In the long-running debate over the exceptionalism of the American working class
historians and social scientists have asked why the United States, unlike its European
counterparts, failed to develop a large Socialist movement or working-class party. Rarely in
this debate have scholars compared the role of cooperation in the evolution of working-class
movements in the United States and Europe. Yet in the countries taken as models of working-class
activism--Britain, Germany, Belgium, and Scandinavia--cooperatives were critical to the
success of Socialist and working-class movements. Indeed, cooperative movements were
sometimes larger than unions or parties and often provided vital support to these institutions.
In the United States, according to recent scholarship, a labor movement similarly inclined
towards cooperation emerged in the immediate post-Civil War years. Organized as the Knights
of Labor this movement was a broadly-based collection of trade and labor unions as well as
cooperatives. In both the European movements and the Knights of Labor, producers’
cooperatives were initially as important if not more important than consumer cooperatives.
While European activists gradually neglected producers’ cooperatives when capital costs proved
too daunting and then turned towards consumer organizing, the American labor movement lost

its enthusiasm for cooperation as a broad strategy for change after the Knights of Labor failed in
the late 1880s. When the labor movement reorganized as the American Federation of Labor it
specifically rejected labor reform of this kind. Thus, in order to understand fully the unique
trajectory of the American labor movement, it is crucial to examine the role of both producers
and consumers cooperation in its development. Such an examination will also help explain why
the American consumer cooperative movement which grew up later in the Progressive era was
quite different than its European counterparts in having few ties to organized labor.
The involvement of American workers in cooperative production and consumption has
long remained an under examined area of American labor history. Yet over the course of the
nineteenth century wage-earning men and women established thousands of cooperative stores,
workshops and factories in the United States. For nearly sixty years trade unionists and shorthour
advocates spoke of cooperation as an essential element of labor reform. Indeed,
cooperation rested at the heart of the labor movements social vision and under the auspices of
trade unions, city-wide trade assemblies and, in its most advanced form, the Knights of Labor,
the cooperative became a working-class tool and model for a more just economy.
What did this movement, dismissed by historians as backward and hopelessly utopian,
mean to American workers? Unlike the early nineteenth century utopian socialists who
developed detailed plans of social reconstruction, cooperators often began their enterprises with
only a vague formula for self-help and a nebulous vision of workplace democracy.

This article will examine the ideals of nineteenth century cooperators and the rise of
cooperative labor reform from the 1830s to the decline of the Knights of Labor. By comparing
two local case studies of successful cooperative movements, as well as drawing on some
significant examples from other locales, this article will show how cooperative production and
consumption provided workers with a means to stabilize their communities and build the labor
movement. It will also suggest the reasons for cooperation’s failure in the late 1880s and its
impact on the labor movement and future cooperative efforts.