and politics received their day in
court. Labor would turn to government and politics only as a last
resort, when it had lost confidence in its ability to hold its own in
industry. This phenomenon, noticeable also in other countries, came out
with particular clearness in America.

For, as a rule, down to the World War, prices both wholesale and retail,
fluctuated in America more violently than in England or the Continent.
And twice, once in the thirties and again in the sixties, an
irredeemable paper currency moved up the water mark of prices to
tremendous heights followed by reactions of corresponding depth. From
the war of 1812, the actual beginning of an industrial America, to the
end of the century, the country went through several such complete
industrial and business cycles. We therefore conveniently divide labor
and trade union history into periods on the basis of the industrial
cycle. It was only in the nineties, as we saw, that the response of the
labor movement to price fluctuations ceased to mean a complete or nearly
complete abandonment of trade unionism during depressions. A continuous
and stable trade union movement consequently dates only from the
nineties.

The cooperative movement which was, as we saw, far less continuous than
trade unionism, has also shown the effects of the business cycle. The
career of distributive cooperation in America has always been intimately
related to the movements of retail prices and wages. If, in the advance
of wages and prices during the ascending portion of the industrial
cycle, the cost of living happened to outdistance wages by a wide
margin, the wage earners sought a remedy in distributive cooperation.
They acted likewise during the descending portion of the industrial
cycle, when retail prices happened to fall much less slowly than wages.

Producers' cooperation in the United States has generally been a "hard
times" remedy. When industrial prosperity has passed its high crest and
strikes have begun to fail, producers' cooperation has often been used
as a retaliatory measure to bring the employer to terms by menacing to
underbid him in the market. Also, when in the further downward course of
industry the point has been reached where cuts in wages and unemployment
have become quite common, producers' cooperation has sometimes come in
as an attempt to enable the wage earner to obtain both employment and
high earnings bolstered through cooperative profits.

FOOTNOTES: