Chalmers P. Wylie (1920 – 1998)

Inducted: 1990

Congressman Chalmers P. Wylie, long a champion of the cooperative form of business enterprise in the halls of Congress, was the key person in marshalling the crucially needed bipartisan support to pass the legislation creating the National Cooperative Bank (NCB) to finance and assist in building consumer cooperatives. Later, as ranking minority member of the House Committee on Banking, when NCB was threatened with dissolution, he engineered its survival by insisting that it receive its final capital appropriation and by using his prestige in Congress and the White House to garner support for legislation to ‘privatize’ the Bank. He did what needed to be done at critical times.

Congressman Wylie’s stalwart advocacy of NCB, now a major development leader owned by its member-users, was particularly heroic in view of the powerful opposition to it. The self-help and ‘privatization’ concepts, which Congressman Wylie advocated in the National Cooperative Bank legislation, became key elements of government policy.