The Practical Utopians

Between 1865 and 1890, in the aftermath of the Civil War, virtually every important American labour reform organization advocated ““co-operation”” over ““competitive”” capitalism and several thousand co-operatives opened for business during this era. The men and women who built co-operatives were practical reformers and they established businesses to stabilize their work lives, families and communities. Yet they were also utopians - envisioning a world free from conflict where workers would receive the full value of their labour and freely exercise democratic citizenship in the political and economic realms. Their visions of co-operation, though, were riddled with hierarchical notions of race, gender and skill that gave little specific guidance for running a co-operative. This text examines closely the experiences of working men and women as they built their co-operatives, contested the meanings of co-operation and reconciled the realities of the marketplace with their various and often conflicting conceptions of democratic participation. Steve Leikin provides new theories and examples of the failure and success of the co-operative movement, including how the Gilded Age’s most powerful labour organization, the Knights of Labor, collapsed in the face of the expanding industrial economy. Dealing with a critically important yet largely ignored aspect of working-class life during the late 19th century, this text brings crucial aspects of the co-operative movement to light and should be a useful study for all scholars of American history, labour history and political science.