Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth

Equality Colony was a United States socialist colony founded in Skagit County, Washington by a political organization known as the Brotherhood of the Co-operative Commonwealth in the year 1897. It was meant to serve as a model which would convert the rest of Washington and later the entire continent to socialism.

The colony's origins lay in ideas of New England reformers in the mid-1890s. Norman Wallace Lermond, a journalist and farmer in Warren, Maine, and Ed Pelton had been intrigued by an idea originally suggested by Socialist Labor Party member F.G.R. Gordon that a series of socialist colonies be established in a single western state. (Gordan suggested Texas.)

Lermond and Pelton started a vigorous letter-writing campaign to notable reformers such as Henry Demarest Lloyd advocating the plan and suggesting that the socialist colonists would be able to initiate the collective ownership of the means of production in the state by voting in a socialist government. Lermond envisioned an organization of many local unions ("L.U.s") that would provide the colonists with financial, material, and moral support, coordinated by a national "center or union" controlled by seven trustees. His immediate model was the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which colonized Kansas with abolitionists prior to the U.S. Civil War in order to make the territory a free state. Lloyd gave the plan modest financial backing

Lermond started the first local union in Warren on October 18, 1895, and Pelton established the second in Damariscotta Mills, Maine that winter. In December 1895, Lermond issued a call for the creation of more local unions in the pages of the New York Commonwealth and the Coming Nation. In the spring of that year he announced he was setting up an "organizational meeting" to create a "National Union of the Brotherhood of the Co-operative Commonwealth" scheduled to be held in St. Louis on July 24–26, 1896, congruent with that year's Populist party national convention, to which he was a delegate. A formal "call" for this convention was published in Coming Nation July 11 and 18, and was endorsed by Henry Demarest Lloyd, Eugene Debs, Frank Parsons, William D. P. Bliss and Eltweed Pomeroy.

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