AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



together in cooperative marketing associations sought the highest possible 



returns. 7 



Whatever their foreign antecedents, the marketing cooperatives of the 

 western Middle West had to face the practical, everyday problems that 

 the American farmer confronted. He had troubles with railroads, with 

 middlemen, and with financial institutions: cooperative associations had 

 to deal with the same difficulties. Before they could succeed, there had to 

 be much "experimentation in selecting, borrowing, adapting, contriving 

 and fitting together devices, procedures and arrangements" into the kind 

 of organization that would do the work required of it. So many elements 

 of the modern business corporation had to be adopted that the cooperative 

 which eventually appeared has been described as in outward form "a 

 business corporation and in the end a mutual benefit society." 8 According 

 to one authority, the marketing cooperatives had no "special techniques" 

 "they simply imitated the practices of the private business organizations 

 with the important modification that the gains or advantages should 

 accrue to those who participated in the enterprise." The fact that coopera- 

 tive leaders often made reference to the efficient methods of distribution 

 employed by American industrialists seems to indicate their very strong 

 interest in trying to profit from these examples. Three principal charac- 

 teristics emerged as the identification marks of a genuine cooperative: 

 first, it must be democratically controlled; second, it must set reasonable 

 limits on its capital; and third, it must distribute its earnings on the 

 patronage basis. 9 But these characteristics alone would hardly have been 



7. John Hanna, The Law of Cooperative Marketing Associations (New York, 

 1931),, p. 4; Bakken and Schaars, The Economics of Cooperative Marketing, pp. 

 169-70. See also Steen, Cooperative Marketing, pp. 3-4. According to Steen, "The 

 spectacular success of the Rochdale society led to the application of the Rochdale plan 

 to agricultural cooperation. This was the case in Great Britain and Ireland, and 

 through northern Europe, notably in the Scandinavian countries. It failed for farmers 

 almost as completely as it had succeeded for the factory workers of Great Britain, and 

 for a quarter of a century agricultural cooperation stood still in Europe. Then Amer- 

 ican farmers revived and perfected the old Swiss system of cooperative marketing 

 and its success led to its general adoption in European agriculture." 



8. Walton H. Hamilton, "Judicial Tolerance of Farmers' Cooperatives," Yale Law 

 Journal, XXXVIII (May, 1929), pp. 938-39; W. S. Harwood, "Cooperation in the 

 West," Atlantic Monthly, LXXXV (April, 1900), pp. 539-40; George Harold Powell, 

 Cooperation in Agriculture (New York, 1913), pp. 10-12. 



9. Bakken and Schaars, The Economics of Cooperative Marketing, pp. 146-47. 



