228 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNISTceeded, the less the interest in a centralized bank of exchange be
came. Weitling sensed what was happening but had to yield to the
trend.
The co-operative movement, obviously, was not invented by
Weitling. It existed in the United States before he came, and it has
passed through several cycles of rise and decline in the course of a
century. The rise in the cost of living in the 1850's, caused in part
by the boom resulting from the gold rush to California, was
largely responsible both for the epidemic of strikes and for the
rise of co-operatives. Moreover, the co-operative movement was
but one manifestation of that wave of humanitarianism that char
acterized the two decades prior to the Civil War. Though some
co-operatives which were established in the 1850's among the
workers survived to the 1880's, labor, in general, turned back to
ordinary trade-unionism after 1853.
As early as 1845, shoemakers in Lynn, Massachusetts, founded
a producers' co-operative. The Boston Tailors' Associative Union
followed their example in 1849, and the paper-mill workers of
Hardwick, in 1850. Consumers' co-operatives began in Boston in
1845 with the Workingmen's Protective Union, and before the
decline began in the 1850's as many as four hundred had sprung
into existence, in many instances the result of unsuccessful strikes.^4
An editorial entitled "Labor Reform—The Cloud No Bigger
Than a Man's Hand," in the New York Tribune of May 6, 1850,
described the establishment of a "Union Bakery on Protective and
Republican Principles" in 1847, with a capital of $400; it supplied
its members with bread at "naked cost," increasing or shrinking
the size of the loaf as the price of flour fluctuated, and paid sick
and death benefits of $4.00 a week and $30, respectively. Its re
ceipts rose from $86 a week in 1848 to $698 a week in 1850; the
organization owned its own horses and wagons and employed
fourteen persons at wages from $3.50 to $13.50 a week. Total
receipts to May 1, 1850, amounted to $49,010.48 and expenditures
(^4) See Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840-60 (Boston, 1924), chap,
xiii. See also chaps, xiv-xv.