Moses Coady - Later Years

Later Years

By the end of World War II credit unions and other co-operatives dotted the Maritimes, transforming the lives of thousands of people. Coady was honoured within the co-operative movement and beyond. He was featured on a national radio program of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on co-operatives in 1940. In 1946 the Vatican made him a Monsignor. In 1949 Coady was asked to address the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. He argued that environmental problems stemmed from ignorance of science, concentration of rural land ownership in the hands of a few, and exploitation of land primarily for profit.

In spite of the success and public recognition, Coady’s optimism and faith in people were tested in the later years of his life. Some co-operative leaders had committed fraud, while others had sold out their community’s resources to vested interests. Some fishermen sold their fish for “half a cent less” to the very middlemen whose monopolistic behavior their co-ops had been formed to discipline.

As the co-ops gradually became larger and more professional, many ordinary members lost their connection, and reverted to the ‘weird pessimism’ that had bothered Coady in his youth.

During the 1940s and 1950s the Extension Department increasingly turned its attention to international development.

After suffering a major heart attack, Coady stepped down as Director of the Extension Department on February 5, 1952. He was 70, and would continue to work nationally and internationally as Director Emeritus of the Extension Department, now with 25 staff, until his death.

In his dying days, Coady told his bishop that he was at peace with God and that “If I die, I die happy in the thought that my blueprint is being realized much more surely than I ever had a right to expect.” On his death at age 77, two fishermen, two farmers, a miner and a steelworker carried his body to a grave on a hill overlooking Antigonish.

Coady’s only book, Masters of Their Own Destiny, was an expression of the philosophy of the movement. Still in print, it has been translated into seven languages. A volume of his speeches, The Man from Margaree, was published by Alexander Laidlaw in 1971. Numerous books have been written about both the man and the movement he led. During his life Coady received three honorary degrees (Boston, Ottawa, Ohio).