free land. After years of
agitation, the same cry was taken up by the Western States eager for
more settlers to build up their communities and this combined agitation
proved irresistible and culminated in the Homestead law of 1862.

The Homestead law opened up the road to self-employment by way of free
land and agriculture. But in the sixties the United States was already
becoming an industrial country. In abandoning the city for the farm, the
wage earner would lose the value of his greatest possession--his skill.
Moreover, as a homesteader, his problem was far from solved by mere
access to free land. Whether he went on the land or stayed in industry,
he needed access to reasonably free credit. The device invented by
workingmen to this end was the bizarre "greenback" idea which held their
minds as if in a vise for nearly twenty years. "Greenbackism" left no
such permanent trace on American social and economic structure as
"Republican education" or "free land."

The lure of "greenbackism" was that it offered an opportunity for
self-employment. But already in the sixties, it became clear that the
workingman could not expect to attain self-employment as an individual,
but if at all, it had to be sought on the basis of producers'
cooperation. In the eighties, it became doubly clear that industry had
gone beyond the one-man-shop stage; self-employment had to stand or fall
with the cooperative or self-governing workshop. The protagonist of this
most interesting and most idealistic striving of American labor was the
"Noble Order of the Knights of Labor," which reached its height in the
middle of the eighties.

The period of the greatest enthusiasm for cooperation was between 1884
and 1887; and by 1888 the cooperative movement had passed the full cycle
of life and succumbed. The failure of cooperation proved a turning point
in the evolution of the American labor program. Whatever the special
causes of failure, the idealistic unionism, for which the ideas of the
Declaration of Independence served as a fountain head, suffered in the
eyes of labor, a degree of discredit so overwhelming that to regain its
old position was no longer possible. The times were ripe for the
opportunistic unionism of Gompers and the trade unionists.

These latter, having started in the seventies as Marxian socialists, had
been made over into opportunistic unionists by their practical contact
with American conditions. Their philosophy was narrower than