Equality Colony was a United States socialist colony founded in Skagit County, Washington by a political organization known as the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth in 1897. It was meant to serve as a model which would convert the rest of Washington and later the entire continent to socialism.
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. Gordon 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. [1]
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 Cooperative Commonwealth" scheduled to be held in St. Louis on July 24–26, 1896, congruent with that year's People's 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. [2]
This convention, however, did not materialize. Lermond could not get away from the Populist convention, and Imogene Fales attended a National Cooperative Congress that created a new American Cooperative union with her as secretary. The Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth was officially organized through a mail referendum conducted through the Coming Nation, which was quickly becoming the movement's semi-official newspaper. [3] 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. [4]
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 cooperative 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. [5]
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, radical minister Myron W. Reed was elected president and an attempt made to draft Eugene V. Debs by electing him national organizer. [6] However, Debs was at the time a fledgling socialist preoccupied with miners' union strikes in the Mountain West and never served in an active capacity as the BCC's organizer. Debs nevertheless warmed up to the idea of colonizing a relatively unpopulated western state and making use of the ballot box to win control of state government and maintained close contact with the organization, meeting with Lermond in Terre Haute on May 24 to discuss possible unification of his American Railway Union with the BCC at convention scheduled three weeks later. [7]
Meanwhile, Victor Berger and his group were urging him to create a new socialist organization 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 cooperation" 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. [8] [9]
By mid-1897 the BCC had about 2200 members in 130 local unions. After short tours in Tennessee and Arkansas, Lermond announced that August that Washington would be the most likely state for colonization. The southern states were already well settled and faced the "Negro question", while Washington had a small, sparse population with liberal inclinations and a Populist governor who was rumored to be sympathetic to the BCC. There were also a number of local unions already in the state, seven of which had sites available.
On September 1, 1897 G.E. "Ed" Pelton left Maine for the Pacific Northwest to secure land for the colony. After visiting several sites, on October 15 he made a down payment of $100 to Mathias Decker, a conservative Skagit County farmer, for 280 acres (1.1 km2) of land in Blanchard, Washington located 2 miles northeast of the hamlet of Edison. [10] Additional purchases and contributions were made until the colony reached an area of 600 acres (2.4 km2) by the summer of 1898. [11]
The first fifteen settlers arrived on November 1, 1897 and named the colony after Edward Bellamy's new book, Equality. By the time that the national board, their families and others arrived in March, the first building, Fort Bellamy, was finished and several others were in progress. However most members of the BCC board stayed in nearby Edison, where they leased a "national headquarters" for the brotherhood. By that summer membership had reached 3,000 members and 18 states had organizers. Through the organization department and the group's newspaper, Industrial Freedom (which began in May), the Brotherhood maintained its "national character". [12]
However, dissension developed between the colonists at Equality and the BCC leaders at Edison. The colonists resented that their money was being used to keep the administration in town, while they lived in the crude, unfinished buildings at the colony site. They also objected to the administration's emphasis on the creation of a national organization and other colonies, feeling that the more immediate goal should be the completion of Equality. In early April, at a contentious meeting of the two factions, a plan to start an additional colony at Edison of the administrators was defeated and the Equality colonists proposed an amendment giving the colony complete independence in internal affairs, which passed by a vote of 298 to 176. [13]
August Lermond resigned from the BCC and returned to Maine, where he founded a new group, the Industrial Brotherhood. By the end of the year, most of the board members had left. In January 1899, a new slate of officers favored by the colonists was elected, and that February BCC headquarters was moved to Equality. From that point membership in the BCC fell to nearly 300, material support and new members from the outside dried up and Industrial Freedom circulation plummeted. The Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth as an organization was subsumed by Equality. [14] While lip service was given to the idea of planting new colonies and socializing Washington for the next few years little was actually done toward those objectives and were eventually forgotten. [15]
The colony flourished for a few years, building two large apartments, a barn, a dining room and kitchen, a school house, a public hall, a store room, a printing office, a saw mill, a root house, a blacksmith and copper shop, an apiary, a bakery, a cereal and coffee house, and a milk house. Its population fluctuated, but was about 100 by the spring of 1903, when only the "die hards" remained. [16] Harry Ault, who would later play a role in the Seattle general strike of 1919 as editor as the Seattle Union Record, arrived with his family at age 14 in April 1898 and began to learn journalism and printing by working on Industrial Freedom. He eventually became its editor, until the publication folded in December 1902. He also started Young Socialist in 1899 for the colony's children. [17]
In 1900 and 1901 some colonists left Equality to found a new community on Whidbey Island called the Free Land Association, or Freeland. This colony should not be confused with Equality in its later stages which was sometimes referred to as Freeland Colony. [18]
In autumn 1904 the colony was visited by Alexander Horr, a proponent of Theodor Hertzka’s "Freeland" concept. [19] He returned next year with more of his followers and soon the colony's population grew by 30%. By the summer of 1905 Horr was able to change the BCCs constitution drastically to adhere to the Freeland concept. A new "local union" was established in New York, and five others in the near vicinity. The changes were not appreciated by the colony's older residents who started to resist the conversion of the colony to the new scheme in late 1905 and the colony became bitterly divided between the two factions, sometimes resulting in violence. [20]
The final factor in the demise of the colony occurred on February 6, 1906, when an unknown person or group of people set fire to several buildings at night. The worst loss was the barn, which burned completely to the ground, killing most of the colony's cattle. The perpetrator was never identified, but each faction blamed the other for the arson. A suit was filed in Skagit County to dissolve the colony [21] and the BCC went into receivership; its history ended when its land was sold for $12,500 to John J. Peth on June 1, 1907. A few families stayed in the area on plots of land that they owned individually. [22]
Eugene Victor Debs was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and five-time candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States. Through his presidential candidacies as well as his work with labor movements, Debs eventually became one of the best-known socialists living in the United States.
The British colonization of the Americas is the history of establishment of control, settlement, and colonization of the continents of the Americas by England, Scotland and, after 1707, Great Britain. Colonization efforts began in the late 16th century with failed attempts by England to establish permanent colonies in the North. The first of the permanent English colonies in the Americas was established in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Approximately 30,000 Algonquian peoples lived in the region at the time. Colonies were established in North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. Though most British colonies in the Americas eventually gained independence, some colonies have remained under Britain's jurisdiction as British Overseas Territories.
Freeland is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) on Whidbey Island in Island County, Washington, United States. At the time of the 2010 census the population was 7,812. The town received its name based on its origins as a socialist commune in the early 1900s: in the eyes of its founders, the land of the town was literally to be free for all people. Some of the first settlers were veterans of a prior experiment in socialism, the nearby Equality Colony.
Edison is a census-designated place (CDP) in Skagit County, Washington, United States. The population was 133 at the 2010 census. It is included in the Mount Vernon–Anacortes, Washington Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Industrial unionism is a trade union organising method through which all workers in the same industry are organized into the same union, regardless of skill or trade, thus giving workers in one industry, or in all industries, more leverage in bargaining and in strike situations.
The Social Democratic Party of America (SDP) was a short-lived political party in the United States established in 1898.
The American Railway Union (ARU) was briefly among the largest labor unions of its time and one of the first industrial unions in the United States. Launched at a meeting held in Chicago in February 1893, the ARU won an early victory in a strike on the Great Northern Railroad in the summer of 1894. This successful strike was followed by the bitter 1894 Pullman Strike in which government troops and the power of the judiciary were enlisted against the ARU, ending with the jailing of the union's leadership for six months in 1895 and effectively crushing the organization. The group's blacklisted and dispirited remnants finally disbanded the organization via amalgamation into the Social Democracy of America (SDA) at its founding convention in June 1897.
Ella Reeve "Mother" Bloor was an American labor organizer and long-time activist in the socialist and communist movements. Bloor is best remembered as one of the top-ranking female functionaries in the Communist Party USA.
The Ruskin Colony was a utopian socialist colony in the southern US at the end of the 19th century.
Burley is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Kitsap County, Washington, United States. It is located just north of the boundary with Pierce County, about halfway between Gig Harbor to the south and Port Orchard to the north. It is located at the head of the Burley Lagoon in Henderson Bay. Burley is a residential area. The community's population stood at 2,057 at the 2010 census.
Seymour "Stedy" Stedman was an American from Chicago who rose from shepherd and janitor to become a prominent civil liberties lawyer and a leader of the Socialist Party of America. He is best remembered as the 1920 vice-presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America, when he ran for office on a ticket headed by Eugene V. Debs.
Llano del Rio was a commune located in what is now Llano, California, east of Palmdale in the Antelope Valley, Los Angeles County. The colony was devised by lawyer and socialist politician Job Harriman after he had failed his bid to become the mayor of Los Angeles in 1911. The colony's land was acquired in 1913 and it was formally launched on May 1, 1914.
Jackson Stitt Wilson was a Canadian-born American politician. He was a Christian socialist and suffragist, and held Georgist economic views. A member of the Socialist Party of America, Wilson was the mayor of Berkeley, California from 1911 to 1913. He ran for Congress on a socialist platform, receiving 40 percent of the votes cast, but was defeated by the incumbent Republican Congressman.
The Social Democracy of America (SDA), later known as the Cooperative Brotherhood, was a short lived political party in the United States that sought to combine the planting of an intentional community with political action in order to create a socialist society. It was an organizational forerunner of both the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and the Burley, Washington cooperative socialist colony.
The Socialist Party of Washington was the Washington state section of the Socialist Party of America (SPA), an organization originally established as a federation of semi-autonomous state organizations.
Erwin Bratton "Harry" Ault (1883–1961) was an American socialist and trade union activist. He is best remembered as the editor of the Seattle Union Record, the long-running labor weekly published from 1912 to 1928. After termination of the Union Record, Ault worked as a commercial printer for a number of years, before being appointed a deputy U.S. Marshal for Tacoma, Washington, a position which he retained for 15 years.
George Ellsworth Boomer (1862–1915) was an American socialist journalist, newspaper editor, and political activist. Boomer is best remembered as a key participant in the formation of the Socialist Party of Washington and as its candidate for the Governor of Washington in 1908.
Jay Fox was an American journalist, trade unionist, and political activist. The political trajectory of his life ran through anarchism, syndicalism, and communism, and he played a significant role in each of these political movements.
Norman Wallace Lermond was an American naturalist and socialist activist. Lermond helped found the People's Party in Maine. and in 1892, Lermond ran for the U.S. Congress from Maine's 2nd congressional district for the Populists, finishing in third place with 3.63% of the vote. In 1900, Lermond ran for Governor of Maine, becoming the first socialist candidate for governor in Maine history. He lost to Republican John Fremont Hill.
Cyrus Field Willard was an American journalist, political activist, and theosophist. Deeply influenced by the writing of Edward Bellamy, Willard is best remembered as a principal in several utopian socialist enterprises, including the late 1890s colonization efforts of the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth (BCC).
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
