O PIONEERS

...There is plenty of hard work being done, but most of it is invisible to society...

...I wondered whether their example held lessons for the movement of today...

...These are some of the things that can be done with unified action in the cooperative movement...

...the country was "rotten ripe for revolutionary pushover...

...You find a lot of faded paint up in the hotbed of the would-be Cooperative Commonwealth, a lot of barely distinguishable letters on abandoned buildings: co-op warehouse, co-op electric, northern cooperative, cooperative society...

...The test is tomorrow's history, and the question is: Who will fashion it...

...The Minersville co-ops continued to function for many more years as part of a more moderate consumers' cooperative movement...

...It was a terrible blunder," Koski says...

...The other was something much less celebrated, and perhaps not even noticed at the time...

...Kurki, a sixty-six-year-old Finn, slight but still quick of step, has spent most of his life working in this area...

...It developed an active—and leftist—education committee that spread the cooperative word farther than the co-ops could have on their own...

...In fact, cooperative thinking in those years often waltzed with socialist and communist theory...

...If you were unemployed and hungry, and became militant, what the hell...

...The movement came to America and in the early 1900s it arrived in the Upper Midwest...

...Inside also was frequent conversation, often political, almost always in Finnish...

...He still argues the communist line that eventually lost favor among the Finns—that co-ops cannot be effective when "politically neutral...

...You find the ghost of a movement in "the Land of the Blue Hills" today...

...I traveled north this spring to study what was left of the Finnish movement...

...In the CCE, and in the movement, the confrontation was the beginning of the end of the radical co-ops...

...The stories Koski is most proud of deal with the times when the co-ops took the initiative to help working people and the poor...

...Others simply lower their expectations, hoping to build, as one Indiana professor put it, "a more friendly America...

...Almost all the Finnish communities in these parts once had one...

...Few people do...

...Or the ones with "Good Hope," who raised a hell of a ruckus and created some living examples of a better way...

...Most farmers and workers continued to patronize the co-ops, and in the next year a cooperative cheese factory grew out of a dairy farmer strike...

...It is easy to imagine him being dragged kicking and screaming from a meeting, or being hauled off by the police for making incendiary speeches—events that he relates now with a certain humor and pride...

...They were a hopeful lot...

...People of the Left, please pay attention...

...This is a story about invisibility and it begins, fittingly enough, with a visit to a ghost town...

...They came actually crying in the store," Koski said...

...Today there is no broad political movement to give co-ops a lift...

...Many of the products were "Red Star," but the hammer and sickle were soon to be replaced on the label by the American symbol of cooperatives, twin pine trees...

...They refer, still, to class consciousness and the class struggle, to company thugs and renegade cooperators...

...When one man who was helping organize the Marengo co-op went out to sell a share to a new Finnish settler in the area, he was chased away...

...I went to work in a grocery co-op...

...He still speaks the uncompromising language of his youth...

...they foresaw a system that would replace what one writer of the time called "this system of every one for himself and the devil for the whole...

...Co-ops," he said, pronouncing the word "kwhops," as almost all the Finns do, "were born out of the working man's struggle...

...The Cooperative Central Exchange (CCE), as the wholesale outfit was called, was to become the hub of the Finnish cooperative movement, and also the place where the most basic question would be pushed to the limit: How long could cooperation and socialism and communism dance together...

...I know a few things about invisibility because for three years now I have been involved in a "movement" that has almost nothing to do with the lives of most Americans...

...It started in the England of the 1800s, when the Industrial Revolution was still young and there was still time, perhaps, to alter its dark, Satanic course...

...The collapse of capitalism seemed imminent to serious radicals...

...Koski speaks in a lexicon common to the other Finns I met, those who refer to themselves as "the leftists" of the co-op movement...

...The forlorn gray barn that now stores hay in Minersville used to be the socialist hall, a center for dances and plays and political activity...

...Some locals worried that not all the communists had been purged from the Marengo Cooperative Society...

...Wide-eyed children at school said communists were "trying to take our co-ops to Moscow...

...Most look like any other small grocery store: rows of Campbell's soup on the shelves, Chef Boyardee, Spaghetti-Os, all the familiar logos from the corporate larder...

...now these were taken over and turned into socialist clubs, as Finnish "apostles of socialism" went on speaking tours and made quick converts...

...He has a triangular, drawn face, with thin, dark hair combed straight down onto his forehead...

...After the split," they'll say, placing an event in context...

...By 1918, the Marengo co-op had moved down the road to the gold miners' depot— Minersville...

...I made contact with the movement through certain 1960s radicals, people who had lost the "historical moment" to transform society but who went ahead anyway trying to transform their "personal lives...

...The gray frame building that originally housed the Marengo Cooperative Society in Minersville was moved to a nearby farm in the 1950s...

...In the 1930s, he would load his truck with ten-gallon cans of milk from the nearby farms and bring them there...

...It would be a cooperative wholesale business, capitalized by the stores' memberships, supplying the stores with the goods they sold...

...A few years ago, the wind blew it down...

...The political storm at Superior the year before had not yet come to Minersville...

...Newly married, the Koskis came that spring from Minnesota to manage the store...

...The anti-capitalist politics were slowly ushered out of the movement...

...Socialists, too, were put off by the strong-arm zeal of the revolutionaries...

...A solidly_built man with loose-fitting work clothes and a shock of blond hair, he stood formally, hands clasped behind his back, his wife Impi at his side...

...The first immigrants had set up churches and temperance societies...

...you get to Minersville, Wisconsin, today, not by following a map, because it's not on the map any more, but by asking someone who remembers...

...You're not collecting for the co-op store," yelled the farmer...

...Inside was a variety of groceries and hardware, bulk bins, a counter, hanging scales...

...In taking that stance, Walli and Koski are very close to the original spirit of the coop movement...

...In 1917, representatives of some of the sixty-five Finnish co-op stores in the Lake Superior area met in Superior, Wisconsin, and decided that the co-ops should no longer stand as isolated outposts across a three-state region but should join together in a co-op of their own...

...They got the vouchers, and "You'd be surprised, it was just like these people . . . like heaven opened up for them...

...But perhaps the Finns—with their co-ops supported by farmers and workers—came closest...

...The stage was being set for a drama that would send reverbations from Superior to New York to Moscow, and eventually back to little places like Minersville...

...And it feels spooky to find it, because in many ways the current co-op movement is a ghost movement, too...

...And one of the grandest dances of all took place in the North, among the radical Finns...

...Koski is the kind of man who still seems to be working for the party...

...Coops did have a real position in the class struggle then...

...Though he spoke quickly and sat forward in his chair holding his hat as if he might leave any moment, Walli was eager to explain why the leftists split from the movement...

...It's a problem many in the movement are acutely aware of, sensing that a movement should be moving somewhere, and that this one isn't...

...A semi-trailer juts out into the street with the confident assurance that the product will be found "At Your Supermarket...

...The most important work he did at Minersville, he says now, was rounding up scrap produce from a private supplier and trucking it to the Depression-era shantytowns by the railroad tracks near Ashland, Wisconsin...

...Many who were uncomfortable with the co-ops' flirtations with communism saw the loan demand as a scandal—and as an opportunity to take a clear-cut anti-communist stance...

...Their words recall times when mining companies fiercely resisted workers who fought for better conditions, times when a local paper could call a union organizer "a putrid festering ulcer on the body politic," times when storekeepers hung signs in their windows that said, "No Finns, No Indians or Dogs Allowed...

...But by the mid-1960s the co-op store was closed, and the area was no longer a hub of activity...

...The results of this religious-like communal life were so good that very few, even today, realize its great social significance...

...They were given to such statements as this one, from a pamphlet entitled Cooperative Tract, No.l: "Have faith in the lovely principle of cooperation, and you may cast your mountain of woe into the sea of oblivion...

...They allude to it simply as "the split," and it is a historical marker for them...

...Many were on the run from poverty and the heavy hand of the Russian czar in Finland, and now, finding conditions harsh as miners, loggers, and farmers in this country, they were particularly quick to ease their rugged lives with collective action...

...It was a pioneering time, a building time, a time when some Finnish immigrants there were eager to build socialism...

...It's a story not to be found in most history books, but attention should be paid...

...In the early days—in the mid-1800s— people in the co-op movement talked about "the coming Cooperative Commonwealth...

...Such hopes are still alive today...

...The nonprofit, egalitarian co-ops that grew out of the 1960s hoped to become "living, breathing models for revolutionary change," as one food co-op worker put it...

...Twenty miles south of Lake Superior, Minersville sits in a land so big and lonely that the settlers sensibly made special efforts to band together...

...By the late 1920s, CCE publications were reaching the homes of almost 30,000 Finns...

...The old four-story CCE warehouse on Winter Street in Superior is now part of a huge pizza factory...

...And they'll tell you that their co-op movement took a wrong turn somewhere, and has never been the same for it...

...Next to that was a gutted, tumbledown brick building which used to be a cheese factory, Alex told me...

...Having organized individuals into co-op stores, the next step was to organize the stores themselves...

...But the real problem was the move toward "neutrality" in the CCE, Koski says...

...But these characteristics led to a well-developed movement, too, and cooperatives became a central part of it...

...The Marengo co-op was not alone, though...

...We were joined by seventy-six-year-old Frank Walli, who was at various times a miner, co-op manager, and newspaper editor...

...Of course, there's not much to it any more...

...The idea behind them was, to many, inherently anti-capitalist...

...He often brings along political books when he visits friends, and when I saw him he had two: one by his fellow Finnish communist Gus Hall, and the other John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World...

...The wholesale business even began to market its own "Red Star" brand of products, emblazoned with the hammer and sickle...

...They were denied credit at the local grocery stores, so they turned to cooperatives and organized stores of their own...

...Koski and another employee, unwilling to renounce their socialist activities, were dropped from the rolls...

...Sitting in Koski's dining room, with old photographs spread out on the table, we talked about the place of politics in the coop movement...

...Many of the people talking about the Cooperative Commonwealth around the turn of the century had a similar notion in mind...

...A few in the Workers' Party, an American communist group following the Comintern Line, envisioned such a role for the CCE...

...The roots of the Minersville co-op store go back to 1916, when "Minersville" was nothing but a train depot used by settlers panning a nearby river for gold...

...One was an international event: the Russian Revolution...

...about a third settled in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula...

...In 1932, Koski led a group from the Good Hope Co-op in eastern Minnesota, and drove fifty miles to demand immediate welfare vouchers for "about forty families that were actually starving...

...The CCE was acquired by Midland Cooperatives in 1963 and dissolved...

...After the split, ya know...

...They took a purely business attitude...

...As I stood in the heart of Minersville with Kurki last March, a chilly wind whipped by, the way I imagine it would through any ghost town—zipping in and out of abandoned buildings, replacing the long-gone hum of activity with the hollow whistle of emptiness...

...There it is—that visibility problem...

...In 1929, the Workers Party demanded a $5,000 loan from the wholesale co-op...

...That dulled their class consciousness, and they began to think the co-op movement was a solution to the abuses of society, and that we could eat our way to a better society—thinking that buying from co-op stores would make a socialist society...

...Others concentrate on changing their own lives, as did a young Finn who wrote of his life in a cooperative house more than seventy years ago: "We took care of our health by taking hot and cold baths, by dieting and denying ourselves various foods...

...Midland has recently been swallowed up by Land O'Lakes...

...There will be a test...

...None of the cooperative movements has ever won big, has ever had much visibility...

...Impossible—unless the working people support it...

...In 1916 there was a great strike on the Mesabi iron range in northeastern Minnesota, and strikers there, many of them Finns, had similar problems with the merchants...

...But the quiz: Of the hundreds of thousands of Finns who came to America, who are the most visible to those of us who look back now...

...The line from Moscow was that communists were to divorce themselves from liberals and socialists and unite behind the party...

...This was the hub of a lot of activity," he said...

...Some in the movement retreat into a simple can-do faith: "Cooperativescan turn the system on its head and redesign it in the interests of humanity," wrote one believer in a 1979 issue of Co-op Magazine...

...When the movements that spawn co-ops recede, other motivators take over, most notably the will simply to survive...

...After the split, "some managers became typical businessmen," Koski said...

...They were going somewhere...

...I was looking for the old store, but it was gone, replaced by a square cinderblock structure, now vacant...

...Stores, warehouses, creameries, cheese factories, and boarding houses were organized as co-ops, which at the time meant shares were sold to members who then gained an equal say in running the ventures...

...By the 1940s, the movement had given up "most of its militant proletarian character," according to one historian...

...But you didn't have to be a communist...

...Minersville had a dusty road and a black Ford, and perhaps some barking dogs, in the summer of 1931, when twenty-three-year-old Ernest Koski posed for a picture in front of the co-op store...

...But it was still a capitalist class that held the reins...

...A co-op store was organized that year in Marengo, a few miles to the north, by Finns who suspected that the town merchant was charging unfair prices...

...You're collecting for the Socialist Party...

...In the early 1970s, when thousands of new cooperatives sprouted, one participant wrote," An understanding may emerge that to control one's environment—cooperatively—is a revolutionary idea...

...But the repercussions of such bitter strikes as the one on the Mesabi also caused many Finns to disavow their radical compatriots...

...It was the logical extension of the Finns' cooperative tendency...

...The most competent cooperators usually become more business-oriented, often making political sacrifices to survive...

...They got used to hearing the jingle of the cash register...

...The old Finns talk of a time of hard-fisted bosses, hostile newspapers, and signs in the stores saying, 'No Finns, No Indians or Dogs' The CCE grew strong through the 1920s as more co-ops affiliated with it...

...By then, two events had taken place which were to affect the Finnish movement deeply, and in the end to come home to hundreds of other Minersvilles scattered across the North Country...

...Koski, now seventy-four, walks slowly these days, and his dapper look and deadpan humor made me think of Chance, the gardener in Being There...

...That set off a debate infused with all the frenzy of the times and pushed the political question to the forefront of the cooperative movement...

...Dave A. Denison recently completed a stint as an editorial intern at The Progressive...

...More than the other immigrants, the Finns kept to themselves, sometimes reluctant to learn English, often labeled "clannish" by non-Finns...

...Mutual cooperation, socialism in its truest sense, could only help close the long, empty stretches from farm to farm...

...Many members were simply loyal to their own ethnic radicalism and institutions and resented the outside interference of a non-Finn party...

...Ours was a working-class attitude, and we were branded communists...

...The split of 1930, he said, was an attempt to repudiate those roots...

...Minersville is just a rural outpost, a cluster of old buildings a few hundred feet from where a paved road, a dirt road, and a set of railroad tracks converge...

...Someone like Alex Kurki...

...Some 300,000 Finns came to the United States around the turn of the century...

...The ones who quietly accommodated themselves to America...

...The co-op stores, which became known as "Finn stores," or, with even more hostile overtones, "Red stores," were the most common cooperative enterprises...

...trailing off...

...But the cooperative movement can't stand by itself, not without the support of labor," Walli said...

...Then, in the early 1930s, someone stopped the music...

...An article last year in Communities, "The Journal of Cooperative Living," ended on a brave, optimistic note: "Co-ops can boast of representing 1.5 per cent of our society...

...Many of his years were spent as a logger, and he looks it, with his plaid jacket and work clothes...

...I shared their sense of what mattered...

...Outside the gray frame building with an awning that said "Marengo Cooperative Society" was a single gas pump, tall and thin, the kind you see in Edward Hopper paintings...

...Today the Koskis live in a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood in Superior...

...Neither Koski nor Walli defends the communist request for a loan...

...But people were talking elsewhere, too, and taking note of the struggle in Superior...

...The quiz was not the test...

...They were a movement in the literal sense...

...After the split," revealing an enduring tinge of bitterness or regret...

...Socialist activity was at its height all over America in 1916, and most of the new coops had leftists at the helm...

...After the split there were "left-wing co-ops" and "right-wing coops...

...Some of the Finnish co-op stores still survive today, but about all they share with the "Finn stores" of yesterday is the word co-op outside...

...At the 1930 annual CCE meeting, the communists were soundly defeated, and some Finns split off and established a rival organization which ran "left-wing co-ops" through the 1930s...