The news in this publi
cation is released for the
press on receipt.
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA
NEWS LETTER
Published Weekly by the
University of North Caro
lina for the University Ex
tension Division.
JUNE 25,1924
CHAPEL HILL, N. C.
THE ONIVEKSITY OP NORTH CAROLINA PRESS
VOL. X, NO. 32
Editorial Boardi E. C. Braason, S. H, Hobbf. Jr., L. R. Wilaon. B. W. Kaisht, D. D. Carroll. J. B.BoUitt, H, W. Odum.
Entored as aecond-ciasa matter November 14. 1914, at the Poatefflceat Chapel Hill, N. C., under the act of Ao^ust 24. If II
COOPERATION BRINGS PROSPERITY
XXVIII-COOPERATION SUCCEEDS IN DENMAPH
Success in cooperative farm enter
prise is a fact beyond doubt or debate
in Denmark for a half century or more.
At least none of the cooperative enter
prises are in question except the new
est enterprise, namely the Central Co
operative Landmans bank. That bank
is just ten years old and it was formed
to extend credit not to individual farm
ers but to farm cooperative groups in
financing their various enterprises of
manufacture, sales, imports and the
like. I found it in hard lines in 1923
due to the immense business expansion
of the prosperous war and after-war
periods. The largest and oldest cor
poration bank in Copenhagen failed,
but the cooperative landmans bank
was still operating upon a basis of as
sured success although the dividends
had dwindled to little or nothing. The
slump in Denmark as in most other
countries of the world came in 1922 and
all the Danish banks have been in more
or less trouble the last three years, but
the big bank of the cooperative groups
is probably in less danger than any cor
poration bank.
The Reasons Why
A careful analysis forced upon me
the conclusion that farm cooperations
succeed in Denmark because of the
following facts: ("1) poverty and com
radeship in poverty at the start, (2) the
universal diffusion of inteiligence and the
sponging out of illiteracy, (3) density of
population and country community life,
(4) a geographical location offering
160 million consumers within a twenty-
four-hour run by rail and boat, (6)
well-nigh universal farm ownership,
(6) organization from the bottom up,
(7) small beginnings in small groups
with small capital, (8) the fundamen
tal principle of self-help. Which is to
say, the farmers ask absolutely noth
ing of the state that they can do by
themselves and for themselves in co
operative effort. Which is further to
say that state-aid of any sort is in the
form of opportunities and services and
least of all in money out of the state
treasury. And (9) state-aid in trans
portation and terminal facilities.
A Long, Hard Pull
Success in cooperation was, not a-
chieved at a single bound in Denmark.
The Danes have been succeeding and
failing, and trying over again and fail
ing again and again, but nevertheless
gripping their lips firmly and setting
themselves to bear as many failures as
were necessary to develop the coopera
tive virtues and to teach them the con
ditions of success. The Dane is not
brilliant chap but he has rare common
sense as a racial characteristic. Fur
thermore he has unbeatable bull-dog
courage. The Danes won their fight
in a good deal less than a half century.
They were willing to pay the price of
success no matter what the cost be
cause the end in view was worth the
struggle. They had sagacity enough to
see that the mere producer of raw
wealth in any land or country is inipvit-
ably the man who gets the smallest
part of the wealth he produces. They
did not need to be told that the ignor
ant pearl diver wears little more than
a breach-clout, that the gold the miner
tqrns up with his pick ornaments the
lords and ladies of the round world,
that whatever wealth an ignorant
farmer produces is consumed at the
banquet tables of intelligence, that all
the world is organized against the soli
tary farmer, and that the farmer
standing alone is the easy prey of or
ganized big-business.
Every item in the foregoing list, of
causes is worth examination. In
course of which, the obstacles to suc
cessful farm cooperation in the South
will emerge. They are obstacles that
must be conquered one by one if suc
cess is ever to be won.
Driven by Poverty
1. The Danes have an idea that
their impulse to cooperate originated
in dire poverty and distress. No farm
population in America at any time has
ever experienced the poverty that the
Danish endured with no chance to cure
during 600 long years of serfdom. And
when the vote of citizenship was given
to them mid-way the nineteenth cen
tury, living in the farm regions was
reduced to its very lowest terms. They
had little or no land, no money with
which to buy farms, and still less cash
with which to operate them. They
were keen enough to see that their
first need was investment capital and
operating cash. And they were as
prompt to organize cooperative credit
unions as the German farmers. But
the German farmers stopped with
credit unions while the Danes moved on
into cooperative manufacture, market
ing, and buying. All of which were
the inventions of pinching necessity.
They very well illustrate Andy John
son’s famous saying, that Success
nearly always begins in poverty and
pluck.'
Exactly as partridges huddle togeth
er in a snow storm so the Danish peas
ant farmers fuddled together to work
out their common problems, and out of
the comradeship of poverty grew the
cooperating spirit and the cooperative
virtues—tireless industry and pinching
self-denial, sagacity or keen prudential
foresight, faith in one’s fellow man,
willing subordination to self-chosen
authority, unimpeachable integrity,
and unbreakable courage. A Dane dis
loyal to his cooperatives is almost un
known, or so I was repeatedly told in
Denmark. He swears to his own hurt
and changes not, he puts his hands to
the plow and looks not back. Loyalty
is a Biblical virtue. Indeed all the co
operative virtues can be definitely
phrased in terms of The Book. Short
of the cooperating spirit and the coop
erative virtues there is no chance to
succeed in farm cooperative enterprises.
Led by Intelligence
2. Moreover the Danes long ago
realized the necessity for sponging out
illiteracy and ignorance. More than a
hundred years ago they passed under a
compulsory education law. It is a law
that enforces itself. Truancy officers
are unknown in Denmark, except
the larger cities. The law has always
been self-enforcing in country commun
ities. The Danish family that willfully
neglects the schooling of the children
is haled into court by the community
itself. Moreover the eagerness of the
Danes for learning and their firm be
lief that knowledge is power soon put
Denmark in the lead in Europe in local
school enterprise. The University of
Copenhagen has 6,600 students and
working income nearly twice that of
the University of North Carolina. The
scholarship students are a large section
of the student body. They come up
from every section of Denmark, some
800 in number. They win their scholar
ships in the schools below, in state
wide competition, they are lodged free
in Copenhagen in dormitories of their
own, and better lodged than the rich
est student at our own University. The
same eagerness for education’and liber
al culture supports book stores, libra
ries, and art shops in larger numbers
than I found anywhere else in Europe
outside of Paris.
Sparsity of Population
3. In the third place'density of pop
ulation and life in community groups
must be taken into account. Farmers
dwelling in solitary farmsteads a few
to (the square mile are almost unknown
in this as in most other countries of
Europe. This condition is common in
North Carolina but it is rare in Europe
outside of Norway, ^weden, and Fin
land. The Danish farmers live in com
munities, not quite as compact as in
lAiddle and South Germany, but
they live together, play together,
and work together. The conse
quence is that their look on life is
social and cooperative instead of indi
vidual and competitive, as in the sparse
ly settled regions of America. Mere
density of population is a great factor
in successful cooperation. And so is
compact country community life. Co
operating farmers must know one an
other well enough to know who among
them have the cooperative virtues—not
one of them but all of them, for noth
ing less than all of them avails in co
operative business.
COOPERATION
Cooperation on a self-help basis
succeeds in Denmark and the prin
ciple passed entirely beyond debate
a quarter-century ago in this little
country.
' And it must be made to succeed or
allowed to succeed in America. We
need the cooperative virtues in every
phase of our national life. Civiliza
tion cannot forever exist as a tooth-
and-claw, beak-and-talon contest for
survival and supremacy among men
and nations. Europe is today an ar
resting illustration of this funda
mental fact. Collusion is better than
collision, cooperation is better than
competition, and the sooner the hu
man race learns this fundamental
lesson the better. Somehow or other
the world must find a place for the
Sermon on the Mount and the Gold
en Rule in business, in social fellow
ships, and in civic institutions. The
race has tried the Rule of Gold long
enough to have learned that it is not
a final way of life.—E. C. Branson,
Strassburg, Sept. 18, 1923.
A Favorable Situation
4. And then Denmark enjoys a u-
nique geographical position. One hun
dred and fifty million consumers of food
and feed stuffs surround it. And these
consumers can be reached in twenty-
four hours in every direction by rail
and boat services. Moreover Copen
hagen the capital is a city with close to
a million inhabitants. It is a great
local market near at hand for the pro
ducers of food supplies. Many farm
groups in Denmark depend upon pur
chasers in Copenhagen alone.' We of
ten speak of producing cotton and to
bacco in North Carolina on a bread-
and-meat basis. A fundamental ob-'
Stacie lies in the fact that our cities
are too few and too small to make food
crops and animal products a money-
yielding business for the farmers. Our
attention is easily centered on the main
money-yielding crops. That is to say,
on cotton and tobacco. And the farm
ers like the rest of us are not easily
capable of what President Wilson
called split-attention. They are not
often able to give their attention to
two different types of farming at one
and the same time. In Denmark the
farmers are devoted to food production
alone-and the main problem is to put it
on a profit producing basis. Further
more the food consumers in Denmark
outnumber the food producers two to
one. In North Carolina it is exactly
the other way around. We have too
many producers and too few local con
sumers of food products that our farm
ers might easily offer to the home
markets. And our farmers are not yet
ready to organize to reach the larger
distant markets—not even our truck
growers. Our fruit growers are only
just beginning to organize in the Sand
Hill country. Our apple growers in
the northwest counties have hardly
even considered a marketing organiza
tion as an indispensable means of get
ting money out of apple-growing in the
finest apple-producing region in the
United States. Our potato and peanut
growers in the Albemarle country will
organize and fail many times before
they succeed, just as a child falls down
many times before it learns to walk.
So it was in Denmark and so it is like
ly to be in North Carolina.
Tenancy A Monster Obstacle
6. Just as there is no illiteracy or none
to speak of in Denmark so there are no
landless farmers or barely more than
10,000 all told against 110,000 in North
Carolina. Farm tenants in North Ca
rolina are more than forty-five in the
hundred farmers, against ten in the
hundred in Denmark, and almost half
of these are life or long-term lease
holders. The rise of landless peasants
into landownership is the story of one
hundred and thirty-five years. It can
not be given here in a brief statement
of the causes of successful farm coop
eration. The point is that the cooper
ating farmers of Denmark are land
owners almost without exception. A
fundamental obstacle to cooperation in
this and other Southern states is exces
sive farm tenancy. In the South at
large a little more than one-half of our
farmers are tenants, the overwhelming
majority of them being croppers or
share-tenants of one type or -another.
The estimate is that they produce
more than one-half of all the cotton
and nearly two-thirds of all the tobac
co. The cotton and tobacco growers’
associations have already learned that
it is not easy to control the crops grown
by their tenants. And no way has yet
been found to conquer this fundamental
difficulty. Here is one of the perils of
cooperative enterprise in the cash-crop
regions of the South. It defeats or
derly marketing.
6. A principle of cooperative enter
prise in Denmark worth close attention
and serious consideration is the prin
ciple of organization from the bottom
up. Which means active local groups,
nearly 10,000 all told, busy with the
small-scale problems of cooperative
production, manufacture, and sale of
farm products, by farmers that know
one another intimately. Every farmer
has a property interest in his products.
He never surrenders this property in
terest at any stage of the game from
first to last. Such a thing does not
seem to be necessary in Denmark for
the reason that they know one another
and trust one another in ways that are
almost beyond belief. At the top are
the centrals, one central for each of
the commodities produced or farm pur
poses to be accomplished. A cooiiera-
tive central is in instant communica
tion with its cooperating farm groups,
directing the sales in home or foreign
markets so as to produce the largest
possible profit; or acting as a wholesale
purchaser of whatever its group of co
operatives needs; or instructing its
groups in arranging for operative farm
credit; and in general looking after the
wholesale concerns and necessities of
its own particular group. As a rule
the central executives are farmers or
farmers’ sons who have been bred from
the ground up in the business details of
agriculture. The central borrows no
money, it is not a proprietor, it has no
credit collateral to offer. It instructs,
advises, and guides, it is a clearing
house, an intelligence center—this and
nothing more.
Nobody knows better than the Dan
ish farmers the difference between
cooperation and a corporation. And a
corporation could not be ambushed under
the title of a cooperation. Here is a
distiiiction with a real difference, and
the Danes cannot be fooled about it. I
have many a time analyzed farm coop
erations in America only to discover at
last that really they are c6rporations.
Or frequently so. Now a corporation
is not essentially bad or wrong. The
point is that farmers ought not to get
into a corporation when they think
they are getting into a cooperation. It
is a chance that they do not have in
Denmark. But it is a chance that they
risk everyday in America.
In quite recent years, we are experi
menting with a new form of farm or
ganization in the United States. It is
not a cooperation, it is a corporation.
And furthermore it is a corporation
with a super-corporation right — the
right of self-contained ownership. The
farmer who joins it contributes his cash-
crops to the business and in so doing
surrenders his property rights in these
cash-crops. Not so when he contrib
utes capital to a bank or a mill or any
other corporation of the prevailing
type. He still owns what he contrib
utes to such corporations and his right
of ownership is represented by shares
of stock. The new form of corporation
in which the farmers are participating
in large numbers in every sta^e of the
Union must needs run the gauntlet of
the courts as the old type of corpora
tion has itself been doing for some 200
years and is still doing at every sitting
of the legislatures and the courts. It
may be an effective form of business
organization for the farmers, but it
will be under fire for many years to
come. The farmers must be prepared
for this fact, remembering the while
that what matters most is not the form
or name of a thing but the substance
of it. Nevertheless no form of farm
business can hope to succeed without
the cooperative virtues of active local
groups.
Small Beginnings
7. Like the Toad Lane weavers in
Rochdale who began with 21 shillings
Piit into a cooperative store, so the
Danes began their various cooperative
manufacturing, marketing, buying, and
credit businesses. And just as the co
operative stores of England are now
the biggest single business in the Brit
ish Isles so the farm cooperatives of
Denmark are conducting the biggest
single business in Denmark. The way
they began reminds me of the advice I
used to get every Friday afternoon
when 1 stood up to speak my little piece
in school: “Begin low and go slow, rise
higher and take fire.” It is a fine art
and the real orator is not slow to learn
it. But it is also a fine art in the busi
ness of farm cooperation. The Danes
began exactly that way. They began
in little groups with combined capital
in small amounts, with risks reduced
to a minimum. They put their eggs in
a little basket. It was all they had
and they watched their basket with ex
ceeding care. Personal attention and
eternal vigilance was the price they
paid for success, but meantime they
were learning little by little the infinite
business details of reaching final con
sumers with farm products put into fit
form for final consumption. They were
small-scale businesses finally combined
into businesses large enough to guaran
tee profits to practically every farmer
in Denmark. I very much doubt wheth
er the Danes could have been induced
to organize a mammoth business at the
start and to risk every dime of their
cash income in any new and untried
form of business organization. Organ
ization from the top down is not the
way of the Danes.
Self-Help Cooperation
8. Cooperation in Denmark is essen
tially self-help cooperation. The co
operative farmers want as little help
and as little interference as possible by
state authorities. For instance, the
Danes ask no funds from the state for
their credit unions or their big coop
erative bank, and they will not have
state officials managing or dispensing
credit to the farmers. They form their
own organizations, elect their own of
ficers, and audit their own accounts.
But among the Mediterranean peoples
the cooperatives are financed by large
grants from the state, and the credit
organizations are largely managed by
state officials. The same thing is large
ly true of producing, buying, and sell
ing cooperatives. The result is what
might easily have been foreseen at the
start. The cooperators are a large
voting bloc, and they make increasing
demands on the state treasuries year by
year—a voting bloc so large in Italy that
they threatened bankruptcy to the state
until Mussolini called a halt. France
at this very minute is facing the same
serious problem. Soft-soaping the farm
ers is the prime business of a Minis
ter of Agriculture in one of the coun
tries I visited last year. I discovered
in my interview with him that every
thing done in bis department Ajvas done
with the purpose of controlling the
farm vote in the approaching elections.
As it happened, it was only the reduced
purchasing value of the peasants’ mon
ey that turned the farmer vote against
him, and that finally turned him out of
I the ministry as a casualty of war.
The fundamental thing in Danish co-
i operation and in Danish social life as
! well is private initiative, personal and
; associational self-help, local commun
ity pride and cooperative enterprise
■ with a minimum of state help and state
interference.—E. C. Branson, Copen
hagen.
i ABOLISHED IN GUILFORD
' The county board of education has
signed the death warrant of one-teach
er schools in Guilford county.
The board has officially adopted the
I policy of not conducting any more one-
; teacher schools in Guilford and has
' gone a step further and announced its
intention not to conduct any two-teach
er schools if arrangements can be made
; to get along without them. '
] Q'here were during the xear just closed
34 one-teacher schools in Guilford of
t which 20 were white and 14 were negro,
j The policy of the board means that not
I any of these schools will be in operation
; when the school sessions start next
' fall. Pupils at all these schools will be
' cared for in larger schools, with conse-
' quently better facilities and teachers.
; Coincident with the decision to end
I one-teacher schools, the board has a-
' dopted a further plan in its platform
of not having any teachers in the coun
ty who do not have state certificates.
The policy is expected to raise materi
ally the average of instruction through
out Guilford.
I Of the two-teacher schools 44 were
, in operation this past year. The board
: would like to start off next fall without
‘ a single one of these in operation, but
it is finding it impossible to make the
whole step at one stride.
[ 'Xn the case of both the one-teacher
i and the two-teacher schools the new
I buildings in many parts of the county
‘ and the plans of consolidation are hand
ling the situation. The county for the
past two years has been witnessing the
greatest school building era it has ever,
known.—Greensboro News.