One Question Online Quiz: What Generational Archetype are You?
A couple of Washington, D.C., policy-writers developed new careers for themselves in the early 1990s when they published a book outlining a repeating cycle of American history and generational archetypes since 1584 (GENERATIONS: The History of America’s Future). William Strauss and Neil Howe argued that there are four generational archetypes that recur based on the cycle of history they are born into...
1973: The Year of the Pheonix
While the 1960s are generally thought of as the political awakening of the Baby Boomer generation, the 1970s weren’t exactly a historical snooze. Many of the people who started the Twin Cities food co-ops had been involved in 60s activism, and they continued this work, either within the co-ops or alongside them. But organic and local were not the powerhouse bywords then that they are today...
A Cooperative Commonwealth in Minnesota?
Tenants Union Drawn into Co-op War
Echoes of the Co-op Wars in the Occupy Movement
In this interview for Radical Roots from 2013, ex-Cooperative Organization (CO) member Lynette Malles reflects on the divisions within the Twin Cities Occupy movement that resemble those in the early co-op movement, and how Occupy Homes flirted with the techniques that did so much damage when practiced by the CO...
The C.O.: The Cult that Controlled Everything from Sex to Farts(?!)
The New Riv is Born: Less Smoke and Free Music
Riverside Cafe: The Evolution of Food Politics
In this video, former Riverside Cafe collective member Mary Alice Smalls reminisces about the evolution of the food served at the cafe. The cafe began with an emphasis on vegetarianism and affordability, and then changed with the community’s greater awareness of the value of local and organic food and the plight of farmworkers...
Riverside Cafe: A Community for Misfits
Another Side of the Peoples Warehouse Takeover
Earlier today we posted an excerpt of our interview with Gary Cunningham that included his description of what it was like to be part of the Co-op Organization’s (CO) takeover of the Peoples’ Warehouse in May of 1975. Here’s an excerpt from our interview with Ken Logsdon about what it was like to be one of the people that the CO kicked out.
Minneapolis Mayor's Husband Breaks Marxist's Arm Defending His Co-op in Street Brawl!
Bryant-Central: Three Tries at a Co-op
Donald Rumsfeld and the Lost Co-op of the North Side
An Alternative Economy to Support You in Your Revolutionary Old Age
Co-op War I: Stalin vs. the Finnish-Americans
The “Co-op Wars” story which we are covering in Radical Roots had an interesting parallel in the 1920s among the first wave of food co-ops in Northern Minnesota, in which another Communist autocrat tried to take over the co-ops for his own purposes. Except this was no secret leader of a tiny sect, this was Joseph Stalin himself...
The Midcentury African-American Co-ops of the Twin Cities
So right as this old wave is coming to a close, at least for the grocery co-ops, the folks in your documentary are first getting the idea that maybe we should just put some food out on a porch or we should find a way to do this at cost. It’s an interesting notion that as soon as the one wave recedes the other one starts to pick up the pace...
Mao in the Co-ops
Interviewing many co-op founders, it has been striking that so many young radicals of the time were so inspired by Mao and the Chinese revolution. While the glum bureaucracy of the Soviet Union was hardly compelling, the apparent energy of the Chinese revolution, along with the Marxist revolutions throughout the Third World, seemed like a viable alternative to American capitalism and imperialism...
Two Ways to Peace: Draft Resistance and Co-ops
Many of the people who started the first natural food co-ops had cut their teeth in, or at least been inspired by, two other movements: the Civil Rights movement and the movement against the Vietnam War. Dave Gutknecht, longtime editor of Cooperative Grocer, was instrumental in the Twin Cities Draft Information Center, which was founded in 1967 and destroyed by a bomb blast soon after...
