Following the corporate takeover of the grocery business, and more broadly large capitalists’ role in the stock market crash and Great Depression, working-class people began to seek out more democratic forms of consumption. Enter the consumer cooperative, where members shared the labor of running stores and invested the profits back into their communities. By 1944, more than 1.5 million people had joined a cooperative, an increase of 800 percent from a few years before. Already constrained by state legislatures, retailers were suddenly also at war with progressive consumer-activists.
Black people were instrumental in developing a thriving cooperative movement. Barred from many stores due to Jim Crow laws in the South and racial discrimination in the North, blacks saw economic cooperation as a means of survival. It was a way to build on what the scholar Jessica Gordon Nembhard has called “a broad tradition of populism and economic justice,” and what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “spirit of revolt” that had begun during slavery.
One of the most successful cooperatives of the era was established in a Chicago housing project and named after the journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells. The connection between Wells and the food distribution question was far from tenuous: Wells’s legendary career had begun in the 1890s with her investigation of the lynching of three men in Memphis — the same city where Saunders would later open the first Piggly Wiggly — after they opened the “People’s Grocery,” a cooperative that threatened a white grocer’s monopoly on the business.
Another black-led cooperative, the Young Negroes Cooperative League, was helmed by Ella Baker who would go on to lead the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr. “The soil and all of its resources,” she said in a 1935 interview, “will be reclaimed by its rightful owners — the working masses of the world.” For the civil rights activist, economic cooperation among working people was a key to establishing socialism.
This militant and ambitious rhetoric explains why the cooperative consumer movement became a target of the anti-communist Red Scare starting in the late 1930s and lasting until the 1960s. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) leveled the sensational charge that nearly all consumer groups in the United States were led by communists. HUAC accused co-ops and consumer activists of attempting to “discredit free enterprise in the United States,” a charge that made newspaper headlines around the country.
The scholar Landon Storrs has argued that cooperative organizations were targeted with the same vitriol as the “labor, anti-fascist, and civil rights causes” that also came under attack during the era. The result was devastating to a movement committed to black liberation and economic cooperation. Amid the Red Scare, shoppers began to distance themselves from cooperative stores maligned as un-American.
As co-ops were being denounced as a Soviet plot, self-service retail outlets were being heralded as symbols of economic freedom. The State Department opened model stores in Europe in the 1950s to convince the continent’s consumers that capitalism filled bellies best. The scholar Tracey Deutsch described one international tour where shoppers in Southern and Eastern Europe “were treated to exhibits of . . . checkout lanes, refrigerated cases for produce and frozen foods, and . . . gravity defying towers of canned goods.” Customers flocked to the stores. “Heaven must be like this,” one shopper said in response to the abundance on display.