Abstract
A history book that begins with the LSD trip that inspired the idea of the head shop is bound to be enlightening. Joshua Clark Davis’s From Head Shops to Whole Foods is, in fact, an insightful book on what the author calls “activist entrepreneurs” (AEs) in America from the 1960s to the present. To Davis, AEs were businesses that de-emphasized profit and focused instead on collaborating with New Left social movements. Besides selling products related to their causes, these brick-and-mortar stores provided spaces for like-minded activists to organize and discuss their niche issues. Often distrustful of the state, AEs operated in the free market while also maintaining the goal of reforming or even dismantling capitalism. They experimented with alternate business processes and often focused on “limited growth and democratic workplaces” rather than profit (p. 4). To achieve these goals, some AEs established worker and consumer co-ops or collectives. Others, however, embraced profit as part of their activist agendas. While no AEs succeeded in restructuring American society or capitalism, they did change culture by making niche products and social issues more mainstream.
Davis focuses on four radical business types—African American–owned bookstores, head shops, feminist businesses, and natural food sellers—drawing connections between them to show that AEs were a coherent historical phenomenon. After an introduction on the intellectual origins of AEs, a chapter is devoted to each business type, with two concluding chapters explaining developments up to the present. Davis is adept at placing AEs in historical context. Though activist businesses existed in the United States since the nineteenth century, the rise of AEs could only have happened in the second half of the twentieth century. Building on Lizabeth Cohen’s Consumers’ Republic (2003), Davis shows that AEs arose as America’s new consumer culture met the disenchantment caused by the Vietnam War and the radical activism of hippies, second-wave feminists, environmentalists, and the Black Power movement. Though many in the New Left were skeptical of the American fixation on consumption, some saw the opportunity to harness buying power to make political and social changes.
One of these social changes was the “revolution of the mind” that African American bookstore owners hoped to achieve by selling radical texts (p. 7). Drawing inspiration from the late nineteenth-century legacy of self-improvement, these bookstores were driven to uplift African American communities by circulating money within them. Besides selling books, black-owned bookstores provided organizing space for groups such as the Black Panthers, the Congress of Afrikan People, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Like the other activist entrepreneurship businesses Davis discusses, these bookstores faced reprisal, in the form of vandalism and harassment from police and federal officials.
Head shops also hoped to alter national consciousness, but they did so by promoting “meaningful drug use” and selling paraphernalia (p. 7). Hippies like Ron and Jay Thelin, owners of the Psychedelic Shop in Haight-Ashbury, hoped drugs would give Americans new perspectives on Vietnam, civil rights, and American society more generally. Stores such as theirs also provided space for advocates of drug legalization and decriminalization. Two legal reform groups, Amorphia and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), used money from affiliated head shops to fund their campaigns. Head shops faced backlash from many groups. The police often suspected that drugs were being sold and used in them; radical groups accused them of profiting off hippie culture; and, by the 1970s, concerned parents argued they promoted adolescent drug use.
Like black bookstores, a diversity of feminist and lesbian AEs embraced self-help, arguing that female business ownership decreased reliance on patriarchal institutions. Publisher Diana Press bragged that “men don’t touch any job we do” (p. 148). Feminist AEs were also criticized. Some feminists questioned profiting from the movement, while the most radical feminists questioned the idea of profit in general. Radicals, notably the lesbian group the Furies, opened collectives in which distinctions between workers, managers, and owners were blurred. Divisions between feminist AEs were so intense that when Diana Press was vandalized in 1977, the owners questioned whether the assailants were from the government, the Right, or hostile feminist groups. Davis claims that by concentrating on alternative business processes, such as co-ops and collectives, feminists put more energy into “making capitalism more humane” than did other business types (p. 174).
Business structure and process were also important for the 400 natural food stores that opened in the United States by 1972 (p. 192). Beginning in 1964 with a store called Erewhon, these small grocery stores had the goal of changing agriculture and improving health through vegetarianism, environmentalism, and the promotion of animal rights. Inspired by economist E. F. Schumacher’s idea that “small is beautiful,” these AEs saw large corporate grocery stores as adversaries. Readers might be surprised that the now-massive business Whole Foods, a company Davis discusses from conception to the present, originally rejected growth.
The final two chapters of the book follow activist entrepreneurship to contemporary times. Although most AEs failed after five years, the movement has two long-term legacies (p. 28). The first is the cultural adaptation of aspects of all four activist entrepreneurship groups, though it came at the expense of their radical goals. Radical black-owned bookstores declined alongside the Black Panthers in the late 1970s, Davis argues. Though black-owned bookstores boomed again in the 1990s these new stores de-emphasized radical texts and reform. Black authors of many genres are now sold alongside white authors but these books are sold by megastores with no reform agenda. By the 1970s, record stores, convenient marts, and drug stores began selling similar products as head shops, and marijuana was decriminalized in several states. These changes show that head shops were successful in making some drugs mainstream, but at the same time, these stores dropped their political agenda to focus on profit and pleasure. Feminist AEs of the 1960s and 1970s must have appreciated that female business ownership increased fourfold between 1977 and 1987, but by the 1980s female entrepreneurs were focused on profits not social transformation (p. 171). None of these activist entrepreneurship groups were as successful as natural food businesses, which are fixtures in America today. To gain this success, Whole Foods grew to gigantic proportions to the detriment of their workers and their original “small is beautiful” agenda.
The other long-term effect of activist entrepreneurship is that business activism was appropriated by companies who sought to reform their images through socially responsible facades. Some do this by “greenwashing” or selling “green” products while making no larger reform commitment. Similarly, the “buy local” movement has only a vague political agenda. Apple and some Silicon Valley companies adopted radical goals and business processes but never detached social activism from profit in the way AEs often did.
Davis’s book is well suited in Columbia’s Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism series because it is a superb example of the new history of capitalism. Davis defines capitalism early in the book and shows that some of these businesses fit into the system whereas others tried to be minimally or not at all capitalist. Another way to think about AEs that Davis does not consider is that these businesses neither fit into nor rejected capitalism, but instead they helped to create a new type of capitalism building on existing institutions. The histories of capitalism that have been published in the past ten years have shown that capitalism is not a monolithic historical force; it is contingent on time and place, and all forms of capitalism change with time. The capitalism that AEs created was transitory and sometimes hypocritical, but it had lasting effects, proving that businesses could do more than make profits. As Davis explains, AEs were precursors to modern solidarity economics, low-profit limited-liability companies, and several national organizations of responsible businesses. Furthermore, AEs inspired the benefit corporation tax status and the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification.
Another aspect of the book that places it into the new history of capitalism is the way that Davis masterfully blends business and social history. He explains the strategies of social movements and entrepreneurs, describing their successes and failures, while also explaining the experiences of consumers. His success in blending business and social history comes at the expense of labor history, however, as workers are given less attention than entrepreneurs. Co-ops, collectives, and unions are given some consideration but little is written on what working for AEs was like. As Davis points out, small businesses, particularly those that failed, have been disregarded by historians, as have small business workers. Historically, however, most Americans worked for themselves, family firms, or small businesses. The workforces of small businesses have had a large impact on their organizations’ success, and ignoring their role can make business owners seem like the sole shapers of historical change. I am hopeful From Head Shops to Whole Foods will inspire more research on small businesses and their workers. As Davis suggests, histories of small co-ops and collectives might be especially insightful.