IMPETUS TO A NEW TREND
McMillin, Miles
The Cooperative Movement: Impetus To A New Trend By MILES McMILLiN PAYING its respects to the magnificent cooperative development in Westphalia, Iowa, a few weeks ago, this column pointed out...
...It was urgently in need of new feed mill facilities...
...The central theme of that column was that these small villages, unable to compete with the great commercial centers, would eventually dry up and become ghost towns, unless they were given an economic pattern differing from the fiercely competitive systems that prevail in the larger trade areas...
...Burkhardt is a significant step in the progress of the American cooperative movement...
...Thunder Clap Of Publicity The complete village, with the exception of the local church and tavern, was recently purchased by Midland Cooperative of St...
...The latest step taken by the cooperatives in this direction is probably one of the most significant co-op ventures yet undertaken in this country...
...For the first time since the cooperative movement took root in American soil, a complete cooperative village has been launched...
...The Cooperative Movement: Impetus To A New Trend By MILES McMILLiN PAYING its respects to the magnificent cooperative development in Westphalia, Iowa, a few weeks ago, this column pointed out that it is perhaps in the thousands of small rural communities in the United States that the cooperative movement will find the most fertile ground for growth in the postwar years...
...While they are waiting for "paradise" to develop at Burkhardt, they will use the houses for the somewhat mundane purpose of housing the employes of the feed mill...
...They hope, of course, to establish eventually a model cooperative community, but they went into Burkhardt on a very hard-headed, businesslike basis...
...Midland has been expanding steadily in the past few years in production fields...
...Midland's new venture was received with a great thunder clap of publicity all over the country...
...They are much larger, of course, and the property has remained in possession of the Government...
...feed, fertilizer, lumber, and petroleum...
...The sleepy little village of Burk-ardt became over-night a subject of lengthy philosophical and social speculations...
...Burkhardt And Westphalia Although Burkhardt will be the first 100 per cent cooperative town in America, it will not be the first one that was planned that way...
...Westphalia, it was pointed out, is the outstanding example in this country of such a development...
...As time and conditions permit, a retail cooperative feed and farm supply service in connection with the mill will be developed along with a cooperative store and service station...
...And like Westphalia, it may give impetus to a new trend in the economic development of a great section of America, which the mighty sweep of mass production and mass distribution has by-passed...
...These cooperative settlements are, of course, quite different from the proposed development at Burkhardt...
...You can bet that A. J. Smaby, Midland general manager, and other Midland officials, exhaustively probed every financial angle of the arrangement before they went through with it...
...It is the small village of Burkhardt, Wis...
...There a rural life program, based on the principles of cooperation, has rescued the village from the economic dry rot afflicting the rural settlements of this country...
...In the first place they were established by the Federal Government and subject to Governmental supervision to some extent...
...As in Westphalia, cooperation may save it from obliteration...
...Writers dug out the stories on the Brook Farm and New Harmony experiments and made the inevitable comparisons...
...Midland officials, like most cooperators, may have their eyes on the clouds of things to be, but they haven't tried to put their feet there...
...The property at Burkhardt will be cooperatively owned...
...Paul, Minn...
...There's always news in model community or "paradise" developments...
...The old Resettlement Administration under Rexford Guy Tugwell, which ha3 now become the Farm Security Administration, founded three such developments back in the early days of the New Deal...
...The purchase, which cost Midland $29,500, includes a feed mill, several houses and barns, and 140 acres of good Wisconsin farm land...
...Greenhills, Ohio, and Greendale, Wis...
...They are located in Green Belt, Md...
...In a sense this is unfair to Midland officials, who have demonstrated in the phenomenal business growth of their co-op in the past decade, that they are not impractical dreamers...
Vol. 8 • September 1944 • No. 36
