Abstract: The article focuses on Nelson O. Nelson as promoter of garden cities and the consumer cooperative movement. Early in his reform career, Nelson O. Nelson distinguished himself as a profit-sharing employer in St. Louis, and as a Bellamy Nationalist, Single Taxer, communitarian and non-Marxian socialist. At the dawn of the 20th century, Nelson was faced with choosing practical goals for his reformist efforts. Nelson devoted his later career to promoting "garden cities" and the consumer cooperative movement. The Garden City movement's impact transformed many a city and suburb in America. Nelson lived on into the new century. In the last two decades of his life, the Leclaire community he had founded and consumer's cooperation came increasingly to structure his reformist thinking. As continuing pat- terns of industrialization and response undermined the universalistic reformisms of earlier days, Nelson's progressive activities became simultaneously more circumscribed and more intense. To a reformer like Nelson, "Gomperism" was anathema.

　　Subjects: CONSUMER cooperatives; SOCIAL service; VOCATIONAL guidance; CAREER development; Vocational Rehabilitation Services; Professional and Management Development Training; SOCIAL workers; GARDEN cities; NELSON, Nelson O.