The Challenge of the Country: A Study of Country Life OpportunityFiske, George Walter
History
The Challenge of the Country: A Study of Country Life Opportunity
Fiske, George Walter
Sociology, Rural
Cooperation is succeeding well not only among fruit growers, but producers
of tobacco, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, celery, and, to a limited extent,
cereals. Experience has proved that it pays for farmers of a whole section
to specialize on the same product; and the most uniform success has come
in societies that are purely cooperative, that is, not joint-stock
companies with voting power according to shares, but _one vote for each
member_, the profits being of course proportionate to the relative volume
of business each contributes.
Short-sighted selfishness resists this plan and yields slowly to pure
cooperation; but experience shows that, as Prof. E. K. Eyerly states, "in
the stock companies the large shareholders are tempted constantly to
increase the dividend rate on capital at the expense of the other patrons.
This may explain in part the difficulty of the cooperative creamery in New
England to hold its own, where only 20% are of the purely cooperative
type." Dr. Eyerly includes among the more common causes of failure
individualism, conservatism, jealousy, mercenary traits, poor business
management, a lack of knowledge of what other societies are doing, and
lack of restrictions on share voting and the number of shares owned.
In the local beginnings of cooperation, ingrained selfishness as well as
rural suspicion and ignorance, sometimes blocks progress. When the strong
California Fruit Growers' Exchange began twenty years ago, it had
difficulty holding some of its members to their agreements. After pledging
their crops to the company they would sometimes yield to the temptations
offered by outside buyers, for the sake of greater temporary profit; but
after a few lawsuits this tendency to break cooperative contracts was
entirely checked.
_Our Debt to Immigrants_
Unquestionably this great cooperative movement of the last two decades
means an entire redirection of rural life and the ultimate conquest of its
worst enemy, individualism. We must thank our adopted citizens for the
main impulse given to this movement. Cooperative principles and the
cooperative spirit have been imported from Denmark, Germany and Italy,
where they had already proved successful, and have taken deep root in our
middle-western and north-central states, gradually overcoming the native
Yankee individualism characteristic of the older settlers. Dr. Eyerly of
Amherst is authority for the statement that the only successful
cooperative stores organized in New England for a generation past have
been, with one or two exceptions, among foreigners.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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