1. On the Line: A History of the Telephone Industry in Wisconsin. Madison, Wis.: Wisconsin State Telephone Association; 1985. 131 p. Notes: Published to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Wisconsin State Telephone Association, this book is included here because of the reference value of its histories of 96 individual Wisconsin telephone companies, including at least seven telephone cooperatives, from their earliest days up to 1985; details are also provided for the handful of networks through the year which were formed by the Wisconsin telephone companies and cooperatives, including one network itself formed as a cooperative, the Wisconsin Statewide Telephone Cooperative Association.
  1. Alanen, Arnold. “The Development and Distribution of Finnish Consumers’ Cooperatives in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, 1903-1973”. IN: Karni, Michael G.; Kaups, Matti E., and Ollila, Douglas J. Jr., editors. The Finnish Experience in the Western Great Lakes Region: New Perspectives. Turku, Finland: Institute for Migration; in cooperation with the Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota; 1975; pp. 103-130. Notes: A paper “originally presented at a conference on “The Finnish Experience in the Western Great Lakes Region: New Perspectives” held at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, in April of 1974″ (editors’ introduction, p. 1). Alanen dates “the first actual Finnish-sponsored cooperative” in the United States to 1903 “when thirteen farm families near Menahga, Minnesota contributed a total of $170 to start a cooperative store” (p. 110)–seventy years later this store was still going strong with annual sales of about $2 million. By 1907 several more “Finnish stores or buying clubs” had been established throughout the upper peninsula of Michigan, northern Wisconsin, and primarily northern Minnesota and by 1917 the number had grown to over a hundred Finnish consumer cooperatives throughout the northern area of the three states and the network had their own wholesale outlet, the Cooperative Central Exchange, headquartered in Superior, Wisconsin. Many of these cooperatives had been started during mining strikes in the region, while others grew from “buying circles” set up by Finnish farmers of the area. Between 1904 and 1907 the communities of Brantwood, Wisconsin and Clifford, Wisconsin became Wisconsin’s first two locations to establish a Finnish-sponsored store or buying club; by 1917 nine were scattered across northern Wisconsin alone and by 1929 that number had grown to sixteen. This paper provides an overview of the history of the Finnish-sponsored cooperatives and the factors which influenced their development over time.
  1. Cotton, J. R. “The Consumers’ Cooperative Movement in Milwaukee, Wisconsin”; 1930. Notes: M.A. thesis, Marquette University, 1930. 1 volume unpaged. Cited in Anderson, Byron, ed., A Bibliography of Master’s Theses and Doctoral Dissertations on Milwaukee Topics, p. 104.
  1. Johnson, Jim. The Co-op Label. 1st ed. Wisuri, Marlene, images. Duluth, Minn.: Dovetailed Press LLC; 128 p. Notes: This lovely and evocative book is “dedicated to immigrants and co-operators everywhere” (p. 6) and they are well served by the poems and mainly photographic images contained in it. The authors explain (p. 5) that Part One of their book “portrays immigration and the anti-immigration activities of 1918” and Part Two “alludes to anti-communist sentiments of the 1950s,” through the experiences of the immigrants in the region around the Twin Ports of Duluth, Minnesota, and Superior, Wisconsin, but especially of the Finnish immigrant experience of the area.
  2. Karni, Michael. “Struggle on the Cooperative Front: The Separation of Central Cooperative Wholesale from Communism, 1929-30”. IN: Karni, Michael G.; Kaups, Matti E., and Ollila, Douglas J. Jr., editors. The Finnish Experience in the Western Great Lakes Region: New Perspectives. Turku, Finland: Institute for Migration; in cooperation with the Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota; 1975; pp. 186-201. Notes: A paper “originally presented at a conference on “The Finnish Experience in the Western Great Lakes Region: New Perspectives” held at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, in April of 1974″ (editors’ introduction, p. 1). In 1917 the Cooperative Central Exchange (CCE), a grocery and dry goods wholesale firm, was established in Superior, Wisconsin, to supply nearly one hundred Finnish consumer cooperatives located in the uppper peninsula of Michigan, in northern Wisconsin, and in primarily northern Minnesota. Many of these cooperatives had been started during mining strikes in the region; others grew from “buying circles” set up by Finnish farmers of the area. This paper explores an internal political struggle among the leaders of the successful CCE over “whether the cooperative movement, begun by immigrant Finns as a defense against gouging merchants, should remain open to all working class groups and pursue only economic change in America, or whether it should become an auxiliary of the Workers’ (Communist) Party of America and thereby militantly political” (p. 186).The crisis began at the end of July 1929 when the New York office of the Workers’ Party tried to arrange for the CCE to give a loan for the work of their political party. Some CCE leaders, however, felt that such a loan would violate the cooperative movement’s guiding Rochdale principles. The decision on the loan would be made by the delegates representing the consumer cooperatives at the CCE’s next annual membership meeting (to be held over three days in April 1930) and the lobbying was intense right up until the vote was taken. Karni explains the background out of which the Finnish consumer cooperative movement grew and lays out how both sides of this internal disagreement attacked on the issues. Later in 1930 the name of the CCE was changed to the Central Cooperative Wholesale.
  1. Shapiro, Eli. Credit Union Development in Wisconsin. New York: Columbia University Press; 1947. 174 p. (Faculty of Political Science of Columbia University. Studies in History, Economics and Public Law; 525). Notes: Undertaken to analyze the overall operation of credit unions as one of the four principal cash credit lenders at the time in the United States (the others being personal finance companies, personal loan departments of commerical banks, and industrial banking companies), this study focused on Wisconsin because the state had a “credit union movement of sufficient magnitude to permit some generalizations” for the field as a whole. At the time of the study, Wisconsin “ranked first among all states in the number of [credit unions] (18.2) per 100,000 of total population” (p. 19) with a total of 563 credit unions, compared to 8,224 for the entire United States (p.33); all of Wisconsin’s credit unions had been chartered under the state charter, rather than federal charters, because credit unions in Wisconsin were also allowed to issue real estate loans (p.30), whereas those with a federal charter could not. The first credit union was formed in Wisconsin in 1923 for “the municipal employees in Milwaukee” (p. 37) under newly-modified statutory language passed that year by the Wisconsin legislature, leading to a total number by 1931 of 52 Wisconsin credit unions. Further amendments made in 1931 to the Wisconsin statute governing credit unions encouraged their rapid development through “the appointment of a credit union organizer attached to the Building and Loan Division of the Banking Department” of the Wisconsin state government (p.38), leading to a two-and-a-half times increase in the number of credit unions in the state during the following year alone. Of the 563 credit unions in Wisconsin at the end of 1939, fully 81 percent were comprised of employees of a “common employer” (p. 19).