Minor: A Yankee Convention [April 1920] 1 A Yankee Convention. by Robert Minor Published in The Liberator, v. 3, no. 4, whole no. 25 (April 1920), pp. 28-34. The plaster is falling off the ceiling, the roof has 600 retail stores run by farmer and worker groups. In caved in, the floor has rotted and the plumbing leaks, the past two years under the pressure of hunger and in the house of Capital. profiteer prices, about three or four thousand more Private merchandising doesn’t feed people any retail stores have sprung up. Nobody knows exactly more. It fails to carry ham and eggs and bread and how many. They sprang up spontaneously and hap- beef and beans from the farm to the human belly. Like- hazard, and in spite of everything that bankers and wise it has fluked at getting shoes and overalls and merchants, lawyers and newspapers could do to stifle overcoats onto people. It’s all wrong. People are going them. Many go down under the vengeance of banks without things everywhere. In Europe about thirty and the boycott of wholesalers. But they sprang up million men are wearing old army uniforms because again in unexpected and unknown places and roughly they can’t get any other clothes. Is America doing much hang on, managing to survive in the leeway of the dif- better? For my part, I’m wearing a borrowed shirt, an ference between wholesale and retail prices. Enough overcoat given to me by a Moscow soldier in Novem- of the cooperative retail stores in the United States have ber before last, and a pair of woozy horsehide shoes. I gotten into communication with one another to es- haven’t lately been able to pay money right over the tablish a dozen wholesale centers. counter in a store for anything except collars. I have In Boston is the “New England Cooperatives been able to buy some new soft collars, and I paid a Wholesale Society” (34 Merchants’ Row), doing busi- half dollar apiece for them. It’s all wrong. ness for forty societies. Warehouses of the “National Isn’t the average American covering his meek Cooperative Association” have been opened at Chi- pride in clothes of Winter-before-last and of fabric as cago, Hoboken, and Seattle. phoney as a New York egg? And isn’t his food, for all In addition, there is the older “Cooperative he pays for it, of the kind that ought to be hauled off Wholesale Co.” in San Francisco (236 Commercial by the garbage man? Yes. Avenue) — and another is the “Tri-State Cooperative Why, the American people are so giddy-headed Wholesale” in Pittsburgh (39 Terminal Way) which, if now for something to eat that the Wall Street barons it was not born of the steel strike, at least cut its teeth are putting up Hoover for President, knowing the thereon. Then there are two independent wholesales, people will vote for him because his name reminds which are not a result of the labor struggle but were them of food! crystallized by economic pressure on the farmers of Everywhere, people are groping for new ways of the Middle West. They are the Farmers’ Union Job- getting food and clothes. Aside from the country where bing Association of Kansas City, Kansas, and the Co- they have struck the soviet style of supplying the work- operative Wholesale Society of America, at St. Paul, ing class through the factory committees, and letting Minnesota. The Central States Cooperative Whole- the bourgeoisie pay 2,000 percent more to specula- sale, East St. Louis, Illinois, and the Cooperative Cen- tors, there is a grand rush toward the cooperative move- tral Exchange in Superior, Wisconsin are a couple more ment. It was strong in Europe long before the war, of highly substantial wholesales, each serving about and had lapped over into America to the extent of about fifty societies. 1 2 Minor: A Yankee Convention [April 1920] So, you see, it’s coming from two directions — I respect business men’s judgment about some from the labor side and from the farmer side. things. If capitalists think the movement threatens to There is a cooperative packing plant at Fargo, aid in freeing the working class from them, then the North Dakota, and another at Seattle, Washington, cooperative movement deserves some very serious and cooperative fish canneries and milk condenseries on favorable attention. Puget Sound. There are cooperative timber mills in But the biggest thing that catches my eye in the Western Washington. The Middle West is dotted with cooperative movement is this: That it brings the farm- cooperative grain elevators and flour mills, livestock ers’ organizations and the labor unions together. exchanges, and livestock commission offices. In Brook- It is strange how little is known among the city lyn, NY, there is a cooperative knitting works. The masses about the various associations of farmers. They land is lousy with cooperative banks, warehouses, and are just now getting introduced to the labor unionists. grocery stores from coast to coast. Some of them are “kulak” (tight-fisted landlord) orga- Cooperative restaurants are sprouting up every- nizations, as Lenin would say. For instance, there is where. That reminds me that while in Detroit recently the California Fruit Growers’ Association, made up of I had a meal of steak and apple pie of the kind I used wealthy land barons living in a feudal style upon itin- to get in Texas twenty years ago but haven’t often seen erant wage-slave labor, as the planters of the Old South since; and I got it in a cooperative cafeteria run by the lived upon chattel-slave labor. They might also be com- “Workmen’s Educational Association” in the “House pared to the landed aristocracy from which were re- of the Masses,” then in the hands of the members of cruited the White Guard, and which the political the Communist Party. Until raided by Mr. Palmer’s sharps like to call the “real people” of Russia. dicks, the place was crowded by the working class of But then there are other farmers’ organizations the neighborhood every mealtime and all day. Even whose opinions as economically determined are very the policemen on nearby beats came here because the much closer to labor. In the old “Grange,” organized prices were extraordinarily low for such quality of food. in the ’70s, the main officers and a certain conserva- The place had a sort of an unstereotyped, and anti- tive element are unsympathetic to labor, but the vig- Childs spirit about it. orous rank and file knows that its hope lies in joining Schools are being established on the cooperative hands with the cities’ disinherited. The American So- basis and cooperative recreational parks are being built. ciety of Equity is a strong farmers’ organization with Laundries, coal yards, and slaughterhouses as well. efficiency and courage, fully proven by its work in Maybe it doesn’t get the working class anywhere bringing farmer and laborer together in both indus- in the long run, but at any rate some of the capitalists trial strikes and agricultural crises. The Farmers’ Union, are beginning to worry about it. The American trade in its various state branches, has shown itself always paper called The Dress and Waist News says of the co- for the underdog of city and country. And the Farm- operative movement in the United States: ers’ National Council engages in enough militant ac- tivities as to give promise of a great future. This is the movement which has virtually delivered the Maybe you’ll remember that the conflict of in- British Government into the hands of radical labor, which, in turn, is responsible for one surrender after another to the terests between the city laborer and the small farmer most exorbitant demands of organized employees.... It is has been a bugbear to progress throughout the indus- all very well to talk of the “direct-from-producer-to consumer” trial age. The French Revolution was nearly strangled principle. But in its final analysis this would mean the reintroduction of barter for modern trade, and another prop by it, the Paris Commune was checked and left to de- knocked from under the conservative economic structure. struction by the failure to coordinate with the peas- If our newspapers knew their business they would have antry. And, most illuminatingly, the clashes of appar- knocked the scheme to imitate this system in America on the head as soon as it showed itself, for just as little as ent interest between the peasantry and the city labor- business has the right to usurp the functions and rights of ers have been the most terrible internal problem of labor, just as little has labor the right to become a competitor the Russian Revolution. I can never forget the impas- of business. sioned speeches of Lenin in protest against the treach- erous avarice of the “kulaks.” Minor: A Yankee Convention [April 1920] 3 It is for that reason that I get excited about this President of the National Cooperative Association, and early-stage agreement between the exploited Ameri- Allan E. Barker, section hand, was there as Grand Presi- can farmer with American labor. There may be jokers dent of the Maintenance of Way Employees. Grant in it, galore, that I have not seen, but the trend is right. Slocum, President of the National Association of Gleaners, beside Joseph Schlossberg, General Secre- On Lincoln’s birthday, February 12th, labor and tary of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. the farmers met together in Streetcar Men’s Hall in Then there were the farmers with their whiskers Chicago.