Summer of Love: The Diggers and the Scene That Ate Itself
Near San Francisco, California
The intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets in the summer of nineteen sixty-seven held about one hundred thousand young people in a neighborhood built for three thousand. They slept in parks, in doorways, on floors, in the panhandle. They had no money, no plan, and in many cases no idea how they were going to eat. The people who kept them alive were a group called the Diggers.
The Diggers were a theater-anarchist collective, named after the seventeenth-century English movement that had attempted to farm common land as an act of political defiance. San Francisco's Diggers ran free food programs every day in the Panhandle, a strip of Golden Gate Park at the edge of the neighborhood. They ran a Free Store where everything cost nothing. They ran a free clinic, offering medical treatment in a neighborhood that had none. They staged guerrilla theater in the streets, performances that dissolved the line between the play and the life. They were the communal infrastructure for a scene that described itself as a revolution while relying on the Diggers to keep it from starving.
By October of nineteen sixty-seven, the scene had become a commercial property. Media coverage had turned the Haight into a destination. Tour buses ran through it. Psychedelic imagery was on t-shirts. The Diggers watched a genuine communal experiment become a brand in nine months.
On October sixth, nineteen sixty-seven, they staged the Death of the Hippie. A funeral procession moved through the Haight carrying a coffin. The inscription on the coffin read: Hippie, Son of Media. Someone played Taps. The organizers distributed a statement: signal that this was the end of it, to stay where you are, bring the revolution to where you live.
The neighborhood went on selling what the Diggers had declared dead. It still does. The experiment the Diggers actually ran, the free food, the free store, the free clinic, those became models for community organizing that outlasted the Summer of Love by decades.
