For many countercultural and New Left radicals in the 1960s, consumer capitalism's postwar ascendance ruined the United States. It manipulated Americans into buying things they did not need, distracting them from the more important things in life. It perpetuated social inequality, corporate concentration, and market idolatry. Yet, as Joshua Clark Davis's insightful and deeply researched new book, From Head Shops to Whole Foods, demonstrates, some of those very anticapitalist critics opened businesses. But they did so as “activist entrepreneurs” in material and ideological support of the social movements of the era. In case studies of black bookstores, head shops, feminist operations, and natural-foods stores, Clark Davis considers the successes and failures of these business interventions for political change. What he finds is that although “activist enterprises” (3) did not unseat consumer capitalism (as some rebels had hoped), they did carve out “free spaces” (21) for nonconformists and social outcasts. They provided naturalist hippies, feminists, black power advocates, and stoners with “right livelihood” (24). They created models for democratic, sometimes anarchic, management and business organization. And they spread movement ideas and goods far and wide. While most activist enterprises had expired by the late 1970s, from either burnout or the inability to square business realism with movement idealism, they permanently unsettled the marketplace, muddying the lines between politics and commerce.

Although all activist shops had political ambitions, some were more successful at advancing social justice and others at promoting alternative merchandise. For Clark Davis, feminist bookstores, credit unions, and other institutions more completely actualized their cause's “process, products, and places” than other activist businesses (4). Debate about the feminist utility of women's entrepreneurship was vibrant and heated through the 1970s, producing some of the most critically astute analyses of the relationship between business and politics. Black bookstores succeeded in spreading Afrocentric and black literature, history, and ideology, but eschewed the experimental anticapitalism and communal practices adopted by food co-ops and many feminist ventures. Movement factionalism, mainstream retailers’ adoption of black literary products, FBI and police harassment, and business mismanagement did black bookstores in. But while in existence, they realized the black power aim of “community control,” providing African Americans with “sites of liberation and empowerment” (46, 37). Head shops and natural-foods stores which were more tightly associated with the drug counterculture and back-to-land hippie naturalism than with 1960s social movements achieved longevity and commercial gain more than clear political affect.

Clark Davis perhaps doesn't give enough emphasis to the fact that the socioeconomic positionality of activist entrepreneurs, the products they sold, and the customers they served determined the political consequence of their businesses and their shops’ instrumentality to social movements. There was simply more at stake for feminist, lesbian, and black entrepreneurs. Entering the white, heterocentric, and male-dominated credit union, bookstore, restaurant, publishing, magazine marketplaces was a disruptive act for women, lesbians, and African Americans. Doing so with a pro-black or pro-woman/lesbian program made them all the more confrontational and inherently political. Feminist credit unions upended centuries-old sexist banking practices, ensuring women customers’ right to economic self-determination – a central objective of the feminist movement. Lesbian restaurants, cafes, and bookstores gave an ostracized and underground community protected havens for open association and creative expression – a clear goal of the gay rights movement. Black bookstores claimed independence from a discriminatory economic system and nurtured racial consciousness – prime aims of the black power movement.

While head shops suffered constant police and reformer persecution, their primarily white, upper-middle-class, male customers and sellers were not breaking class, racial, or sexual/gender conventions by becoming shopowners or hip consumers. And their final goal – to legalize pot so that everyone could expand their consciousness – was amorphously political and was linked to the counterculture more than to a social movement. As for natural-foods stores, Clark Davis states that they were related to “environmentalism, pacifism, animal rights, anarchism, and the counterculture” (191). Perhaps this diffusion of commitments impeded a unifying political purpose for natural-foods retailers and shoppers. Although natural-foods businessmen, like John Mackey, employed movement patois and style to make Whole Foods the most successful activist enterprise considered, he did so vapidly and with profit share as his bottom line. Finally, it seems that health protectivism and gastronomic distinction, long-standing white, upper-middle-class American concerns, became natural-foods businesses’ guarantor. Clark Davis does attend to these differences, but perhaps not as precisely as he could have done. A rather minor complaint of this otherwise very readable, innovative, and original contribution to the histories of the 1960s, social movements, and American business.