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 ♪