If in the thirties the labor program was to restore a social and political democracy by means of the public school, in the forties the program centered on economic democracy, on equality of economic opportunity.  This took the form of a demand of a grant of public land free of charge to everyone willing to brave the rigors of pioneer life.  The government should thus open an escape to the worker from the wage system into self-employment by way of 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.