Equality Colony - Brotherhood of The Co-operative Commonwealth

Brotherhood of The Co-operative Commonwealth

The colony's origins lay in ideas of New England reformers in the mid-1890s. Norman Wallace Lermond, a journalist and farmer in Warren, Maine, and Ed Pelton had been intrigued by an idea originally suggested by Socialist Labor Party member F.G.R. Gordan that a series of socialist colonies be established in a single western state. (Gordan suggested Texas.) Lermond and Pelton started a vigorous letter-writing campaign to notable reformers such as Henry Demarest Lloyd advocating the plan and suggesting that the socialist colonists would be able to initiate the collective ownership of the means of production in the state by voting in a socialist government. Lermond envisioned an organization of many local unions ("L.U.s") that would provide the colonists with financial, material, and moral support, coordinated by a national "center or union" controlled by seven trustees. His immediate model was the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which colonized Kansas with abolitionists prior to the U.S. Civil War in order to make the territory a free state. Lloyd gave the plan modest financial backing

Lermond started the first local union in Warren on October 18, 1895, and Pelton established the second in Damariscotta Mills, Maine that winter. In December 1895, Lermond issued a call for the creation of more local unions in the pages of the New York Commonwealth and the Coming Nation. In the spring of that year he announced he was setting up an "organizational meeting" to create a "National Union of the Brotherhood of the Co-operative Commonwealth" scheduled to be held in St. Louis on July 24–26, 1896, congruent with that year's Populist party national convention, to which he was a delegate. A formal "call" for this convention was published in Coming Nation July 11 and 18, and was endorsed by Henry Demarest Lloyd, Eugene Debs, Frank Parsons, William D. P. Bliss and Eltweed Pomeroy.

This convention, however, did not materialize. Lermond could not get away from the Populist convention, and Imogene Fales attended a National Co-operative Congress that created a new American Co-operative union with her as secretary. The Brotherhood of the Co-operative Commonwealth was officially organized through a mail referendum conducted through the Coming Nation, which was quickly becoming the movement's semi-official newspaper. On September 19, the Coming Nation announced the adoption of a constitution and the election of seven officers: Lloyd as president, Lermond as secretary, B. Franklin Hunter as treasurer, Frank Parsons dean, Morrison I. Swift organizer, I. E. Dean master workman and A. S. Edwards, of the Coming Nation editor.

The constitution's preamble committed the organization to three broad goals: "1. To educate the people in the principles of Socialism; 2. To unite all socialists in one fraternal association; 3. To establish co-operative colonies and industries in one state until that state is socialized." Each of the eight elected trustees would head a department of the organization. The president would theoretically head an executive department to generally supervise the group, but the most important position was secretary, which would head the colonization department charged with planting socialistic colonies. There were also departments for education (headed by the dean), organization, which would create new local unions, exchange, industry (headed by the Master Workman) and finance.

Not all of these positions were filled, however. Lloyd and Hunter declined their positions, and the post of distributor was apparently unfilled. In new elections held in January 1897, Myron Reed was elected president and Eugene Victor Debs national organizer. However, Debs' conception of what the colonization scheme meant was different. He had envisioned it as an outlet for the blacklisted and unemployed members of the American Railway Union. Meanwhile, Victor Berger and his group were urging him to create a new socialist political party, committed to political action and not colonization. Lermond, Parsons and Reed attended the June 1897 convention of the ARU which created the Social Democracy of America, but the BCC did not join the new organization, rejecting its "class struggle" thesis with a vision of a colony that would include middle-class professionals and "everybody who believes in co-operation" and not just "the laboring classes so called". Weakened by the loss of Debs and the defection of some of its membership to the new SDA, the BCC set out to start its first colony.