Labor Unions, Cooperatives, and Socialism: The RLDS Radical Tradition in the Long Progressive Era

This paper investigates three sometimes overlapping radical causes in the RLDS Church – labor unions, Socialism, and cooperatives – during what some historians now call “the long Progressive Era,” 1880-1940. While the RLDS Church as a whole was never a uniformly “radical” religious tradition, pastors who served as labor union leaders, apostles who worked for or supported the Socialist Party of America, and ordinary members who created church-sponsored agricultural cooperative communities ensured that a vibrant radical tradition existed within a big-tent church of mostly working-class members. The three topics analyzed in this essay – unions, socialism, and cooperatives – did not simply typify the three routes for radicalism in the long Progressive era’s RLDS Church. Rather, unions, socialism, and cooperatives were three ways that radicals more generally in this era pursued their projects.