AMERICANCOUNTERCULTURESAn Encyclopedia of Nonconformists, Alternative

Lifestyles, and Radical Ideas in U.S. History

Volume One

Edited byGina JVIIsiroglii - -

SHARPE REFERENCEan imprint of S^.E. Sharpe, Inc. ^

184 Cooperatives, Consumer

of government (and sometimes alien or paranormal) intrigue. The film Conspiracy Theory (1997) depicts a paranoid New York City taxi driver (played by Mel Gibson) who discovers that the various conspiracy theo­ries he has constructed over the years are indeed real.

Despite their ubiquity in American culture, most conspiracy theories are built on a fatally erroneous as­sumption about the real efficacy of conspiracies. As his­torian Bruce Cumings puts it, “if conspiracies exist, they rarely move history; they make a difference at the mar­gins from time to time, but with the unforeseen conse­quences of a logic outside the control of their authors: and this is what is wrong with ‘conspiracy theory.’ ”

^ichael A. Martin

See also-. COINTELPRO; UFOs.

Further ReadingConason, Joe. It Can Happen Here. New York: St. Martin’s, 2007. Fenster, Mark. Conspiracy Theories. Minneapolis: University of Min­

nesota Press, 1999.Hitchens, Christopher. “On the Imagination of Conspiracy.” In For

the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports. London: Verso, 1993.

Hofstadter, Richard. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Harper’s, November 1964.

Palast, Greg. Armed Madhouse. New York: Penguin, 2006.---------- . The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Truth About Corpo­

rate Cons, Globalization and High-Finance Fraudsters. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Perkins, John. The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth About Global Corruption. New York: Dutton, 2007.

Pipes, Daniel. Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From. New York: Free Press, 1997.

Cooperatives, ConsumerConsumer cooperatives constitute an alternative form of merchandise distribution that uses a combination of shared ownership and membership governance to al­low a group of like-minded citizens to control how they purchase goods. Through the democratic control of a commercial enterprise such as a grocery store, con­sumer cooperatives empower their members to have a greater say in the products available,, to exert more influence on the working conditions of retail, manu­facturing, and agricultural labor, and to voice their collective concerns over social issues such as environ­mental sustainability.

Through open, voluntary organizations in which citizens accept rules of membership and either one-time

or recurring financial investments, consumer coopera­tives have allowed the evolving American counter­culture to critique the inequality and competitiveness inherent in free-market capitalism for nearly 200 years. At the same time, they have provided members with a method of binding themselves together to communi­cate a desire for progressive change in American politi­cal, social, and cultural values.

Cooperatives in America began as early as 1752, with Benjamin Franklin and the Philadelphia Contri- butionship, a mutual fire insurance association, and they have been present in European and American so­ciety since the beginnings of industrialization. Robert Owen, a Welsh factory manager, labor advocate, and outspoken critic of laissez-faire econoihics, came from England to found the New Harmony community in Indiana in 1825; he promoted the social and economic benefits of cooperative living before Congress and in cities across the country. The model for what became the modern consumer cooperative was the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, founded partly* by Owenites in Rochdale, England, in 1844. It legally registered a store, incorporated a set of fundamental cooperative principles into its charter, and is still in operation.

The first consumer cooperatives in the United States were begun by farmers. By the late nineteenth century, labor unions such as the Knights of Labor, as well as farmers’ groups such as the National Grange and the Farmers’ Alliance, had established numerous merchandise stores in order to supply essential goods to their members at shared costs, while providing con­sistent markets for local producers. These early Ameri­can attempts largely failed as the populist tide subsided and with the demise of the Knights of Labor.

By the end of the century, however, with continued economic and labor strife, cooperative ideas again gar­nered attention from intellectuals and social activists, such as economics professor and prominent progressive thinker Richard Ely. In 1922, the Capper-Volstead Act finally legalized farmers’ cooperatives.

Strengthened by the interest of Russian, Jewish, Finnish, and other immigrant groups, the ranks of consumer cooperatives grew again after the turn of the ’ twentieth century, including several with pronounced radical political agendas, such as the Jukola coopera­tive in Virginia, Minnesota. The Cooperative League of America formed in 1916, and cooperatives gradually became less class conscious, although still politically left-leaning, and more concerned with consumer and democratic control.

Cooperatives, Consumer 185

The Great Depression witnessed a surge in con­sumer cooperatives, particularly in areas with a history of back-to-the-land movements and cooperative settle­ments, such as rural New England. For example, the Hanover Food Co-op of Hanover, Vermont, has been in continual operation in a region sympathetic to coop­erative enterprise since it was founded in 1936.

That same year, the famous writer, muckraker, and political activist Upton Sinclair published Co-op: A Novel of Living Together, and cooperatives were an integral part of the End Poverty in California (EPIC) programs, the platform for his nearly successful California gubernato­rial campaign. EPIC inspired numerous buying clubs across the state, including the first co-ops in Berkeley, and local EPIC clubs sprang up around the nation.

During the Depression years, community organi­zations and labor union members launched a majority of the 2,400 co-op stores tallied by the government in 1936, although city and suburban neighbors also joined. With more than 3^30,500 members, consumer co-ops were responsible for 1.5 percent of all retail sales nationally during the 1930s.

After World War II, cooperatives in all sectors began consolidating, and the numbers of consumer cooperatives, again dwindled. However, the possibility that cooperatives offered of locally controlled, counter- cultural alternatives to corporate business and their rebuke of the perceived materialism and conformism associated with middle-class affluence led to their re­ceiving renewed attention from political and cultural radicals during the 1960s.

Consumer cooperatives attracted young leaders, such as antiwar activist and longtime editor of Cooperative Gro­cer magazine David Gutknecht and consumer food advo­cate Ronnie Collins, as well as interest from more radical groups such as the Black Panther Party. Art Danforth, prolific writer, peace activist, and expert on the legal and financial aspects of consumer cooperatives, helped younger organizers integrate cooperatives into the growing coun­terculture movement taking shape.

Meanwhile, universities began establishing re­search institutions .devoted to developing cooperatives. For example, the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives was established in 1962, and numerous other university cooperative extensions followed suit.

By the early 1970s, a new generation of consumer cooperatives emerged. These tended to be much more centered on lifestyle choices, often embodying aspects of New Age culture, alternative and homeopathic medicine, and the increasingly influential natural and organic foods movement. Many, such as the Sevananda

Natural Foods Market, founded in Atlanta in 1974, also published alternative journals and began aggres­sive consumer education efforts. The Wedge Natural Foods Co-op, also founded in 1974, has become an institution in Minneapolis, Minnesota, contributing money to nonprofit and community organizations through donations and grants. The Weavers Way Co-op, founded in 1972 in Philadelphia, expanded be­yond selling groceries from its storefront in a historic neighborhood to include an organic farm, coffee shop, and pet supply store. These new-generation coopera­tives relied on strong member investment and com­mitment to counteract weakening farm and industrial sectors and to address growing concerns over product safety and environmental degradation.

Despite the renewed popularity of consumer coop­eratives, several stores soon experienced severe financial distress, with several closures during the 1980s and early 1990s, while more centralized, national cooperative busi­nesses, such as REI (for Recreational Equipment, Inc.), the Seattle-based outdoor-equipment retailer, continued to grow and expand their services. In response, national organizations, such as the National Cooperative Busi­ness Association and the National Cooperative Grocers Association, began trying to unite cooperatives across the United States in order to establish more, and more financially secure, consumer cooperatives.

Alongside larger consumer cooperatives, such as REI, are the hundreds of local cooperative market stores, farmers’ markets, and wholesale buying clubs, such as Costco and Sam’s Club, that persist and grow in number every year. Consumer cooperatives are found throughout the United States and increasingly in the Pacific Northwest, although they are most prev­alent in New England and the upper Midwest states.

Joshua Youngblood

See also: Cooperatives, Producer.

Further ReadingCo-op Handbook Collective, The. The Food Co-op Handbook: How to

Bypass Supermarkets to Control the Quality and Price of Your Pood. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.

Furlough, Ellen, and Carl Strikwerda, “From Cooperative Common­wealth to Cooperative Democracy: The American Cooperative Ideal, 1880—1940.” In Consumers Against Capitalism? Consumer Cooperation in Europe, North America, andJapan, 1840-1990, ed. Ellen Furlough and Carl Strikwerda. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999-

Merrett, Christopher D., and Norman Walzer. Cooperative and Local Development: Theory and Applications for the 21st Century. Ar- monk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004.

186 Cooperatives, Producer

Rozwenc, Edwin Charles. Cooperdtives Come to America: The American Utopian Adventure. Philadelphia: Porcupine, 1975.

Cooperatives, ProducerProducer cooperatives are a means for farmers and manufacturing labor to assert greater control over the distribution and sale value of their goods while ensur­ing that essential goods and supplies are available and affordable to the producers themselves. Often included in the radical political agendas of labor unions and utopian reform moverhents, producer cooperatives rep­resent an effort to strike a balance between the inter­ests of the farmers and workers whcf make consumer goods on one side, and the business interests that most often profit from the sale of those goods on the other. Producer cooperatives have served prominent roles in counterculture movements at different stages in Amer­ican history, such as the populist uprising of the late nineteenth century. Other producer cooperatives have found acceptance in mainstream society; the most suc-

The Order of the Patrons of Husbandry, or Grange, was a network of local agricultural organizations in the 1860s and 1870s that established a cooperative purchasing program and sponsored farmer-run stores, shared grain elevators, and central warehouses. (Library of Congress)

cessful ventures have survived and flourished by em­bracing a more centrist commercial image. * •

During the 1830s, protective trade unions estab­lished cooperatives to resolve work floor disputes and to procure fair prices for the work of craftsmen and artisans. This early movement for labor cooperatives did not survive the turbulent economic trends in the decades before the American Civil War. During the 1860s, however, the Knights of Labor formed a broad-based collection of trade and labor unions, and the organization employed cooperative strategies to help workers; this effort represents one of the most radical attempts to reshape American society by em­powering the ranks of labor. More than 500 coopera­tive workshops and factories were in operation in the three decades after the Civil War, before the collapse of the Knights of Labor in the 1880s. The Knights of Labor was the last large-scale effort to use cooperatives as a method of labor reform in the United States.

In 1867, Oliver H. Kelley, a government employee living in Washington, D.C., started the Grange (now the National Grange), a Masonic-inspired network of local organizations that promoted self-help and coordi­nation among farmers. The organization quickly spread across the Midwest and South, with a total of more than 25,000 local Granges founded during the 1870s. The Grange sponsored cooperative farmer-run stores and established grain elevators, central warehouses, and wholesale centers.

After the economic recessions of the 1870s, includ­ing the devastating Panic of 1873, and growing politi­cal unrest among farmers, the Farmers’ Alliance was founded in Texas in 1877, gaining strong support among economically depressed farmers throughout the South and Midwest. The Farmers’ Alliance employed travel­ing lecturers and organizers who set up cooperatives and suballiances to coordinate seed and equipment and to ensure that farmers had affordable access to ba­sic necessities. Emphasizing the need for farmers to retake the agricultural economy from business inter­ests, the Farmers’ Alliance, according to one strain of historical assessment, offered a countercultural critique of national trends. The United States, they believed, was becoming ever more urban, materialistic, and dis­respectful of the self-sufficient, republican ideal on which the nation was founded.

Emerging out of protests in the South over the crop-lien system, the Farmers’ Alliance was overtly po­litical and more radical than previous farmer organi­zations. By the 1890s, it had laid the groundwork for a national wave of populism and the significant, if

Coyote, Peter 187

short-lived, political challenge to the two-party system by the People’s Party.

With the rise of the farmers’ union movement at the turn of the century, led by less radical organiza­tions, such as the American Society of Equity (estab­lished in Indiana in 1902), the Farmers’ Educational and Cooperative Union (founded in Texas in the same year), the National Farmer’s Union, and the American Farm Bureau, there were more than 14,000 coopera­tives operating in the United States by 1920.

In 1922, the Capper-Volstead Act recognized the right of farmers to produce and market their products cooperatively. It reflected a growing acceptance of pro­ducer cooperatives as a reasonable form of economic combination (in contrast to business "trusts”) that suc­cessfully helped sustain farmer livelihoods.

Cooperatives were integral to helping farmers survive the Great Depression of the 1930s, although tenant farm­ers and sharecroppers in the South were among those hardest hit by falling crop j^rices and incomplete federal measures to protect landless farmers and unskilled work­ers. New Deal banking measures, in addition to national cooperative financial and organization institutions, helped ensure that producer cooperatives had access to the re­sources they needed to continue providing essential ser­vices to farmers and agriculture processors.

After World War II, producer cooperatives became more centralized, with most smaller regional coopera­tives swallowed by consolidation. During the 1950s and again in the 1970s, agriculture co-ops amalgam­ated resources for bringing their products to market, including the costs of supply distribution and market­ing in addition to the actual growing and processing.

By the 1970s, cooperatives were plagued by prob­lems, as they attempted to evolve strategies to compete against monolithic corporations and vertically inte­grated firms with networks of subsidiaries, joint ven­tures, and outsourced labor. Since the late twentieth century, producer cooperatives have explicitly rein­fused core principles into their organizations, includ­ing the goals of saving family farms and reducing environmental impact in the hope that cooperative ventures can again offer a more socially responsible al­ternative to unfettered corporate capitalism.

The Frontier Natural Products Cooperative, founded in 1976 and located in Norway, Iowa, is jointly owned by its wholesale customers. It has carved out a unique place among producers catering to the demands of the post-1960s counterculture by offering products as diverse as gourmet cinnamon and a full line of aro­matherapy oils. The company promotes the sustainable

cultivation of herbs and plants both in its home fields and in environmentally endangered regions around the world, where many of the medicinal herbs originate.

The Organic Valley Family of Farms, founded in Wisconsin in 1988, has formed a nationwide network of dairy and meat producers that have successfully competed in the expanding market for organic foods. It has stayed true to its central purpose of protecting small family farms by facilitating the cooperative mar­keting of high-quality goods through the most sus­tainable and equitable means possible.

Producer cooperatives providing specialty prod­ucts such as beer, herbal tea, and natural cosmetics have achieved success since the mid-1970s by respond­ing to the natural food and alternative lifestyle mar­kets, while traditional producer cooperatives, such as Land O’Lakes, founded as the Minnesota Cooperative Creameries Association in 1921, and Sun-Diamond Growers, continued to utilize cooperative structures and producer ownership to compete in a modern mar­ketplace increasingly dominated by multinational corporations.

Joshua Youngblood

See also: Cooperatives, Consumer.

Further ReadingFurlough, Ellen, and Carl Strikwerda. “From Cooperative Common­

wealth to Cooperative Democracy: The American Cooperative Ideal, 1880—1940.” In Consumers Against Capitalism? Consumer Cooperation in Europe, North America, andJapan, 1840—1990, ed. Ellen Furlough and Carl Strikwerda. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999-

Leikin, Steven. “The Citizen Producer: The Rise and Fall of Working-Class Cooperatives in the United States.” In Consumers Against Capitalism? Consumer Cooperation in Europe, North Amer­ica, andJapan, 1840-1990, ed. Ellen Furlough and Carl Strikw­erda. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999-

Merrett, Christopher D., and Norman Walzer. Cooperative and Local Development: Theory and Applications for the 21st Century. Ar- monk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004.

Montgomery, David. The Pall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1923. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Rozwenc, Edwin Charles. Cooperatives Come to America: The American Utopian Adventure. Philadelphia: Porcupine, 1975.

U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Business-Cooperative Service. Co-ops 101: An Introduction to Cooperatives. Cooperative Informa­tion Report 55. June 1997.

Coyote, Peter (1941-)Peter Coyote is an American actor, voice-over artist, and arts advocate who began his career in entertainment as a