Craig Rosebraugh: I believe in hierarchy

Rosebraugh, who is 33, has a lean and weathered
hawklike face, with slightly protruding front teeth
and piercing blue eyes. He often wears his ginger hair
in a buzz cut, and he is generally polite but also a
little bit taut--combative, even. If you ask him what
he thinks about the U.S. government, he will not
snicker or roll his eyes comically. He will just look
at you cold and say, "The same people have been in
power since 1776: rich white men. And are they
benefiting women? No. Latin Americans? No. The
environment? No. It is time to start talking about a
revolution in this country. And yes, if there is a
revolution, it will be violent. Name one revolution in
history that was not violent."

From 1997 to 2001, Rosebraugh was, famously, a
spokesperson for the Earth Liberation Front and the
Animal Liberation Front, two still-thriving,
intertwined networks of saboteurs who have inflicted
$100 million worth of property damage on those they
deem despoilers of nature. The more prominent ELF has
claimed responsibility for setting fire to four
chairlifts in Vail, Colo., and also for vandalizing
dozens of Hummers sitting in the lots of SUV
dealerships nationwide. Rosebraugh says he never
directly participated in such destruction. Instead, he
fielded messages from the saboteurs and then, sitting
in his office in Portland, Oreg., sent out incendiary
press releases. "If we are vandals," he once said, "so
were those who destroyed forever the gas chambers of
Buchenwald and Auschwitz."

In 1998, The New York Times Magazine called
Rosebraugh the "Face of Ecoterrorism." In 2002,
Congress summoned him to testify. FBI and ATF agents
raided his house twice. Rosebraugh was unmoved. He
went on to found the Arissa Media Group, a nonprofit
with the stated purpose of pushing for a revolution in
the U.S.A.
Through Arissa, he then published his own book, The
Logic of Political Violence, which bore on its cover a
photo of the World Trade Center engulfed in orangey
black flames.

What few people knew was that, as he angled to take
down the Man, Rosebraugh also honed a taste for fine
living. He bought an old Victorian house and furnished
it with antiques. He became an accomplished vegan
cook,
treating his houseguests to some portobello tofu
crepes, say. He disdained the prevalent view that, as
he expresses it, "if you're for world change, you have
to live in sloppy squalor." He saw elegance, in fact,
as consistent with ELF's sabotage--as a matter of
"pride and dignity and caring."

But his gourmet passions were little known. I live
near Craig Rosebraugh in Portland, and until recently
I always conceived of him as the consummate low-budget
radical. He played drums for a garage band called the
Procrastinators, and whenever I saw him out walking
his dogs, he was dressed, head to toe, in penitent
black.

So I was a bit shocked when, late in 2003,
Rosebraugh's parents, Fred and Marilyn Rosebraugh,
laid down $650,000 for a sumptuous three-story
Portland Victorian so that Craig could make it the
home of Calendula, then the city's only all-vegan
restaurant.
After an extensive refurbishment, the place bore
graceful orange stained-glass windows and little
crescent moons carved into the gingerbread surrounding
the windows.
The spindles on the railing of the large wraparound
porch were painted a chromey silver.

The whole place seemed so...impeccable, and so
cruelly dismissive of the scruffy radicals with whom
Rosebraugh had traveled all through his twenties. And
the business plan for Calendula seemed, likewise,
almost overbearing in its ambition.

The restaurant would serve only organic vegan food.
No pesticide residues, no genetically modified fruits
or vegetables. Its entrees--which now cost roughly $12
apiece and range from shitake-seitan fajitas to
tomato-coconut tempeh--would abound in local produce.
Some dishes would be uncooked, in deference to a
growing subset of vegans who eat "raw," meaning they
won't touch any food that has been warmed to over 118
degrees Fahrenheit.

Indeed, a certain moral rectitude would guide the
whole Calendula project. Rosebraugh opened the
restaurant explicitly to raise money to produce
revolutionary media--TV programs, documentaries, and
books. And now, on the walls of Calendula's dining
room, there are framed photographs of famed radicals:
Che Guevara, for instance, illuminated by two
sanctifying headlamps.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that Calendula would be a
full-bore co-op, at which even the lowliest dish
scrubber has license to quote Das Kapital ad nauseam
at staff meetings. But no, no, no, no, it's not like
that at all because collectives are bad too. "In a
collective," Rosebraugh explains, "all people do is
debate trivial things. They'll spend six hours
deciding
whether to leave the light on or off. I believe in
hierarchy, and I like the way corporations are
structured. They're successful because that's what
they set out to do--succeed. And I want to succeed."

Yes, Craig Rosebraugh is a tangle of contradictions.
And when he first opened his restaurant, I didn't have
much hunger to eat there. I was inclined, frankly, to
leave Rosebraugh alone, festering on his own tiny
island of piousness. But still, every time I passed by
Calendula, I was galvanized by the acid battle that I
imagined was frothing inside, between
lynch-the-landlord anarchy and the white linen
tablecloths. I was intrigued, too, by Rosebraugh's
Uber ethical campaign, just seven blocks from my home,
to build an idealistic restaurant in a world where the
vast majority of consumers favor Whoppers to go. Craig
Rosebraugh was making no concessions whatsoever to
crass reality. He was just plain right--stubborn,
convinced of himself in so many irreconcilable
ways--and he was plowing forward. How long, I
wondered, would the guy last?

I first met Rosebraugh face-to-face on a drizzly,
gray morning last January. It was early, around nine,
and he was in Calendula's kitchen, wearing a white
chef's smock as he minced broccoli on a white plastic
cutting board. His weight was up to 165 pounds, but
still there was a certain severity to the tableau I
beheld, as though it were part of a film shot by
Stanley Kubrick.
The stainless-steel countertops were all gleaming and
impeccably clean, as were the silver pots neatly
racked on the wall, and I was distinctly aware that
Rosebraugh was alone, hacking small objects to bits.
This is his mtier, really: Rosebraugh is not a people
person.
He's an independent guerrilla. "When you're running a
business," he told me, "every force in the world is
pushing against you to avoid ethics. I go into Cash
'n' Carry, where they sell wholesale goods to
restaurants, and I see people packing out huge crates
of subgrade
produce. Everything's incredibly cheap, but you can't
buy it if you're trying to be ethical. And I don't. I
occasionally get recycled paper products there, or
maybe some soy milk, but that's it."

Rosebraugh invokes very precise operating procedures
at Calendula. He explained as he began chopping
carrots. "I've taken full color digital photos of each
entree," he said, "so hopefully the kitchen staff can
copy the pictures as they're putting food onto plates.
I've also implemented a system for tracking waste."
His workers were digitally weighing each morsel
discarded during preparation and keeping a weekly
waste tally. Meanwhile, Rosebraugh was taking produce
poised to go bad and concocting impromptu
specials--for instance, the seitan sausage fajitas he
was making now. "The goal," he told me, "is to keep
both food and labor
costs below 30% of total costs. Now I'm at 27 and 26."

Rosebraugh is the executive chef at Calendula, as
well as the owner, and until he recently hired two
managers, he was working 100 hours a week--and all the
while sequestering himself in a sort of political
isolation ward. Rosebraugh has never voted in an
election. Even now, as he feeds Portland's most
well-heeled liberals, he scoffs at the left, which by
his lights achieves only incremental change. Groups
like the Sierra Club, he feels, just let "the beast of
injustice" grow, instead of working toward the future
he craves--a heady era in which a new American
government provides universal health care and
endeavors to wipe out global warming as it fights
illiteracy and poverty.

Rosebraugh kept chopping, and soon he spoke of his
revolutionary ambitions. He was careful. "I'm not
advocating that all the black-hooded anarchists go out
and start shooting government officials," he said.
"And I'm not saying we should go door-to-door in
Portland, Oregon. If you went around saying, 'We're
signing up people to be part of the revolution,'
they'd call the counterterrorism task force on you."

The key to overthrowing the government of the world's
sole superpower, Rosebraugh stressed, is education. To
this end, he hopes to produce a documentary film that
would deliver a primer in revolution to mainstream
America. "I'd like to interview Assata Shakur, of the
Black Power movement," he said. "And Nelson Mandela,
and Fidel Castro..."

"Fidel Castro?" I said. "Do you know Spanish?"

"I'm learning," said Rosebraugh. "I have the tapes at
home."

Craig Rosebraugh situated his restaurant in an
optimal spot. Portland may well be the nation's most
radical and steak-hostile city. The activist community
here is not one small troupe of worrisome dweebs
gnashing their
teeth in the back of a single cafe. It is, rather, a
gathering of tribes: grungy tree sitters, pacifists,
urban gardeners, anarchist skateboarders. The phrase
"Got Kucinich?" still commands a wistful cachet in
certain quarters of Portland. It sings, especially, on
Hawthorne Boulevard, where Calendula sits near
scuffed-up old record stores, coffeehouses, and
boutiques selling aromatherapy candles.
But still Portland's political landscape is uneasy
terrain for a firebrand like Rosebraugh. Portland's
radicals inhabit, as most people do, a closed little
society. When a guy like Rosebraugh comes
along--pontificating, with dollar signs in his
eyes--he will be made into organic mincemeat.

Portland's radicals may extend their hearts to small
farm animals and disenfranchised molybdenum miners
worldwide, but they inhabit, as most people do, a
closed little society that knows its share of rancor
and backbiting. When a guy like Rosebraugh comes
along--pontificating, with dollar signs in his
eyes--he will be made into organic mincemeat. The
attacks, however, will be kept inside the community.
When I asked other local activists about Rosebraugh, I
found very few people willing to talk about him in a
national business magazine. But a popular bulletin
board, portland.indymedia.org, bristles with venom.

"All bosses are f--faces," one indymedia
correspondent wrote recently, discussing Rosebraugh.
"Calendula is a 'guilt-free' politically correct
reification of capitalism."

"I can't believe people haven't f--ing torched the
place already," added another scribe.

How can anyone nurture a business in such a climate?
Rosebraugh didn't have it easy, in part because his
restaurant was bound to a troubling reality:
Fred Rosebraugh, Craig's dad, earned the money to
finance Calendula by manufacturing hydraulic valves
for tractors and lawn mowers. The elder Rosebraugh
founded a company called Compact Controls in his
suburban Portland basement in 1977; he retired 24
years later after selling his company, which had 270
employees and $35 million in annual revenue, for an
undisclosed sum.

Per Portland (and ELF) protocol, Craig Rosebraugh
should have publicly renounced lawn mowers--lawns,
even. Instead, he spoke of his father fondly and in
defensive tones. "My dad's a moderate Republican," he
told me. "He voted for [George W.] Bush the first
time, but then he deeply regretted it. If you get down
to it, he believes in education and welfare--he really
believes in those things. In his industry, he was a
leader. He was very responsible in making sure that
toxic chemicals were disposed of properly."

When Rosebraugh was subpoenaed by Congress in 2002,
he brought his dad with him to Washington. "He flew
out to support me," he told me. "That was one of my
greatest moments with him--for him to be witness to
the everyday
proceedings of the U.S. government."

At a House subcommittee hearing, led by Colorado
Republican Scott McInnis, a panel asked Rosebraugh
probing questions about his links to ecoterrorism.
He intoned versions of "I'll take the Fifth
Amendment" 54 times.

I asked Rosebraugh if I could talk to his dad, and he
grew protective. "You can try," he said, "but I'm
going to tell him to ignore you because I trust you
about as much as I trust any other reporter I've dealt
with, which is not at all."

Rosebraugh's father ignored my calls; I never spoke
to him.

When Calendula opened in January 2004, Rosebraugh had
18 employees, including an executive chef. He managed
them as I imagined his dad would have, as de facto
CEO.
He called mandatory staff meetings and sat at the
head of the table. He distributed detailed employee
manuals and enforced a dress code, insisting that his
servers wear "business casual" clothing. He began to
rankle his underlings. "He was working against our
collective flow," a server named Abigail Barella
would later write on indymedia. "His ego often blocked
communication."

Andrew Hodgdon, also a server, was more outspoken.
"Working for Craig was an altogether negative
experience that just consumed my precious energy,"
Hodgdon, a professional actor, told me. "We had to
wear these stiff black button-down shirts that were
tight in the collar, and Craig--he was always watching
you. You were always on thin ice with him. He'd say
things like,
'I've told you numerous times you need to iron your
shirt. And button your top button--this isn't a sex
appeal kind of place.' I started hating my job, and
others were hating it too. I said, 'Craig, there's
some s-- going down, bro.'"

Indeed there was. By midsummer, just six months after
launching his business, Rosebraugh had lost almost
$100,000 of his parents' money. By his own reckoning,
Calendula was mismanaged. He had too many employees,
and the chef cared not a whit about finances. "He
ordered anything he wanted to," Rosebraugh recalls
ruefully. "I mean, produce shipped in from all over
the
world, out of season. The walk-in freezer was a gold
mine of exotic fruits and organic nuts."

On July 28 Rosebraugh took a bold step: He reduced
servers' hourly wage, before tips, to $7.05 from
$8.00.
He also made it clear that health care benefits would
be a long time coming for his employees. Manager
Katharine Atkinson teed off on Rosebraugh and, she
wrote on indymedia, she got nowhere: "When I told
Craig that the servers were disappointed, he said,
'Let them quit! If they don't like it, they can work
somewhere else. This isn't a utopia, it's a
business!'"

Within two days, Rosebraugh fired Atkinson, Hodgdon,
and Barella, along with one other waiter, James Horn.
In turn, these four employees allied with an
all-but-forgotten union, the Industrial Workers of the
World, also known as the Wobblies, who 90-odd years
ago shook fear into the titans of industry. Today the
Wobblies can claim only 1,000 members worldwide. In
Portland, however, they have serious street cred and
clout. One night in August 2004, they ambushed
Rosebraugh at Calendula.
Led by their union rep, Pete Beaman, the striking
workers stalked up the steps of the silvery porch and
demanded their jobs back. Make no mistake: This was
now civil war--and Rosebraugh was steamed.

He told the strikers that they were trespassing. He
refused to give the Wobblies their jobs back, and he
threatened to call the police. (That's right: the
donut eaters that Rosebraugh has called "the thugs of
the state.") Then, as a coup de grace, he made one
final supremely corporate gesture:
He issued a self-explanatory press release.
He spent $1,650 to place, in an alternative newspaper
called Willamette Week, a full-page rejoinder to the
strikers, who, he said, "received nothing but patience
and respect from me." Calendula's servers, he said,
"set their own schedules and received any time off as
requested....The insinuation that I sit back in my
office counting stacks of money while the 'wage
slaves' do all the work is both insulting and
laughable."

In the same issue, the newspaper named Rosebraugh
"Rogue of the Week," noting that, during the
restaurant's first two months, he made his four-block
commute to work in an SUV--a Toyota 4Runner.
Rosebraugh, who now drives a Honda hybrid, couldn't
quite fathom the indignation against him.
"Why do they single me out?" he asked me. "They hold
me up to some superhuman standard. Most people drive
their car to work, don't they? Seriously, who the f--
cares what I drive?"

Calendula customers, apparently. In late September, a
sign on Calendula's door said: "Closed, owing to
financial difficulties."

Eventually, I phoned the organizer who'd helped bring
Calendula down--Pete Beaman of the Wobblies. Beaman
was guarded when I told him I was writing for Inc.
"Why would I want to support their capitalist agenda?"
he asked me. He said he'd take my interview request to
his
board and get back to me. I never heard from him.

Thinking things over, I began to hone a certain
respect for Craig Rosebraugh. If nothing else, the guy
was willing to get down in the mud. He was tenacious.

When Rosebraugh was working with the Earth Liberation
Front, he suffered the ill effects of low cholesterol.

He was frequently dizzy. He hallucinated; he lost his
balance. He had severe food allergies. Rosebraugh
conducted over 700 media interviews, many under the
hot glare of TV studio lights. He never once spoke of
his illness. He stayed on message. He also wrangled,
he says, with an FBI agent who conducted
"psychological warfare." After one raid, the agent
left all of Rosebraugh's papers torn up and piled in a
sort of pyre in his bedroom. On top, in shreds, was an
announcement
for the funeral of Rosebraugh's grandfather.
Rosebraugh cleaned up the mess and kept working.

On December 12, Calendula cafe reopened for business.
This time it had a pared-down staff of nine.
Rosebraugh himself was shaping the menu and relying on
his digital scale for salvation--he immediately began
the weighing of scraps and monitoring of costs that he
thought would save him. Soon, his employees would be
shielded from his astringency by two new managers,
cook Tony Hauth and waitress Allison Bagby. Hauth
works off the clock an hour every day, "just because I
want to see this place still going in a year," and
Bagby, who's served at Calendula almost since it
opened, has defended Rosebraugh on indymedia. "I have
quit two jobs due to my bosses saying something rude
to me," she wrote. "I
would leave this job too if there was any reason to."

I've eaten at calendula a number of times since the
reopening. I've brought my parents, my daughter, and
friends, and each time I've taken delight in telling
my guests that the place was run by the unrepentant
Face of Ecoterrorism. I've liked watching them sit
there in
the dim lamplight of the dining room, trying to add
that one up, because in truth Calendula is an
exceptionally pleasant place to eat. Rosebraugh had
contradicted himself once again: The man who'd told
me, "There are no utopias" had created what he calls,
in his promotional literature, "a gourmet vegan
paradise." He'd labored to attain a space that was
true to the
chiffony vibe of that phrase. As you eat at Calendula,
you can see that he worked at it earnestly--and that
some details are a bit overwrought. The mojitos, for
instance--why did Rosebraugh give them this funky
vegetable undertow? Really, who needs organic cilantro
in a cocktail?

But that's a minor point. Mostly, Calendula does what
any restaurant must: It lulls you. It cocoons you. And
so recently, on a warm night, I found myself at
Calendula sipping a chocolate martini and listening to
the wheedling strains of the Decemberists playing
softly on the stereo. The waitress came around and,
with a tattooed arm, replenished my water glass.
The busperson cleared the neighboring table and
delivered the young couple there--sober and
Pilates-lean--a pot of chamomile tea.

Just before 10, a tall, thin man--slightly
disheveled, with his shirt hanging loose--burst up the
steps and into the dining room. It was Rosebraugh
himself, and for maybe two seconds he stood there,
amid the tables, pivoting, as though in search of lost
keys. And right then I thought: What would it be like
to be him, to carry a storm of conflicting ideals
inside you and to feel obliged, always, to force those
ideals on the world, even as others called you a
jerk?

Partly, I reckoned, Rosebraugh felt proud: Calendula
is now turning a slim profit most months. (It's been
accepted in Portland as part of the woodwork--as a
place where, say, a stylish real estate agent might
take her more earth-friendly clients.) But partly, I
was sure, Rosebraugh also felt frazzled. I remembered
him telling me, "When I'm working 100 hours a week, I
feel guilty that I'm not doing activism."
And I remembered visiting him once for 10 minutes in
his office in Calendula's basement.

For all but a few seconds, Rosebraugh stared straight
at his computer screen, manipulating a graphic image
of a calendula flower. The flower would decorate a
menu, and it was fulgent and lovely, in keeping with
the gentle vibe of the Calendula brand. Rosebraugh
sat with his back facing me, his responses terse as he
dialed in on his task. He was working: His restaurant
was going to succeed, even if, in succeeding, he had
to embrace the very capitalist system he yearned to
destroy with a war. He would succeed.

"So is there anything else you want to say?" I asked
into the tense silence.

"No," Rosebraugh said. One syllable.

I left. Rosebraugh kept working. He peered into the
screen, the war bubbling on, as always, inside his
head.

Bill Donahue has written for The New Yorker, Outside,
Runner's World, and other magazines. This is his first
article for Inc.