Co-Op Report

A good scare was thrown into U. S. retailers last summer when the New Deal manifested a sudden interest in the broad subject of consumer cooperatives. An outright endorsement of the co-op movement was actually drafted for the Democratic platform, Secretary of Agriculture Wallace was plugging the idea in book and magazine, and President Roosevelt was so impressed by Marquis W. Childs's Sweden: The Middle Way that he dispatched a commission to Europe to study co-ops on their native soil. The co-op commission spent more than two months abroad, returning to find that co-operation was being muted for the duration of the Presidential campaign. Meantime the members of the commission, headed by Jacob Baker, assistant WPAdministrator, were unable to agree among themselves on what to report, and the New Deal apparently lost interest. Belatedly last week the Commission sent its findings to President Roosevelt in the form of a 414-page volume with a supplementary 317-page volume of appendices which he unquestionably will never read. Its recommendations :

1) A thorough survey of U. S. Cooperation, 2) establishment of a Government agency to furnish co-ops with information and advice and 3) "that steps be taken" to assure consumer co-operatives the same facilities for obtaining credit as are already provided for farmer cooperatives.

All six members of the commission finally signed the report, including Robin Hood, secretary-treasurer of the National Co-Operative Council. In contrast to most of his fellow members, Robin Hood was bearish on the future of U. S. coops, pointing out that European co-ops flourished because they satisfied basic economic needs. Concluded he: "It may thus be seen that the chief factors accounting for the remarkable development of consumer co-operation in Europe are: 1) exceedingly inefficient retail distribution ... 2) class loyalty to their own institutions given by repressed industrial workers, who in Europe are not as migratory and mobile a class as in the U. S.; 3) a deeply ingrained thrift or savings motive . . . and 4) in recent years, strongly financed central co-operative wholesales able to promote new local societies or assist struggling ones. These factors are absent or relatively absent in the U. S. today."

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