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

In 1884, a group of Welsh-born Iowa miners were reeling after a failed strike that had lasted on and off for three years. The men, all residents of the tiny company town of Lucas, Iowa, had worked for the Whitebreast Coal Company, and some, in consequence of their union organizing and role in the failed strike had been banned from working in the company’s mines. In the harsh aftermath of these events, the miners drew up articles of incorporation for the “Iowa and Missouri Coal Mining Company” with the express purpose to “unite in one person the character of both operater [sic.] and miner in our membership, for the purpose of securing to ourselves the full product of our own skill and labor; and to secure a unity of action by a union of interests.” The editors of a nearby newspaper approvingly noted the new organization and then published the entire charter of the organization, stating, “We publish the articles for the benefit of those of the Saints who may be contemplating entering into similar projects, as a sort of guide to them.” Furthermore, the editors noted, “We are authorized by the Lucas brethren engaged in the work, to invite all who feel so inclined to join with them.”

The editors’ use of the terms “Saints” and “brethren” might be puzzling until one searches for the source of the article. The magazine reporting on the Iowa and Missouri Coal Mining Company was the The Saints’ Herald, the official organ of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS, now called Community of Christ), headquartered at the time in Lamoni, Iowa and led by Joseph Smith III, the son of the founding prophet of Mormonism. All of the Welsh-born Iowa miners who founded the mining cooperative were RLDS, too. The congregation to which they belonged, the 200-person strong Lucas RLDS Branch, might well have been the radical capital of their church in the late nineteenth century. As will be seen, the Lucas RLDS Branch (congregation) produced leaders in the Socialist Party of America, the United Mine Workers of America, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, as well as a member of the Council of Twelve Apostles in the RLDS Church. As such, the Welsh RLDS miners exemplify what I call the RLDS radical tradition.

Founded in the Midwest in the 1850s, the RLDS Church had welded together Mormon dissenters who in various ways had rejected the leadership of Brigham Young and his more numerous Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints headquartered in Utah. Led by the direct descendants of Joseph Smith, Jr., the RLDS church grew from a few hundred scattered Midwesterners at the time of the American Civil War to 75,000 members by the outbreak of World War I. While the RLDS Church had small missions in Europe, French Polynesia, Australia and elsewhere, the vast majority of its membership lived in the American Midwest, and most of them resided in rural areas rather than industrial urban centers. RLDS rejected practices embraced by their nineteenth-century Utah-based denominational cousins (LDS), such plural marriage and vicarious work for the dead in temples. However, like their better-known LDS cousins, they believed themselves to hold exclusive sacerdotal and sacramental powers, embraced the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants as additional books of scripture, possessed a complex hierarchical priesthood structure, and idealized a Latter Day Saint communitarian vision from the 1830s known as “building Zion” (Launius, 1996; Howlett and Duffy, 2017).

Within the RLDS Church, “building Zion” was most cogently expressed in two RLDS doctrines – the “gathering” and “stewardships.” The doctrine of “gathering” meant that RLDS believed they would someday “gather” to Independence, Missouri and establish a physical, latter day New Jerusalem, just as Joseph Smith. Jr., the founding prophet of Mormonism, had commanded in the 1830s. The doctrine of stewardship meant that they would somehow be in community with each other in the New Jerusalem, sharing in the labor and collective ownership of the community. How exactly this would be worked out was still open to experimentation in the late 19th and early 20th Century RLDS Church. Building Zion, though, framed all RLDS radical projects, sanctifying them as a means towards an unabashedly utopian end (Howlett, 2006). 

With this background, this essay 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 (Sklar, 2021). 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 bishops 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. As will be seen, union agitation, socialist political activity, and the formation of cooperatives reached their apogee in the RLDS Church during the decades after World War I, not before it, thus adding more reasons for historians to think about an American Progressive Era that did not end with the start of World War I. 

Finally, 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; that is, radicals sought transformations through electoral projects and state policies; harnessed the power of workers to change economic systems; and gathered into local communities to model new systems of living with an eye toward larger transformations (McKanan, 2010; McKanan, 2011; Rosenblatt, 2016). Thus, even with their particularistic communal theology (the “restored gospel”), RLDS radicals in the long Progressive era were less outliers in the world of radical religion than they were exemplars of it (cf. Hunt, 1983).