CO-OPERATIVE VENTURES 229
to $48,655.53. Horace Greeley advised the printers to emulate
the bakers and establish a co-operative printing plant, and he also
accepted subscriptions at the Tribune office for stock issued at
$25 a share for a boot and shoemakers' co-operative.
The Boston Tailors' Associative Union resulted from a dis
astrous strike of three months' duration. At the end of four
months' operation, some seventy workers were able to show a
profit of $510 on an initial investment of $700. The Protective
Union, organ of the Labor Reformers of New England, had a
weekly circulation of 3,300 in April, 1850. Brisbane, while on a
lecture tour in Cincinnati, discovered a Journeymen Iron Mould
ers' Association, whose workers melted from 9,000 to 10,500
pounds of metal a day, manufactured and sold stoves, and earned
from $12 to $15 a week. Their example stimulated the iron work
ers of Pittsburgh to organize a puddlers' association. A printers'
co-operative in Cincinnati published the daily Nonpareil.
Late in the summer of 1850, the Coopers' Protective Union of
New York City completed a new shop in three weeks, a two-story
frame building fifty-six feet by twenty-two feet in which it began
business with a number of cash orders. Other workers in New
York formed an Industrial Home Association; by making small
weekly payments they acquired a tract of land near the city, which
they proposed to divide and sell to their members in quarter-acre
lots. The New York Hat Finishers' Union, composed of a hun
dred hatters, started a co-operative shop with an initial capital of
$7,000. Boston seamstresses operated a shop, the Beehive, at 50
Court Street and were reported to be doing a good business. Cleve
land had a Female Co-operative Union Clothing Store, and in New
York the Shirt Sewers' Union received donations of $100 each
from P. T. Barnum, Henry C. Carey, and Horace Greeley, and
$20 from John A. Roebling, a German immigrant who became
America's earliest and greatest builder of suspension bridges. The
co-operative movement spread rapidly through the larger in
dustrial and commercial centers. It had the unqualified endorse
ment of the New York Tribune, which found in the co-operatives
barré
(Barré)
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