the Germans was identified with the name of Wilhelm Weitling, the well-known German communist, who settled in America about 1850.  This movement centered in and around New York.  The cooperative principle met with success among the English-speaking people only outside the larger cities.  In Buffalo, after an unsuccessful strike, the tailors formed an association with a membership of 108 and in October 1850, were able to give employment to 80 of that number.

Again, following an unsuccessful Pittsburgh strike of iron founders in 1849, about a dozen of the strikers went to Wheeling, Virginia, each investing $3000, and opened a cooperative foundry shop.  Two other foundries were opened on a similar basis in Stetsonville, Ohio, and Sharon, Pennsylvania.  These associations of iron founders, however, might better be called association of small capitalists or master-workmen.

During the forties, consumers’ or distributive cooperation was also given a trial.  The early history of consumers’ cooperation is but fragmentary and, so far as we know, the first cooperative attempt which had for its exclusive aim “competence to purchaser” was made in Philadelphia early in 1829.  A store was established on North Fifth Street, which sold goods at wholesale prices to members, who paid twenty cents a month for its privileges.

In 1831 distributive cooperation was much discussed in Boston by a “New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics, and Other Working Men.”  A half dozen cooperative attempts are mentioned in the Cooperator, published in Utica in 1832, but only in the case of the journeymen cordwainers of Lynn do we discover an undertaking which can with certainty be considered as an effort to achieve distributive cooperation.  Several germs of cooperative effort are found between 1833 and 1845, but all that is known about them is that their promoters sought to effect a saving by the purchase of goods in large quantities which were then broken up and distributed at a slight advance above original cost in order to meet expenses.  The managers were unpaid, the members’ interest in the business was not maintained, and the stores soon failed, or passed into the possession of private owners.

It was the depression of 1846-1849 which supplied the movement for distributive cooperation with the needed stimulus, especially in New England.  Although the matter was discussed in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and even as far west as Ohio and Illinois, yet in none of the industrial centers of these States, except perhaps in New York, was it put into successful operation.

In New England, however, the conditions were exceptionally favorable.  A strike movement for higher wages during a partial industrial revival of 1843-1844 had failed completely.  This failure, added to the fact that women and girls were employed under very unsatisfactory conditions, strengthened the interest of humanitarians in the laboring people and especially in cooperation as a possible means of alleviating their distress.