Background
Nelson Olsen was born on September 11, 1844 in Lillesand, Norway. He was the son of Anders and Gertrude Nelson. His father emigrated to the United States in 1847 and settled in Buchanan County, Missouri.
Nelson Olsen was born on September 11, 1844 in Lillesand, Norway. He was the son of Anders and Gertrude Nelson. His father emigrated to the United States in 1847 and settled in Buchanan County, Missouri.
Nelson attendance at rural school.
At the outbreak of the Civil War Nelson enlisted in the Union army and served throughout its duration. Upon reentering civil life he settled in St. Louis and took employment with a wholesale grocery firm. A year later he started a business of his own in St. Joseph, Missouri.
From 1870 to 1872 he was established in Hiawatha, Kansas, but in the latter year he again went to St. Louis and in 1877 he founded the N. O. Nelson Manufacturing Company, makers of building and plumbing supplies. The problems of labor had for a long time attracted Nelson's interest, and in 1886, because of the reputation for wisdom and justice he had established among business and labor elements, he served as conciliator and arbitrator of a strike on parts of the Gould system of railroads. He then began to study the basic causes of industrial disharmony and acquainted himself with several plans of profit-sharing, especially with those of the Maison Leclaire in Paris, and Godin in Guise, France. He became convinced that the essentials of such a system possessed all the attributes necessary to the maintenance of a just and practicable relationship between capital and labor. Capitalism, notwithstanding its shortcomings, was preferable, so he held, to any alternative order, and he believed that a major reason for the practicability of profit-sharing was that it rested "automatically upon conditions already in effect. " The plan of profit-sharing in his plant Nelson put into operation in 1886. After allowance had been made for "customary salaries, wages, expenses, and interest, " the remainder of the firm's income for the year was to be divided pro rata upon the total amount of wages paid and capital employed. The dividends were payable in cash or in stock in the firm. In 1890 a tract of land near Edwardsville, Illinois, was purchased, and upon it Nelson founded the village of Leclaire, in which were built factories and employees' dwellings and which was laid out as a model community. For many years it was the worthy boast of its residents that it had no policemen, no pauperism, and an extraordinarily low rate for death and infant mortality. In 1905 Nelson extended the provisions of the profit-sharing plan to the customers of the firm. In his effort to minimize economic waste and to increase in all feasible ways the incomes of his employees, Nelson started in 1902 a cooperative store in Leclaire based upon the Rochdale plan. By 1916 it had about 150 members. The success of this project heightened Nelson's belief in the practicability of cooperation in merchandizing.
In 1911, during a visit to New Orleans, he was affected by the evidence of want on the part of the inhabitants of the poorer districts, and he established at his own expense a grocery-store in which commodities were sold at the lowest possible margin of profit. He developed the enterprise into a chain and in 1915 organized a cooperative association. The business grew to consist of sixty-three stores, a bakery, a creamery, a condiment factory, and the stock and equipment on a farm. Notwithstanding early prospects of success, the enterprise as expanded, experienced a succession of losses culminating in 1918 in its failure, and Nelson filed a personal petition for bankruptcy on the New Orleans undertaking.
For many years Nelson had been strongly interested in numerous matters of civic, social, and philanthropic import.
In 1887 and 1890 he was a member of the St. Louis City Council. In 1895 he was a delegate to the meeting in London of the Profit-Sharing and Co-operative Associations of the World.
The collapse of his venture in New Orleans hastened his loss of interest, already considerably diminished, in the major business in St. Louis. For three years preceding his death he lived in California.
In religion Nelson was until middle life a Lutheran, but in later years he became a Unitarian.
In politics Nelson was for many years a Republican but with the passage of the McKinley tariff, which he strongly opposed, he allied himself with the Democratic party.
Nelson favored free trade, and believed in "free silver" and the single tax.
Nelson's character, personality, and intellect, combined with his energy and superior business sense, were the basis for his accomplishments. But it seems fair to say that he at no time appreciated the deeper implications of a system of profit-sharing or recognized the limitations operating against its widespread and permanent adoption. He failed to understand that the success accomplished in his own plant was more personal than institutional.
In April 1868 he married Almeria Posegate.