Cooperatives in New Orleans: Collective Action and Urban Development by Anne Gessler (review)

Anne Gessler's Cooperatives in New Orleans: Collective Action and Urban Development makes an important contribution to the fields of labor, economic, women's, and civil rights history as she weaves together a complex genealogy of cooperatives in New Orleans since 1897. Drawing extensively on local newspapers, city directories, census records, interviews, local archival collections, and secondary works from many disciplines, she attempts to show how cooperatives contributed to the city's modernization by helping build flood-control infrastructure, consumer programs, and cooperative food markets. Gessler organizes her book around seven cooperatives that she claims "fused international alternative economic theories, grassroots social movements, and local communal traditions to create a neighborhood-based cooperative model" to help poor and working-class residents (p. 4). Gessler also admirably illuminates how "ordinary New Orleanians" have fought for "equitable, community-responsive urban growth" (p. 5).

Gessler divides her book into three sections—the first examines a utopian socialist cooperative in the late nineteenth century; the second, the more pragmatic Rochdale cooperatives in the early-to-mid twentieth century; and the third, racial justice cooperatives in the mid-to-late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her first chapter follows the development of the local branch of the Socialist National Union of the Brotherhood of Co-operative Commonwealth, formed in February 1897 and rooted in the Seventh Ward and Central Business District. According to Gessler, this cooperative drew on French republican ideals, utopian socialism, "Caribbean and African diasporic survival politics," and the traditions of local creole of color mutual aid societies, as it called on the city to develop a public works plan that would give jobs to the unemployed and upgrade municipal flood control (p. 180). While initially interracial, this cooperative (and its successor, the Laboringmen's Protective Association) ceded its utopian vision when it excluded non-naturalized immigrants and Black workers from membership and lucrative job contracts.

In contrast to the Brotherhood's goal of dismantling capitalism and founding a socialist utopia, Rochdale cooperatives sought to integrate consumers into capitalism's framework. Section 2 explores the Housewives' League, a white elite woman-led consumer advocacy group that promoted communal kitchens and housekeeping and founded a cooperative farmers' market and grocery store. Gessler's next chapter explores the New Orleans Consumers' Co-operative Union, which also built a grocery store and a credit union in the Freret neighborhood. Both cooperatives' success was undermined by their commitment to helping whites at the expense of Black workers and consumers.

Gessler's final section examines cooperatives focused on aiding Black residents. Flint-Goodridge Hospital superintendent and, later, Dillard University president Albert W. Dent helped found a medical insurance Rochdale cooperative. Dent's son Tom Dent helped lead the Black liberationist Free Southern Theater Collective from the mid-1960s through 1971. Gessler brings her study to the present with an examination of two groups organized after Hurricane Katrina: the Gathering Tree Growers Collective and the Louisiana Association of Cooperatives in New Orleans.

Gessler should be commended for illuminating a wide range of cooperatives and for including not only their successes but also their limitations, especially when collectives tightened along racial, class, and citizenship lines. However, her study could be strengthened with a clearer explanation of why she focuses on these particular cooperatives. How large and widespread were these different groups during their existence? Also, is New Orleans's cooperative history unique or representative of other southern or American cities in the twentieth century? Finally, although Gessler argues that all these cooperatives were "internationally inspired," more sustained evidence on the ways that New Orleans cooperatives drew on global ideas and philosophies would be helpful (p. 183).

Still, this book makes a significant contribution by revealing how New Orleanians on the city's economic, political, and social margins forged their own collective institutions as bulwarks against unchecked capitalism.