Soft music - In the 1970s, a group of young radicals
started a food revolution. In the space of
just a few years, they opened more than two dozen
cooperative grocery stores in the twin cities of
Minneapolis and St. Paul. - It was this grand vision
of creating an economy. Really an alternative economy that would sustain a
whole big community. - It was a phenomena. There was nothing else
in the country like it. - Huge sales that
the place was packed. - Shaped by their
involvement in the movement against the Vietnam War,
these committed young people saw these community
owned enterprises as a way to replace capitalism with a healthier, more
egalitarian way of life. - We wanted a social political
revolution in this country and we weren't afraid
to use that word. - There was a sense that the
revolution's right there. You can almost touch it, - It was feeling that
you were part of history. - [Narrator] Some
asked if it was enough to build a new world in
the shell of the old. Or was it time to unite
with the oppressed to make revolution now? This debate tore a thriving
activists community apart. - The co-ops really
were a boiling mix
of conflicting ideas. - Relationships
were torn asunder. Friendships were shattered. The city of Saigon
just fell, you guys. Why are we fighting
amongst each other? - [narrator] The
disagreement over evolution versus revolution soon
exploded as former friends and comrades turned to
coercion and violence. - They kicked in Chuck's door. - They mostly punched
me in the body. - They had steel pipes
and other weapons. - [narrator] This conflict
became known as the co-op wars. - How could this great
revolutionary idea get torpedoed so quickly
just because someone wasn't selling canned
goods in a grocery store? (upbeat music) - [narrator] Cooperatives
are businesses that are owned and democratically governed by their customers,
their workers, or both. One of the most
visible types of co-op is the natural
foods grocery store. The state of Minnesota
has more of these co-ops than anywhere in the country. In the Twin Cities alone,
food co-ops have sales of over $200,000,000
and are owned by over a hundred
thousand members. These co-ops provide a market
for over 300 sustainable farms in the region. But the young people
who founded these co-ops didn't have business
success on their minds. They came out of movements for
equality and social change, and their aim was nothing
less than revolution. Their journey didn't
begin in a grocery store. It began on a commune. - Here, Kitty. Kitty This is my farm. I live with my son and his wife and three grandchildren. Actually, I'm getting a
bunch more fruit trees, and they're gonna go out here. I've got three
apricots right here, over by the bird house. Those are brand new. (upbeat music) A bunch of us moved
in January, very cold. Ten people were living
in that little town. Almost in two or three
months, we added 20 people. - We had some excellent potters
there and they made pottery. They built this gigantic kiln. - We ended up being about
30, 35 people there. - Had a bank downstairs. A couple other storefronts and upstairs was the
ballroom, a couple apartments. - A lot of us, at least to
begin with had all our bedrooms in one big room with like
India print hanging down. - People would come
out all the time. Anytime there was a new
batch of LSD or anything that they felt they
needed to share. We were always open to that,
music, and whatever else. - The whole community
for miles around, figured out we were there and started touring around
the block to look at us. 'Cause we gardened
across the street. - We grow mostly our own food. All the vegetables
are grown organically. We try to give to the soil
as much as we take from it. We've grown enough vegetables
to can 600 quarts the winter. - We learned to eat better because we wanted
to be healthier and the political implications
of eating processed foods. And it was much cheaper. - She and Keith started
buying like whole grains and brown rice and honey
and other things in bulk. And that's what kind of led
them to the retailing of that. - We grew most of our own food
and sold stuff to make money. Well, at some point, Keith, my ex and I went
up to San Francisco. - [narrator] Keith and Susie
traveled to San Francisco, the epicenter of
the counterculture, looking for ways to
put their new ideas about food into action. While out there, they met up with their fellow Minneapolis
hippies, Diane and Alvin. - A place in the
Haight-Ashbury District and Susie and Keith were there. - We visited health
food stores out there. We visited one of the
traditional co-ops out there. And so we were really
interested in food. - There was a commune
called the Diggers and they would go from little
community to little community and sell foods wholesale. And I just thought,
"Wow, that is so neat." - [narrator] Inspired
by the Diggers anarchist anti-business example, the Minnesotans decided to
bring their newfound knowledge back to where they had
joined the counterculture in the first place,
Minneapolis's West
Bank neighborhood. (upbeat music) - The West Bank was
a really community, rough around the edges. The old stores that
had been there forever, like Richter's Drug Store,
and a Holtermann building. - For the most part,
I liked the drugs. There's a lot of nice women
around here, some culture. Just about everything
you'd want. - The West Bank seemed
like the perfect place to start their new
food experiment. They just needed
the proper venue. - Diane Soztik
and Alvin Ottoman, poor things, let us
set up on their porch. - We had learned where to
buy food and stuff like that. - Honey and whole wheat
flour and brown rice. - Sesame seeds, peanuts,
the People's Pantry. We were opened maybe
Tuesday, Thursday. - In six months, we had
$5,000 in inventory. - So we started out
in our naive state, just figuring different people
would volunteer to watch. And my sister Vicki,
watched it a lot. Keith watched it. I watched it and Diana
and Alvin watched it. - My husband was selling
marijuana at the time too, and totally stoned
into the living room. And somebody would walk
right into the house and say, "It's an emergency, my
grandma needs brown rice." - And finally they got tired
of it for very good reason. - Yeah, that was when I
said, "We want our $50 back and we don't wanna have people
coming over all the time." - In the meantime, we'd
went to the People's Center. - They ended up moving
this People's Pantry, as it was called, into
the People's Center. - It also had a free
veterinary clinic. So you had this big
room with sick people and dogs and cats. - All of a sudden we were
selling 50,000 a month. It was just like. - After a few months, they had to have the Health
Department close us down. - We were being
chased by the law. The Health Department
chased us out. - As the People's Pantry
looked for a new location, more people were
inspired to get involved. Two local grocers proposed
opening it as a co-op grocery. - We met Roman and
Tom who had True Grits all around Loring Park. - Basement of a three-story
apartment building grocery store and it wasn't
being very successful. - And they were
really interested. They were the ones that
had spotted the place. A store on 22nd and Riverside that had closed down
a small grocery store. - Well, not originally part of
the plan for People's Pantry, the idea of forming the
new store as a cooperative was immediately popular. - We were having these
meetings for opening the co-op and there were like a
hundred people would come to the meetings. - It came through. We got to go in there. - People were excited about it. People were down
there volunteering, getting the store ready. - We had a Board of
Directors election, and I think everybody
paid $2 to join. - The store opened and
we just picked up all of these barrels of whole grains and things that the
People's Pantry was doing and moved them right
into the new co-op. And so People's Pantry
and the co-op merged into what became known
as North Country Co-op. - So in six months,
we were doing $2,000 of business each day. That's as much as
supermarkets were doing. - Huge sales, the
place was packed. I mean, it was so packed you
couldn't move around in there. - People were just lined up
and they came from all over because they couldn't get it. That wide of a variety
because health food stores didn't have like
produce and dairy. - The supplier of
produce to us said that by far we were the
biggest users of broccoli. And that was interesting. - Everything was
the People's this. People's that. People's something else. - I made a People's bag and
then I did People's pants, which were drawstring pants. And then I did People's skirts. We started selling
them in the co-ops. - I'm sure you've heard
of Dean Zimmerman. - Well, let's go get, see if
we got some eggs here today. Hello, ladies. The thing about chickens
is they're nice recyclers. I just throw all of
my compost in here and they take it
down to nothing. Everything just disappears from these wonderful
recycling birds. - Dean Zimmerman, he stood
up at the front there and he says, "If you don't
like how crowded it is, start your own co-op. - It was growing so fast,
we just couldn't keep up. - Just co-ops.started popping
up all over the place. The second co-op to open after
North Country was Whole Foods over on 25th and First Avenue. Mill City, which was on
26th and Bloomington. There was Selby
Foods in St. Paul. - Yeah, we're so successful. We have 12 stores and we have
a warehouse and a bakery. A network had sprung
up like mushroom. - In addition to the enthusiasm
of the counter-culture, new co-ops benefited
from changes in the grocery marketplace. The decimation of mom
and pop grocery stores by new supermarkets made
grocery, real estate, and equipment
available and cheap. - One day, a guy came
walking into North Country and he said, "I hear you
guys might be interested in buying some coolers." "Well, what do you got?" "Well, I got this little store over there on Franklin Avenue." And we walked in. I went into the place,
I looked around. I says, "Whoa, how much do you
want for the whole building?" So we ended up
renting the building, buying his coolers from him. Spent about a week fixing
the place up a little bit. And it was already a
growing grocery store. So we just opened it up
for business, Seward Co-op. (upbeat music) - There was no place like this. - Minneapolis was unique. - [narrator] The Minnesota
co-op explosion was so big, it surpassed the
West Coast efforts which had inspired it
in the first place. - San Francisco had nothing. Seattle had two food co-ops. One was kind of a
corporate supermarket and the other was a
regular co-op like we had. We had more food
co-ops in Minneapolis than a large part of the U S. - So I spent from 1977,
really until 1992, writing and reporting and
researching this whole thing. Here were a whole army of
people who basically were anarchists in the best
sense of the word. The mantra always was "We
can do it better ourselves." - A distribution network arose
to service all these stores because it was very lucrative. Stores were gonna buy from
their co-op distributor because they had a
shared value system. - We got a co-op started
in Wynona, then Mankato and Duluth and Menominie. All over there were food co-ops. They were using our
People's warehouse. - [narrator] The
network centered on
the people's warehouse included dozens of stores
and the local farmers and vendors that supplied them. It served as the beginnings
of a real alternative economy for thousands of
people in the region. They longed to be part of the
larger socialist revolution that was underway
all over the world. This revolution
found Keith and Susie when they moved to
a farm in Wisconsin. - Keith and I, and our son
Leif, who was two then. - Let's get a place
in the country. - We were living in teepees. - I know how to build a space that I could live in comfortably Really little amount
of money if I had to. Really a little amount of money. - We were gonna build a house. Keith and I cut down the trees and used the draw knife
to shave off the bark. And then we built
essentially a dugout. Got printing plates. Aluminum printing plates
and used them for shingles. And then put sod over it. It sounds very primitive, but it was really bright
and light in there. - It was a great experience. It was really a great
learning experience. - Keith was the person who
introduced me to the left. He just kind of took me
under his wing in a way. Introduced me to the
anti-war movement. Keith and Bob, they
really impressed me. They were reading Landon
and Mao by candlelight. - We had this thing
where there was four or five of us living
in the back 40. We would have somebody
read while we were working and doing stuff. Like we go out in the garden,
pulling weeds or something, There'd be a person
out there reading because we didn't
have any radio. One of the things that
we started reading was Mao Tse-tung's
Little Red Book. Then we got visited. - I don't know if Bob Hogan
brought him out or not. - He said that he could
teach us a whole lot more than what you just got
in the Little Red Book. Theophilus Smith,
that's his name. - [Narrator] Theophilus Smith, aka James Williams, aka Edward James, aka Edward Smith, aka Theo, aka Smitty was a mysterious figure
with a shadowy past. Even today, no known
photos of Theo exist. - Smitty was a short,
kind of stocky man. - Very charismatic. Got caught on the wrong side
of the law a little bit. - He had a thing going for him. And that's that he
was underground. He wasn't to be known about. - When he came in a
room, his eyes would go from side to side. Bob had said, "Well, he's
been in a lot of situations. He has to watch out. He has to be careful." - He wasn't real
open about his past because he was trying to
build a group of people who would follow him. - Smitty was also a black man in a nearly all white
group of activists. African-American activists
have attempted to open a co-op on Minneapolis's north
side in the sixties, but this new wave of food
co-ops was mostly white. - It was a fair amount of
confusion around racial politics and I could see him
taking advantage of that. Talking about how
bourgeoisie they were and how they weren't
helping real people. - He'd been with
Snick in the south. He was at Dodge with
a group called DRUM, Dodge Revolutionary
Union Movement. - [Announcer] Completely
supersized by black people. You want to stand up. Black people did this. DRUM, baby, DRUM,
baby, DRUM, baby - DRUM was a militant black
organization formed in Detroit in 1968 to challenge not only
auto industry management, but also the white dominated
United Auto Workers Union. It spawned many imitators and eventually an
umbrella organization, the League of Revolutionary
Black Workers. - Continued adherence and
reliance upon the operation of capitalistic principles
and fearless principles is of course, anathema and
the antithesis of anything that relates to decency and
justice and freedom for mankind. So we are explicitly
Marxist-Leninist. - It seemed like
this is something that really you should learn. - Keith Ruona had a lot
of lefty inclinations. He was the first big influencer, as they would say nowadays, that Theo Smith reached out to. 'Cause he was very charismatic. People listened to him. Apparently, Theo came there
and got him into the room and talked him into it. - They started talking
about the co=ops. - It's like here was a chance
to really be a revolutionary. - And how maybe they should
determine what was going on. - The idea that the
co-ops could be a part of building working
class movement. - There was
something inherent in that whole counterculture
of bourgeois guilt. The fact that you can start
a little grocery store and you can be a hippie. Or you can move
out to the country and live off the
land or whatever. There was this undercurrent
of I'm just escaping. I'm not really doing anything
to forward human rights. - We're talking about
co-op transformation. And, oh wow! - And that's of course
where the red flag went up. - With Smitty controlling
things behind the scenes, Keith and Bob's Winding Road
Farm reading group transformed into the co-operative
organization or CO as it became known. The CO aspired to be a disciplined
Marxist Leninist antidote to the countercultures
anarchy and escapism. - I was supporting the CO
and she was against it. She was on the other side and that's what broke us up. Couldn't say two
words to each other without it being a fight. - Moved into town with
Leif and left Keith. - Susie and Keith's breakup
would soon be reflected throughout the co-op community. Keith was with the CO, who saw the co-ops as
an organizing tool. They would sell the masses
mainstream food at low prices. Then, recruit them
for the revolution. Susie's side, labeled
hippies by the CO, remained committed to
the idea of the co-ops as a community-based source
for healthy unprocessed food. The CO moved back
to the Twin Cities. It was time to begin
using the co-ops to mobilize the working class. Smitty sent Jerry Path to
infiltrate an easy target. - The idea was that
the Beanery was one of the weakest
links in the co-op. It was a failing store. If we could come in there
and transform that store, that would be like the model. - He came in and volunteered. In a couple of months, he might be the main
person in that co-op. - Me and a couple other
people started at the Beanery up by Lake Street and Lyndale. We were very anarchical. We had no structure, hardly. Our success, I guess drew the
interest of this organization. - I got a job at the
store right away. Then after maybe a month or so, Becky and Bob came
to work at the store. - Smitty sent Bob
Haugen and Becky Cuomo, another CO member, to
transform the Beanery into a store that truly
served the working class. - They pretty much immediately began to wanna do
an investigation of
the neighborhood, as far as what foods
they wanted at the store. - I said, "You people are
serving an elitist agenda, selling these natural
foods that nobody wants. You should be selling white
bread and Pepsi instead." And that's what they did. They changed it. Took advantage of the openness
of the Beanery's process and stacked the meeting. - At some point, we
did the transformation. We did bring in canned goods. We did bring in sugar. - At the Beanery, the CO
was starting from scratch in their outreach
to the community. But in the predominantly
African-American Central and Bryant neighborhoods,
they found someone with the community
credibility they needed. Moe Burton, a
former Black Panther and neighborhood activist had already organized a
successful community garden when he was contacted by the CO. - We got approached by
some folks that said, "Hey, what about
starting a co-op?" And we started building
a co-op right there on that same block on
34th and Fourth Avenue that later became
Bryant-Central, the
co-op organization, and they were very secretive. At the beginning, it
was a good relationship. Very helpful. They were volunteering,
helping to build the co-op. They were always in
conversation with Moe. They basically were training us. So a bunch of us went out to
various co-ops and worked, but it was really people that
lived right in that community that were actually on the
board and controlled the co-op. - The CO helped start
Bryant Central Co-op, but the community controlled it. It was the Beanery where
the CO had sole control that Smitty decided to
promote as the model for co-op transformation. - I was given an assignment, writing a paper about the
transformation of this store. A sentence here and
there were written by me, but most of it was by Smitty. - It is a historical fact
that anti-imperialism was the motivating factor
behind the creation of the co-op stores. Do the actual practices
of the co-op spit the intellectual understanding
of anti-imperialism? The answer is no. We, the Beanery workers,
have made an all out effort to destroy upper-class
attitudes on food. - The Beanery paper went out
through the whole co-op system. Smitty looked at me and we
were in some kind of meeting or whatever. They're going like hotcakes. - The Beanery paper
began a heated discussion among the workers and
members of the co-ops that served the Twin
Cities community by 1975. A main forum for
this controversy was
the one institution that bound them all together. Their collectively
owned distributor, the People's Warehouse. - The Warehouse was really
the central organizing force of the whole movement. Everything came
from the Warehouse. Any education or co-op outreach, all came out of the warehouse. - Everybody felt like they
owned the People's Warehouse, that they had contributed
money to the building fund with jars by the cash
registers at stores. - They were very segregated. They really didn't have
any kind of involvement of people of color in their
operation organization. We were buying food from them, but really didn't
have any say in how the People's Warehouse
actually did its work. The co-op would be run by
the workers in the Warehouse, but that there would be
a Policy Review Board made up of two people
from each member co-op. - The People's
Warehouse had grown far beyond the Twin Cities. It's trucks connected
regional farmers and vendors with stores across
Minnesota and beyond. Each co-op sent representatives
to the annual meeting of the Warehouse's
Policy Review Board. All across that network,
co-ops were aware of the growing conflict
and choosing sides. - I dropped out of high
school in my junior year, and I knew folks at
the Winding Road Farm. I walked out of high school because I felt I wanted
to learn other things and signed up basically to
work in co-ops shortly after. - I came out of the late
sixties and seventies, a hippie on the road. And I was traveling from
Vermont out to the West Coast. Was heading back, I
was very pregnant. Ended up visiting a friend
in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. In South Dakota, we would make
an order of all the families, and then we would drive a
station wagon or a pickup truck or some vehicle and drive
up here to Minneapolis to get our food from what was
called People's Warehouse. - The Warehouse has done
$50,000 worth of business in 1973 or 74. And they didn't even
have a bookkeeper. - It was at the Warehouse's
Policy Review Board meeting in April, 1975, that the CO
decided to make its move. They would use the
Warehouse's chaotic management as a pretext to seize control, giving them power to influence
the entire co-op system. - So there were
hundreds of hippies in town for our quarterly. - I had volunteered to do all
of the work in the kitchen. So I was in the
kitchen, washing dishes. I knew something
was gonna happen and it was gonna be crazy. I'd rather be back
in the kitchen. - A bunch of people walked in and in a loud voice announced
that they had decided that we were not an
effective organization and they were going to
take over the Warehouse. - People just freaked
out and panicked and "Rah, rah, oh, rah! What does that mean?" - Lots of yelling and
screaming and just, it was starting
to get very ugly. - They didn't of course jump
up and say no or whatever, but jaws were dropped
all over the room. - I came home from working. We get a phone call. - And they said that they
were going to come that night and take over the
People's Warehouse. - And that was when people
were sent into the Warehouse to sit on it. - So that we'll have
a presence there so that when they come, they
won't be able to take an over. - I was pulled into
a meeting where we then organized our
counter offensive to going into the warehouse and kick them out
and take it over. Remember, we have images
of the Bolsheviks. We're the Bolsheviks. They're the Mensheviks. Throw their ass out in the
snowbank at any means necessary. - So I get a call
from Bob Malish. And what I assumed was
he was over some place where people were talking
and rehashing the days events and everything that's going on. So I went over there. They were planning to go over
and take over the Warehouse. Physically. - We had a vote and it
was, it wasn't unanimous. There were maybe three or
four people who voted against. Against using violence, but it passed
overwhelmingly basically. - I was there. My uncle Moe was there. There was a few other
people from our co-op, but it was a number of
people from various co-ops. - One of the things
that Smitty said was that if we bring sticks in,
that will reduce the violence. That'll have the effect
of reducing the violence. That was one of his arguments. - We were upstairs in the place and we were smoking some hash and after awhile said,
"We better get going." And we came downstairs. And we sat around the bags
of flour and rolled joints, told stories. - I remember all of
us driving over there, getting out of the trucks,
coming in and basically saying, "This is a takeover." - All of a sudden there
were like 25 people came in and they were the
cooperative division. They had steel pipes. They were really angry. They were full of
class rage at us because we were the bourgeoisie. - They were threatening
us that we needed to leave or they were going to beat us. - I remember me saying, "It's time for some
third world leadership. You guys have never had
that before, have you?" Where you had people of color
actually being in leadership. - We're surrounded by these
grimacing, angry people. And some of them were our
coworkers and friends. - There wasn't much resistance. People didn't want to
have any fisticuffs. I remember Dean
Zimmerman being there. - Some of the recently recruited
folks from the proletariat were kind of anxious. - You have 15 minutes before we splatter your
guts all over the walls. These aren't exact quotes. - She had this pipe over my head and she was going to hit me. - They ended up hitting
one of the anarchist and causing a little
injury in the arm. - When she said, "You
have five minutes." I said, "I'm ready to go." - We threw them out and
then we barricaded ourselves in the Warehouse. - The idea was that we'd
shut the Warehouse down for transformation to turn
it into an organization that actually serves
working people better. (upbeat music) - The next day we had every
hippie in town, in the yard. All up in arms. - Mayhem of people
outside who were angry. - They can't take over
a financial institution, like the Warehouse, and then expect
everybody's is gonna go, "Oh yay, take it!" It's not gonna happen. I don't care who you are. - All these discussions
were going on in the yard. - And then inside there
were people debating and talking about
what they were doing. There were people on the roofs. - There was a guy
named Mike Dunn. He was violently opposed to us. He got up on the roof and he
was breaking out the window. And we got to go sit
out on him for hours. It's like one of us sitting
on each of his limbs. - The original co-op people
wouldn't call the police. - That would have violated
a kind of a community norm to have just simply
call the cops. And even if you did,
you have two parties who are claiming
possession of an entity, that's quasi legal. - I was a member of the
Minneapolis City Council. I had some actual,
real political power and I was willing to use
that power to support what I thought was the
advancement of Marxist ideas. - [narrator] But the
militant tactics of the CO were undermining the
credibility of those ideas and making compromise
impossible. - I wanted to negotiate and
talk to the people inside, but as I saw Dean
cross the street, the cop car came between us and then everything
kind of changed. - [narrator] While those
defending the Warehouse were reluctant to involve the
police, the CO had an ally on the city council. - Dean Zimmerman and others
would come up to my office and tell me what was happening. Well, they've turned
off the electricity. So I would call up the
electric company and say, "There's been a problem. Would you turn the
electricity back on?" - The banks had closed
all the accounts. 'Cause somebody had, you
know, when somebody says, "I own the Warehouse." "No, we own the Warehouse." And the bank says,
"Nobody gets any money." - Who owns it? Well, we all own it. Who's we? Everyone! And the police were
just flummoxed. - People were astounded
when they realized that it wasn't set up
as a co-op legally. And then you entered
into all these vague, "Well, who really does own it?" And then who really feels
like it, they own it. That's a whole other thing. And so, yeah. We had to negotiate. (upbeat music) - So after two or three days, the CO announced that the
Warehouse has been transformed and opened up again. What did that mean? Like everything
else the CO said, "What did anything mean?" - We gathered on Monday
morning and we said, "We have to keep going. We have to get food. We got people that want food." - Instead of going back in and violently,
taking it back over. - Came up with a name
and incorporated, and we came up with DANCe which was the Distributing
Alliance of the North Country with a little teeny e. That was for et cetera. So that we can say "dance". And then of course
they called it dank. - Thought it was
pronounced dank. Although I've heard
it pronounced dance. Who put up a little
slogan from Emma Goldman that "if I can't dance, I don't want to be
in your revolution." Not a bad philosophy to have. - Once DANCe formed, a lot of co-ops immediately
transferred their buying loyalty and others brought from both and gradually shifted
at that other group wasn't something they wanted
to be associated with. As well as I think getting
better service from DANCe. - The old warehouse was no
longer what it was before. And so there was
unanimous support for this incredibly
dynamic group of people that just jumped
in and formed it. - Some DANCe supporters
turn to a legal battle to take back the People's
Warehouse from the CO - There was a committee of
people who started talking to lawyers about suing the CO. - The legal moves, which have
brought us to this courthouse. are clearly moves to deceive
the public and to undermine and attack the rising force
of working class struggle. - Two attorneys, Rusty Cargill, balding guy with the
briefcase, Rusty Cargill is basically a lawsuit
that asked the court to declare we were
the rightful owners and controllers of
People's Warehouse. Not the people who
were occupying it. - [narrator] The legal
challenge continued, but the courts weren't
the only battleground. Partisans fought a war of
ideas and recriminations through position papers,
posters, and even comics. - We've agreed with
many of the seal people on certain issues, but we are
interested in alternatives to narrow minded people
exploding macho, violent, and unprincipled tactics. - [narrator] The paper two
coordinators for Mill City wrote in response to the Beanery
workers position paper reflects elitist, illusionary, and distorted views
on social change. - And so these
papers would put out and then they were distributed
around, in different co-ops and they were read a%nd
discussed and argued about. - People would spend hours writing these big
theoretical dissertations and then distribute it. People would actually read
it and they'd sit down and they'd talk about it. People were serious
about politics because it was so personal. - If you're off on a bummer, someone's got to bring it
down to get you off of it. Sometimes they got to be
heavy on you to help you. It's very important that
all of us get as much honest and constructive
criticism as possible. Be a good comrade, criticize. - I read a Hundred Flowers. The hippie newspaper
that had the big story about the Warehouse takeover. And I met with a friend and she was explaining
some of the details to me. And I was completely on the
side of the co-op organization. (upbeat music) - One of the big seal slogans,
which was a Marxist slogan, is "heighten the
contradictions." That was their whole thing
about polarizing people that were at the various stores. By heightening the
contradictions, you find out who has aligned
themselves with the revolution. And then you just, you get
rid of the other people. - I was a pimp. No, okay. - Susie was involved with
starting two other co-ops after her return to the city. Raising money for those
startups was part of her work. Her split with Keith and
the CO had only grown wider. - They put these
one page things out that said Moe Burton was
an opportunist or something and I was a pimp
for raising money. They plastered them all
over the front of the store and around, up and
down the street. - The CO starts pulling out
flyers, accusing Chuck Phoenix, of being a known dope dealer. Of course they were
the Stalinoids. Their methods were
intolerable to a lot of us. - It was like hardcore
Marxist politics. And a lot of people didn't
have a taste for that. They didn't want it. - [narrator] The CO's
aggressive tactics weighed on their most influential
supporter City Council Member, Ed Feliene. - Marxist ideas weren't
really Marxist so much as they were kind of
a gangster Marxism. - [narrator] He was forced
to do something drastic. He switched sides. - And that's when
I wrote my piece on What's Happening
in the Co-op Movement. - [narrator] The only
way to settle questions of an ideological nature is
by the democratic method. The method of
discussion, of criticism, of persuasion, and education. And not by the method of
coercion or repression. - I was always afraid that
they were going to threaten me. So one time when Leif was gone,
they kicked in Chuck's door, who lived upstairs
from me in a fourplex. And so that kind of stuff
makes you very fearful. - There would be predictably
violent responses. And this is part of the process. And this is what is
going to be required because voting and doing things in a nice American
democratic way wasn't going to change the
system fast enough. - [narrator] As the CO
and its People's Warehouse continued to lose
business to DANCe, the CO, again,
turned to violence. This time, against
their former allies. - It was a disagreement
between us and the CO. And that disagreement
had to do over control and what they wanted us to do. And we were really a
community-based co-op. - Moe was a serious activist. Black Panther in the
sixties, did prison time. He has given up a lot
for his political views. It's interesting because
if anybody in the movement would have been receptive to
hardcore Marxist thinking, it would've been Moe. Moe just couldn't take
these guys seriously. - [narrator] Smitty and the
CO insistence on full control was the breaking
point for Moe Burton and the Bryant Central Co-op. They broke off any association
with the co-op organization, effectively switching their
allegiance to the hippies. - And so they came in and
tried to take over our co-op. And they were making threats
and they were calling us and they were doing
all this stuff. - Bob at the insistence
of Smitty was calling Moe at 10:00 at night. 12:00 midnight. 2:00 in the morning. Telling him, "You wanna
come out and fight. - His phone corded. His phone line is cut. Can't get on the phone. What's going on? And then they blow up his truck. ♪ Must be someone ♪ ♪ And even there's pain
down in my throat. ♪ - There was shots fired
that night at our house. It was pretty traumatic. And then we got up
the next morning, and we went to the co-op and it was almost like a
scene out of a Western. - I handed out the leaflets
about the food issue. I don't know, community
control, whatever. - We had about 14 or 15 young
people, including myself working in the co-op and
here comes these guys. And they're going to
physically remove us from the co-op that we built. - All of a sudden,
Moe Burton drives up, and his wife was there too. She was mad. She was spitting mad. She was spitting on the
ground and Moe just got out. He was six five. Great big guy. And Bob was this
little short guy. He came up and started
fighting with us. - And so here's Bob
throwing punches and Moe's like, you know, like, holding the guy by the thing and he's flaying - Moe is laughing really because he just was
kinda pushing Bob down.. - While they were
down the alley, Smitty came along with a cane. Tapping a cane, looking right and left
and walked into the store. He was just checking
out what was going on and then walked away. - He pretty much beat him up. - [narrator] Failing to take
over Bryant Central Co-op and struggling to keep the
People's Warehouse afloat, the CO grew desperate. On January 9th, as the
members of DANCe gathered to legally incorporate, the CO again tried to
take the co-ops by force. - Chris Olsen and I were working at Seward Co-op that morning. I was in the back room and I
heard Chris in the front yell. They started attacking him
and then seconds later, I was being attacked
in the back room. There were three
people attacking me. Five were attacking Chris. There was one volunteer
working for us. She was totally freaked
out, poor woman, and went over to Seward Cafe
next door and told them. And I think they
called the police. - Other reactionaries
and social degenerates, such as Chris Olsen, Leo
Cashman, and Chuck Phoenix have tried to seize
control of the co-op system for their own use. This is a rip off. - They got criticized by the CO for using middle-class
methods, like calling the cops. And the store was returned.. - We were allowed back into
the co-op in the evening. After that, we maintained
control of the co-op. - The day after being
evicted from Seward Co-op, the CO attacked Mill City Foods. - They were gathered
right on that corner. And we were with our backs to
the store kinda linked arms. And we started singing,
"Row, Row, Row, Your Boat." And that just infuriated
them all the more. They start screaming at us. "Idiotic hippies, thinking
that life is just a dream." And so on. ♪ How many times,
baby, I lied to you? ♪ ♪ Lord only knows, what
I will try to do. ♪ - The fact that there was
this physical assault beating of people in a planned
deliberate attack like that, created a lot of
sympathy towards our side and a big backlash
against the CO. - I'm going, "Keith, they
just kicked the door in. They just burned
down Moe's truck." And he knew Moe. It was like, "What's
going on here?" Keith Ruona wants
to believe anything. - It could be really heavy. Really heavy. - [narrator] In it's final
salvo of the co-op wars, the CO attacked North Country
Co-op on March 12th, 1976. - There was going to be a
takeover of North Country Co-op but apparently the
word had gotten out and all the hippies
heard about it. They showed up really fast
and sort of the police. Together, we were escorted out. Times had changed, given
the numbers of people that were with the reactionaries and how quickly they
rallied to the cause to save the traditional
co-op system, at the time. - It took a while,
the case played out in the summer of 1976 and we prevailed. - I think it was partly, we
won the political argument and partly we got better
at being distributor. So that's where people went. - My ex Keith, my
brother-in-law, I never would have thought
they'd get involved in some cult-like thing, but they didn't know what
they were getting into either. - I bought into it way
more than I should have. The last time I saw Smith was that I delivered
my trunk full of books, my Marxist literature to him. I was done with it. - And then everybody
from the CO dispersed. - We stopped being
involved in the co-ops. They went and did
what I was told was called working
class assignments, where you were told to go work. Lived in a place where you would get to understand the
working class better. - A bunch of people
when to Chicago, where they're gonna
get jobs in factories and mingle with the
true proletariat and learn more of that. - The purpose of this
organization was primarily to develop cadre to the point where they could take
over the government and have the skills
and the knowledge and the political strategic
thinking to be able to do that. - I had to go to New Orleans and I knew there was
a couple of groups in New Orleans struggling
to start food co-ops. CO folks called me up and says, "All right, you
ought to come back." That was in the
spring, late spring. Nothing had changed. So I wrote a paper outlining
my problems with the CO. Said I quit. - [narrator] In summary,
it appears to me that the primary
result of the CO's work has been to create
anti-communism. The practice has
been so far off base and has isolated us so
completely from the masses that the damage is irreparable. I don't think we have
time to be saddled to an organization
so counterproductive. I quit. - After that was the beginning
of the end of what would be called the first wave. - Things went on. Kind of an evolutionary process and in a way it was
a cleansing process. - [narrator] Bryant Central,
Mill City, and the Beanery were among the many co-ops
that closed in the decades following the co-op wars. - It's kind of ironic. The CO in a way was right. It's gonna just turn into
another boutique business. Having said that, the
fact that these co-ops have attracted
mainstream customers and supported hundreds of
local farmers is a miracle. It's just a miracle. - Seward Co-ops membership
and sales grew five fold in the two thousands. They decided to use their
success to build a second store in the neighborhood
considered a food desert. They began construction in
2014, just a few blocks away from where Bryant
Central Co-op had stood. (crowd cheering) The issue of how to
include the marginalized has not gone away. Neither have the hard
words and hurt feelings that come with
passionate debate. - Action steps around
gentrification, without black people
being involved. That's just the
bottom line reality. We know about our issues. - We were surprised by
the level of reaction, and we decided that we
needed to hire someone who was more of a
community organizer - I was hired by Seward
Co-op to, I think, do a couple of things. One was to try to translate
the work of Seward Co-op into something that the
community could understand. - Pretty much, we're
right in the middle of the Bryant neighborhood. A black church right here. Black church right here. Black church right here. It's the Black Bible Belt. We're for co-ops. We're not against co-ops,
but more than anything, we are for racial equity
for black and brown people. - They also raised
issues around jobs. Who would get the jobs? Will their children be
able get those jobs? I asked them, "How many people of
color do you employ at the Franklin store?" And they said,
"Fourteen percent." And they're really
proud of that. Fourteen percent, mostly
east African folks. I said, "Well, that's
nothing to be proud of when the Seward
neighborhood itself is almost 50% people of color." - The question of who
will that co-op serve is a fundamental question. And it's being
publicly discussed. It's fantastic. That's the way it should be. - [narrator] Despite over
a year of controversy and attention, the Friendship Store opened
on October 7th, 2015, with a new focus on community. - Hey Tim, how's it going?
[Tim] Hey! - Giving back into
the community I think was probably one of
the biggest things that the organization learned to say, "Wow!" Even though we've been
around for 40 years, we had to go back
and do door knocking. We had to do engagement. We had to get the
community on board. We are now around 36%
of our staff identify as staff of color. - Co-op does not mean organic. Co-op does not mean collective. Co-op does not mean a
whole bunch of things that people have
thought it to mean. It basically means a
democratic form of ownership. - I do believe that the ends
do not justify the means. - It's hard not to make matters
worse, for crying out loud. - I feel like I'm a strong
political person myself, but I don't feel that you
can impose that on everyone. - I was glad that
I quit doing it. Happy to fade away. - That vision, I think some
of us still really believe that it could be
such a better world. It really could
be a better world. - I think co-ops are
at the cutting edge of where we could be in that they have not seen
their time has not passed. It's just beginning. ♪ I remember so dearly ♪ ♪ The times gone by ♪ ♪ It's a dream that
I just can't let go ♪ ♪ We sit in the evening
drinking wine and getting by ♪ ♪ And outside where the
northern beauty go ♪ ♪ I want to live
in my better days ♪ ♪ I want to feel it
come back, come back ♪ ♪ The days were not hard and
we slept through the night ♪
