Transcript of interview with former co-op volunteer / FBI confidential informant

Interviewer: How did you become an FBI informant during the Minnesota food co-op wars of 1975?

Name redacted: Well, when co-ops started forming in the late ‘60s, the FBI thought it was a communist plot. That theory got a lot of traction because many early co-op’ers were actual, literal Communists, mimeographing typewritten Leninist newsletters. You would’ve thought downtown Minneapolis was the Red Square. So it was a case of “let’s just keep an eye on these people.” But since there was a cooperative warehouse in Wisconsin serving as a distribution hub, when co-op-related violence broke out, it crossed state lines. So the FBI went from passive surveillance to active infiltration. When the Minneapolis co-op wars spread to the North Shore in ’75, I was on the short list to infiltrate the Duluth one. A native Duluthian, I had worked undercover before, and I was already a Co-op shopper. I was not a member, but knew some of the early Co-op’ers from church. I wasn’t on the anarcho-communist continuum, and I wasn’t a hippie — I just wanted better food. This made my handlers a little nervous. They started thinking I was a pinko. But I told them, “You couldn’t find a loaf of whole wheat bread in Duluth until the Co-op opened in 1970.” They were eating Wonder Bread baloney sandwiches with mayonnaise, but that convinced them. So the FBI paid for my Co-op membership. Then I signed up for member volunteer work shifts to get on the inside. I stirred buckets of nut butter with a drill attachment, but I heard stuff. I wasn’t the only one, the Feds had an informant in Grand Marais too, and some as far south as Iowa. Minneapolis was the hub, of course; the co-ops down there were popping off like popcorn.

Interviewer: What is your analysis of what the Minnesota co-op wars were about?

Name redacted: Arguments between hippies and communists about whether to be worker-owned, member-owned, neighborhood-owned, open to all; volunteer staff versus paid staff, nonprofit versus for-profit. The tension was between those who wanted a food revolution and those who wanted a revolution revolution.

Interviewer: And who were some of the major players?

Name redacted: For starters, General Manager Kelly McMurdo, a street fighter. She and other anti-war protesters had moved to San Fran, where she supported herself by starting a catering company while learning about back-to-the-land and the co-op food trip. When she came back to Duluth in 1970, she parlayed her experience into the Co-op manager position, as the store was just starting. It was so anti-authoritarian, it wasn’t even incorporated as a business; it was a glorified buying club. And there were these arguments about what kind of store to be. McMurdo said, “Let’s try member-owned. Look, I know how to run a small business profitably, and we can re-invest the profits back into the co-op to expand and stabilize. But you have to just let me run it. Or, fire me and try running it by committee, see where that gets you.” She knew everyone on the five-member board of directors, who had been voted in by the membership specifically to hire her. Later some board candidates ran explicitly against the McMurdo “just let me run it” motto, painting it as a power-grab. McMurdo was seen as an imperialist outrage by a three-member majority of the board by 1975. The two board hippies took a hands-off approach. But the O wanted to seize the Co-op for the revolution.

Interviewer: What was the O?

Name redacted: The Organization — people called it the O. It was the organization of co-op communists and anarcho-syndicalists, with allies in every co-op. See, the hippies saw hiring a manager as a necessary evil, improving the food system from the inside. But the O saw McMurdo as a petite bourgeoisie operating for profit. So they protested inside the Co-op every Saturday — standing on the oat bins — berating their fellow shoppers for betraying the working class by buying organic. The O wanted to broaden the product base to attract more poor people, to organize them against the state. That’s why they demanded co-ops carry margarine, white bread, and Coke — so they could bombard more folks with class analysis.

The hippies were appalled. The high price of organics was the cost of keeping pesticides out of the water table. The way to bring the price down was to sell more of it. Although cliquish and bourgeois, they prioritized the environment and health — you had to be alive to wage class war.

This appalled the anti-capitalist anarchists who would rather give away free white bread — or at least sell it at cost — with an eye toward stringing up the capitalists and bureaucrats by their entrails at some point. Until then, the anarchists were fine selling Coke, even though that meant the Coca-Cola corporation made money. Once the revolution came, they could get that money back when they seized the means of production. This was the background for the war. The O started sending people to beat up workers, firebomb delivery vehicles, and occupy co-ops. Bricks through storefront windows, that sort of thing. They seized a major warehouse, but stores aligned with the hippies boycotted it, which was met with counter-boycotts.

Interviewer: How did the 1975 Duluth Co-op occupation happen?

Name redacted: It actually happened the summer of ’76. The board let McMurdo manage the place, until the O won three out of five seats. And they tried wresting control from her. Ramping up the Saturday protest, their allies occupied the building, threw the workers out, changed the locks, and barricaded the doors. They brought their own cash register, and used it to buy everything off the shelves. Then they absconded at four in the morning. They gave the food to the people’s pantries. As the hippies crowbarred their way back inside the store, they found empty shelves, and their cash register had not captured any sales. They reluctantly called the police, but since the business was not incorporated, the cops couldn’t tell who owned it. The board of directors had authorized the occupation! The police wished everybody luck figuring it out.

The hippies had to deal with the fact that an occupation would happen again the next Saturday. But McMurdo knew it would never stop. So she made a plan to crush it. She had one week to train her staff into a fighting force. First she purged the staff of communists, which she felt bad about, but she comforted herself knowing communists love a good purge. Everybody else got a ten-cent raise, an overall savings to the business. The staff was now a core group of loyalists, a skeleton crew with one job: protect the Co-op.

One loyalist was the broom clerk, a 19-year-old Catholic Worker who had just weaned himself off LSD the previous year. He wanted clean food, protested at the air base, and tricked pretty girls into joining his book club, which turned out to be a Bible study group. But some of them stuck around, so he was the only dude in a Bible study group full of hot Christian chicks. McMurdo overlooked this because she needed bodies, and the kid was a whiz with any cleaning project. He could go far if he just kept it in his pants. In a week she had him stick fighting with brooms and mops.

The cashier was a utopian socialist who would have sided with the O, but was insulted on Saturdays when she got accused of being a class traitor for making $2.25 an hour. Well, there were several cases of over-ordered unpasteurized soymilk that had gone bad. The half-gallon packaging was bulging into football shapes, about to burst. McMurdo stashed the cases on the roof, and put the cashier in charge of them, saying, “Maybe a little pasteurization is a good thing. Damn the torpedoes.”

The stock clerk was a U of M student who couldn’t get to work on time, so he didn’t last long, but he was a whiz with a slingshot. McMurdo encouraged him to experiment. He discovered that shooting dry garbanzo beans from a wrist rocket was surprisingly effective. The aerodynamics of the irregular beans screwed them through the air like little curveballs. They hit with a whap, and they stung, even through denim jackets.

Immediately after the occupation, McMurdo had dialed into the Co-op phone tree, calling for an emergency meeting and a board election. She wanted the O gone. It was Wednesday night when the membership met in the basement of Peace Church. There she convinced them to vote for a board election, and to vote her way. The occupation had cost the O, who got voted out in raucous proceedings. They vowed to occupy the Co-op anyway.

McMurdo pressed the new board to incorporate — and they did, by Friday afternoon. This is what killed the dreams of the communists, and those dreams of a volunteer-run co-op operating without money. Incorporating meant any cash register-swapping scheme would be theft.

But there were potentially dozens of Saturday protestors ready to show up, so McMurdo stationed her forces around the property. Saturday morning, close to a hundred lumpen proletariat armed with sticks and metal pipes took to Fourth Street and marched on the Co-op singing “The Internationale.” But they were met and surrounded by twice that number of petite bourgeoisie hippies pouring out of Chester Creek Park, buttressed by McMurdo’s elite grocery forces, singing “This Land is Your Land.”

As scuffles broke out, the broom clerk fought like the Devil, and when his brooms and mops were broken, members of his book club jumped in wielding stale seven-grain baguettes. The cashier rained down swollen soymilks from the roof, keeping people away from the door. She stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the stock clerk, stinging people with arcing garbanzo beans. And McMurdo was up there with them, dumping 60-pound buckets of bulk liquid laundry detergent over the side, slicking up the corner of 14th Avenue. The loyal members, volunteers, and shoppers closed in on the communists, corralling them toward the avenue, now a slide to the shining lake. One by one, and then in clusters, the slippery communists slid down the hill. Some slid right into Third Street Bakery and started work immediately. But the fever had broken — the occupations stopped, and the avenue looked fresh and clean.

McMurdo retired years ago, lighting out for the territories. You’d think that was the end of an era. But let me tell you, at annual meetings of the national Co-op Grocers Association — to this day — people fight about bringing in Coke. Except now it’s not communists who want to bring it in, but capitalists.

Interviewer: When did you stop working for the FBI?

Name redacted: The violence died down so the FBI quit needing my intel — that must have been 1977. I kept the membership. But the question is not, when did I stop working for the FBI? The question is: when did McMurdo stop working for the CIA?

An index of Jim Richardson’s essays may be found here.