Although, as we shall see, the eighties were properly the era of
producers' cooperation on a large scale, the self-governing workshop had
always been familiar to the American labor movement. The earliest
attempt, as far as we have knowledge, occurred in Philadelphia in 1791,
when the house carpenters out on strike offered by way of retaliation
against their employers to undertake contracts at 25 percent less than
the price charged by the masters. Fourteen years later, in 1806, the
journeymen cordwainers of the same city, following their conviction in
court on the charge of conspiracy brought in by their masters, opened up
a cooperative shoe warehouse and store. As a rule the workingmen took up
productive cooperation when they had failed in strikes.

In 1836 many of the trade societies began to lose their strikes and
turned to cooperation. The cordwainers working on ladies' shoes entered
upon a strike for higher wages in March 1836, and opened three months
later a "manufactory" or a warehouse of their own. The handloom weavers
in two of the suburbs of Philadelphia started cooperative associations
at the same time. At the end of 1836 the hand-loom weavers of
Philadelphia proper had two cooperative shops and were planning to open
a third. In New Brunswick, New Jersey, the journeymen cordwainers opened
a shop after an unsuccessful strike early in 1836; likewise the tailors
of Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Louisville. In New York the carpenters had
done so already in 1833, and the painters of New York and Brooklyn
opened their shops in 1837.

Before long the spirit became so contagious that the Trades' Union of
Philadelphia, the city federation of trade societies, was obliged to
take notice. Early in 1837 a conference of about 200 delegates requested
each trade society to submit estimates for a shop to employ ten members.
However, further steps were prevented by the financial panic and