ABSTRACT
The settling of the American colonies came about as a result of some unique circumstances. The Lockean notion of putting the land to good use and improve it in an effort to make a religious and humanitarian statement was an idea that led to some decidedly undemocratic behavior with respect to the native and African populations in America. Most of the farmers who found themselves landless or in jail were veterans of the recent American Revolution. The American interior was opened, and as that occurred, a frantic scramble for the acquisition of property began. The late nineteenth-century cooperative movements across the American countryside owe a great deal to Nikolaj Frederik Grundtvig and the Scandinavians who fleshed out the concept. But the American embrace of cooperative institutions took place at a very inopportune moment; that is, the farmer cooperatives appeared at the tail end of the period of acquisition in this country and at the beginning of the period of dispossession.
