The Diggers and the Haight-Ashbury Exit the Stage
Grogan returned to Haight-Ashbury in time for the legendary "Summer of
Love" in 1967. Tens of thousands of young people from across the country,
many of them barely into their teens, headed for San Francisco that summer. They
were lured there by two years of media hype about what they would find there:
radical politics at Berkeley, endless supplies of inexpensive hallucinogens, the
stirring rhythms of the San Francisco Sound, the collective ecstasy produced in
the dance halls and the open sexuality displayed by the hippies of
Haight-Ashbury. These attractions, along with San Francisco's reputation for
tolerating "deviant" lifestyles—though this tradition had withered
considerably by 1967, as city [p. 140] officials and the police came down hard on the
hippie hordes—made it the destination of those seeking new experiences, a new
life or simply a new day. (A Digger leaflet proclaimed: "Today is the first
day of the rest of your life".) Police estimated that a total of 75,000
young people squeezed into a densely packed Haight-Ashbury that summer. The
Diggers and other neighborhood activists intensified their efforts to feed and
house these American refugees.(124)
In July the Diggers changed their name to the Free City Collective. The new name
was a reaction against the "expropriation" and exploitation of the
word "Digger" by other radicals and the media. Even Hollywood had
heard of the Diggers. Advertising copy for The Love-Ins, a 1967 film
about the Haight-Ashbury, warned America that "the hippies and the diggers
are here!" In the fall, the Diggers organized their last major parade. They
called it "The Death of Hippie." Pallbearers carried a coffin filled
with beads, hair, incense and flowers.(125)
It was not a premature farewell. The "Summer of Love" was the
beginning of the end of the Haight-Ashbury, both as a bohemian neighborhood and
a viable community. The influx of long-haired, runaway teens wasn't the only
problem. Two years of Dionysian abandon had undermined, though not quite
destroyed, hippie dreams of creating an empyrean urban haven where one might
taste both personal freedom and shared ecstasy. As an army of young people and
tourists invaded the district in 1967, many of the original Haight-Ashbury
hippies fled. Like Grogan, they headed for rural areas, though not to hunt.
Hundreds of Haight hippies founded new, mostly short-lived communes in the
countryside.(126)
Many of Haight-Ashbury's new residents had neither the intellectual curiosity
nor the spiritual ideals of the original hippies. A journalist who visited the
neighborhood in 1967 reported that many of the young people who came there in
1965 and 1966 had gone to college and came from upper-middle-class backgrounds.
They were the "children of chairman of the boards of the largest
corporations, the most successful lawyers, the richest stockbrokers."(127)
Those who came in the spring and summer of 1967 hailed from more diverse
backgrounds. They ranged from children of professionals to runaways from abusive
or repressive families. The new Haight residents were a motley brew of high
school dropouts, religious fanatics, naive "flower children," callous
drug dealers, thugs and pimps. Rape and other forms of assault and exploitation
greeted young women who ventured into the neighborhood. Some of them were as
young as 14. "Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street," said
the Diggers in 1967. They were accurate on both counts. Venereal disease and
vaginitis were epidemic. The murder rate and incidents of physical assault
soared. Robbery and burglaries became commonplace. In perhaps the most pointless
robbery in the history of the United States, the Diggers' Trip Without a Ticket
free store was burglarized!(128)
[p. 141]
By the end of the summer, heroin, barbiturates and other "body"
drugs vied for popularity with consciousness-altering and less-expensive drugs
like LSD and marijuana. The profitability of hard drugs led to an outbreak of
violent crime. When police arrested a notorious heroin dealer, they found a
suede bag in his car. The bag contained the severed arm of a drug dealer who had
been murdered. When asked about the bag and its contents, the "stoned"
drug dealer told police, "I'm very, very, hazy about that arm."(129)
In retrospect, perhaps the most telling sign of the decline of the
Haight-Ashbury and the counterculture was the arrival late in 1967 of Charles
Manson, recently paroled from prison. Two years later Manson embarked on the
most infamous murder spree of the decade. The son of a Cincinnati prostitute,
Manson met some of the young people who became his acolytes and accomplices in
murder during his stay in Haight-Ashbury. He also experienced his first LSD trip
there. The counterculture's "anything goes" toleration made it easy
for anyone, including psychotics, to join up. His drug experiences fortified
Manson's ambition to become a rock-and-roll singer-songwriter. One of his
compositions was titled "The Ego Is a Too-Much Thing."(130)
The Diggers, or Free City Collective, continued to exist into 1968, although
with far less fanfare and notoriety, and substantially diminished creativity.
During their halcyon days in 1966 and 1967, Digger pageants, free food, free
stores and free services invested the counterculture with moral concreteness. It
provided moral substance to a hippie "love" ethic that often amounted
to little more than self-absorption, hedonism and solipsistic trances
masquerading as "self-exploration." Of course, the Diggers were
radical individualists as well. Years later, Coyote called them "social
safe-crackers, sand-papering our nervous systems and searching for the right
combinations that would spring the doors and let everyone out of the box."(131)
Yet they tried to integrate personal autonomy with a sense of civic
responsibility. But the Diggers were no more successful than other radical
groups of the sixties in harmonizing individual liberty and community.
Unlike most other sixties radicals, however, the Diggers, actors who had
performed historical plays during their days with the Mime Troupe, possessed a
sense of history as an unfolding drama. They knew that what had evolved in the
San Francisco area since the early sixties was a celebration of American freedom
deeply at odds with the way most Americans preferred to live their lives. The
turmoil that ensued implied that the country might be at a crossroads. Down one
road was the freedom associated with the West, down the other was the desire for
security linked to the East: movement and adventure versus settlement and fear
of the unpredictable. The Diggers sensed that with nowhere left to go, with no
physical "West" of freedom remaining to explore, Americans might
finally be compelled to confront what they had wrought. In 1967 they [p. 142] distributed
a leaflet that had an apocalyptic edge. "Always before, there was somewhere
to go. . . . Man has always moved westerly, now is piling up on the Pacific
Cliffs, and Japan is flooding back on us. It is all One. At last."(132)
Ken Kesey, whose explorations of social frontiers anticipated the Diggers'
life-acts, would have understood the historical significance of this broadside.
In 1964, on the bus loaded with LSD headed east, he called the Merry Pranksters
the "unsettlers of 1964, moving backwards across the Great Plains. . . .
All of these things," said Kesey, "have a mythic story."(133)
Sometime early in 1970, when the hippie dream was all but over, the Brooklyn
native Ernmett Grogan gave up on the West. The most famous Digger decided to go
back to the East. He had "done all he ever could in California with its
people, at least for 'Free!' anyway."
The west had become his home, and he pushed it as far as it could take him
without dying. . . . He decided to head back to where it all began, when he was
supposed to have been a boy. He decided to return to New York and Brooklyn, and
he was going to walk all the way because he wanted to listen carefully to
whatever sounds America was making. Everything he ever heard about America was
true.(134)
He was going to walk to New York. As usual, Grogan opted for the grandeur and
literary lilt of myth rather than the flatness and accuracy of fact. An avid
reader of Beat literature, Grogan may have been familiar with a passage in
Kerouac's On the Road. During a respite from their frenetic excursions
back and forth across the country in a car, Dean Moriarty suggested to Sal
Paradise that they walk to New York from San Francisco. "Let's walk to New
York. . . . And as we do let's take stock of everything along the way."(135)
Or as Grogan suggested, freedom was the experience of taking to the road and
listening carefully to "whatever sounds America was making." For it
was all "true." Whether on foot or behind the wheel, the road
guaranteed there was always something new to discover or experience in America.
Always some other place to go. And start over.
Whatever his means of transport, Grogan made it back to Brooklyn. In 1978 he
died from an overdose of heroin. His body was found in a New York City subway
car. On the Coney Island line.(136)
Measuring the long-term impact of the counterculture is not easy. Some
historians and critics believe the hippie movement liberalized American culture
[p. 143]
(whether or not they view this as beneficial depends on their political and
moral values). Counterculture attitudes toward sexuality, drugs and work
challenged the supposedly work-obsessed, sexually repressed ways of mainstream
America. Conservatives bemoan these changes, which they believe led to a crisis
of values and the ensuing culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Others view the
hip movement of the sixties as heralding a sea change in lifestyles. It
shamelessly displayed and ultimately institutionalized the hedonism at the heart
of twentieth-century consumer culture.(137)
The vast majority of Americans in the sixties rejected the counterculture as
a way of life, but over time both they and the marketplace selectively absorbed
some of its wares and values. In one form or another, rock-and-roll, new age
therapies, sexual liberation and self-fulfillment as a way of life seeped from
the counterculture into the mainstream. The suppliers and buyers of instant
gratification transformed a leisurely stroll through a festive Haight Street in
the sixties to an endless shamble though [should be through] a bland
shopping-mall culture in the nineties. And the hippies' attempt to explore their
sexuality—however questionable their means—was transmuted over time into,
among other things, a pseudoerotic obsession with sexuality.
All of these views have some validity because, during and since the sixties,
there were so many motives for becoming hip and so many ways of expressing
hipness. Many hippies seriously searched for secular enlightenment or spiritual
salvation amid the fads, flowers, flashbacks and fleshpots of the
counterculture. There were others who, so to speak, let their hair down only on
weekends. It was fun. And there were still others, like those who
joined Charles Manson's "family" of killers, the forlorn, hopelessly
insecure souls desperately seeking meaning, any meaning, in their lives. Unable
to devise one of their own, they looked to "gurus," benign or
otherwise, to do it for them. Gurus were easy to find: the counterculture oozed
exploitative, charismatic figures of one sort or another.
Easily lost sight of in this jumble of conflicting styles, motivations and
interpretations was the concrete moral challenge to the established American
order posed by the Diggers and others like them in the counterculture. The
Diggers did more than champion anarchy, though they would have agreed with
Emerson that a "man contains all that is needful to his government within
himself."(138) And they were more than directors of some rousing plays in which primitive
acts of American freedom were performed, though Grogan's hunt, like any serious
play, was for real.
More than anything else, and more than most in the sixties, the Diggers
intuitively grasped an abiding irony of the American experience: Americans
either condone or acquiesce to near anarchy in their economic behavior but
generally retreat from it in other areas of their lives. Or, for that matter, in
other people's lives.
[p. 144]
The most significant, culturally approved displays of improvised freedom in
the United States occur within its largely unrestricted economic marketplace.
The fruits of liberty aren't harvested in some wilderness of the free soul but
on the Wall Street of bulging stock portfolios. "Free" enterprise—the
"performance" of buying and selling—is the only "play" in
which Americans can pretty much "act" as they please. Beyond the
economic realm, there is a traditional and ongoing obsession with controlling
spontaneous or idiosyncratic behavior, especially in matters of sex, drugs,
dress, unpopular beliefs and general comportment. Thus an American can do as he
pleases with his material possessions, but is not free to legally marry someone
of the same sex. The accumulation and disposal of private property is one's own
business; the enactment of one's private life may or may not be. After all,
Americans implicitly ask themselves, how much anarchy can a society tolerate
while still remaining viable?
Grogan, Coyote, Berg, other Diggers and serious hippies did more than
challenge this equation. They reversed it. For a brief interlude they turned
their little piece of America on its head. They substituted a free life for free
enterprise. Their versions of self-reliance and of becoming self-made had
nothing to do with work, careers, economic competition, possessions or status
seeking.
At the same time, "It's free because it's yours" was not a call for
socialism. Political ideologies and the hierarchies and organizational
structures they require were anathema to the form of individualism advertised in
the Diggers' most famous slogan. Rather, it was a call to explore an interior
New World, a twentieth-century summons to stake a claim to a mythological
American freedom lodged somewhere within the wilderness of the self. It was
improvised, unalloyed "movement": away from modern economic striving,
hierarchy and social control, and toward a lost, perhaps imaginary, unexplored
frontier where one might create infinitely plural personal identities and social
territories.
"It's free because it's yours." It was as un-American as any mythic
American phrase could be.
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