, traces the pioneering of the cooperative principle back to weavers in Rochdale, England, who in 1844 began by selling themselves four consumer staples: flour, butter, sugar and oatmeal. (DIRECTORY NOTE Stuart Chase Papers) At the end is a 1941 Postscript by Wallace J. Campbell, noting, in the spirit of the original pamphlet, that "co-op food stores from Massachusetts to California are demonstrating that consumers in business for themselves can be as efficient and as economical as the giant chain stores" (p. 14).

A cooperative is a non-profit organization by means of which individuals or small businesses can provide themselves with needed goods and services at cost. Members of a cooperative own and control the business. By eliminating profits from the prices charged for goods, consumer cooperatives run on the so-called Rochdale plan were able to save consumers' families the difference between wholesale and retail.

"Associationalism" or cooperativism was a widespread response at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century to the stresses of the Industrial Revolution. It allowed workers to band together to better secure their members' economic needs. During the 1920s, cooperatives were prevalent, permitting communities of interest to develop in a great number of trades and professions and endowing them with a sense of power in the national economy. As the personal stories in Consumers' Cooperative Societies in New York State (1922) show, immigrants played a large role in the growth of cooperatives in the United States.

The government study The Cooperative Movement in the United States in 1925 (Other than Agricultural) (1927), published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, demonstrates the great variety that existed of types of non-agricultural cooperative societies -- worker, consumer and credit -- and the conditions under which they operated. Credit Unions: Their Operation and Value (1926) classes the credit union as a type of consumer cooperative and focuses especially on lower-income consumers. For immigrants in the workplace, credit unions functioned as an instrument of "Americanization." (DETAIL NOTE Immigrants)

Mass marketing and huge retail chains among white businesses precipitated the counter-organization in 1928, in Montgomery, Alabama, of the Colored Merchants' Association (C.M.A.) , a black grocers' buying cooperative established to enable black businesses to compete and survive. As outlined in the July 1929 issue of Opportunity, the goals were to strengthen the profitability of black stores, offer more attractive shopping opportunities to black consumers, and raise the awareness of national advertisers of African Americans' buying power.

The Coolidge Papers case file Co-operative Marketing - Agriculture 1923-28 focuses on cooperatives formed specifically by the farm sector. The file shows that New York businessman B.F. Yoakum, previously a railroad construction magnate, was a keen advocate of Western farm cooperatives. A manifestation of the management efficiency revolution sweeping the country in the first part of the twentieth century, farmers' marketing associations represented faith in rational, scientific management, marketing efficiency, standardization of crops, the usefulness of research and statistical data, reduction of wasteful overlap and competition, and increased productivity. (INTRO NOTE Taylorism)

During Calvin Coolidge's administration, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was particularly supportive of the growth of agricultural and other kinds of associationalism. (INTRO NOTE Herbert Hoover) Some historians, however, contend that Congressional measures encouraging the formation of farm cooperatives during the 1920s did not particularly help farmers caught in the agricultural crisis, and may even have been a strategy to distract from finding more effective legislative remedies. (DETAIL NOTE McNary-Haugen)