Everyone who uses the Internet, a good search engine, and is at least a little distractible (or much too curious) has had the experience of starting in one perfectly sensible place, and ending up finding themselves reading or seeing something seemingly quite unrelated and often bizarre or unbelievable. This isn't really the result of a random walk, which obviously can lead one badly astray, rather it is the result just stepping slightly off-course, just a little bit, at every junction of the search. I suppose it is a bit like the old party game of telephone, where the initial message slips slightly awry with each transmission.
In commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War I have been reading a lot of things about the War that somehow I never got around to before. At the moment I am being guided around Chattanooga, Tennessee in the Fall of 1863, by Shelby Foote. The Union Army of the Cumberland was, for all intents and purposes, besieged. The commander who had gotten them into that fix had been relieved, and General George Thomas put in his place, while over-all command of the whole region had been settled on Ulysses S. Grant. Grant sent Thomas an urgent message, saying that it was necessary for him to hold on there, and Thomas replied that he and his troops would stay until they starved. When, not too long after this, Grant managed to get to Chattanooga to assess the situation in person, he discovered that Thomas was not using rhetorical hyperbole: the troops actually were beginning to starve. So Grant's first priority was to open a new way to get food to the soldiers, which he did within a week. The soldiers referred to this new route into the city as "The Cracker Line" and were glad to finally get enough to eat, especially considering it was late November and the place was getting pretty damn cold.
The troops had been subsisting on rations consisting of three pieces of hard tack and a quarter pound of salt pork, to last for three days. Sometimes they got a little beef, which was driven in over a sixty mile trail with no forage, the soldiers called this meat "beef dried on the hoof." Thinking about their rations, good and bad, led me to wonder just what ordinary Americans usually ate in the middle of the 19th century.
Doing a quick Google on 19th century American diet led me to a promising sounding article at JSTOR. The article turned out to be available for free, if you opened an account, so I did. I tried searching for more of the same, and discovered that the JSTOR search engine sucked, so went back to Google and specified the search this way:
19th century diet america site:www.jstor.org
Which brought up a whole list of really fascinating sounding things, something like "Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America" is hard to resist, but I kept my focus on the more general goal and investigated the review of a book of essays about eating in America. However, in the course of electronically leafing thru the review I came across a statement casually referring to the "co-op wars in Minneapolis in the the 1970s." What in the world? I couldn't resist and I Googled the topic. And to my astonishment discovered there is an actual Wikipedia entry about a political group that called itself "The O" and was a major player in said co-op wars. There is also a nice article about the North Country Co-op at the Minnesota Historical Society.
I personally was hard pressed to figure out how anything could go wrong with food co-ops. OK, the initial name of "People's Pantry" was pretty goofy, but it was 1970 and hippiedom was still in flower, even if the blossoms were starting to droop. I myself had been to San Francisco several times in the late sixties, and while I didn't wear a flower in my hair, I did stay at the Diggers one time. It was all great while it lasted, and it was a visit to SF that inspired the founder of the first Minneapolis food co-op. So what did go wrong? As it turns out, politics.
This will sound strangely familiar to some of us in several different ways. First off there were two different philosophies about the food the co-ops should offer. One group favored buying wholesome food in bulk--the sorts of food that are currently still in short supply in the urban food deserts. Another group wanted to offer cheap popular food. By the mid-1970s there were twenty to thirty co-op stores in the "Northcountry" area, depending on how you drew boundaries. One would think there would be room for both philosophies, where people could choose the type of co-op they preferred. But we're talking about people and politics, and what seems reasonable and sensible often isn't what happens, even in regard to such a seemingly trivial or simple matter as local food co-ops.
The second major divide, and the one that led to the wars, involved broader political divisions. One group organized as the "The Co-op Organization" and they were very much into movement politics. They defined themselves as revolutionaries who maintained that the middle class hippies and their healthy food nonsense were missing the point. They believed their opponents were just social elitists who had failed to organize in any effective way to aid the working class. This band of revolutionaries set out to take over the entire co-op movement and its physical assets. The co-op wars erupted when the CO began to occupy things like the People's Warehouse, and also attempted to take over several storefronts. At one point their efforts were "overruled by a crowd of angry community residents and co-op members who stormed the store, installed a new cash register, and demanded that CO members leave the store."
In 1976 the North Country Co-op managed to get its act back together, with a little bit of a compromise in terms of food philosophy, deciding "to include canned goods, white bread, and for a short time, refined white sugar." Meanwhile the political radicals seem to have degenerated into a political cult, and became so secretive that they disappeared from view, and may have ended altogether in the 1990s. The life of the North Country Co-op finally ended in 2007, done in by capitalist competition.
And I found myself wondering about the members of the leftist cult, just as I constantly find myself wondering about the Civil War Southerners: what were they thinking? My brother recently told me he had reached the conclusion that all humans are crazy. Perhaps that's the most we can know about such things. Dierks Bently has a song with the refrain, "I know what I was feelin' but what was I thinkin'?" Perhaps that's as close as I'm going to get to understanding these things: the people involved were acting on their feelings, not on any sane analysis of what would happen as a result of their actions.