Hip or Rad?: Exploring the Digger Legacy Through Print Matter, 1966–1968
If you ask the average person about the late 1960s in San Francisco, they will say something about sex, drugs, long hair, and tie dye. If they are older they may remember the precise name of that 1967 summer when middle class youth from around the country flocked to Golden Gate Park — the Summer of Love. They may long for the days before the outlaw of psychedelics like acid and LSD. Back then, they may say, we were all on drugs.
Hippiedom in the United States was a youth movement that took the world by storm. At the height of racial and political tensions across the nation — Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, etc — a confluence of migrants to the Bay movement created a countercultural movement dedicated to the tenets of love. For some within the movement, though, this wasn’t enough. The Diggers, an anonymous collective disillusioned with hippiedom, emerged in 1966 as a group dedicated to calling attention to the apparent contradictions in the hippie movement. Namely, they critiqued consumerism, American capitalism, over-policing, corpocracy, and the hippie’s all-too-common tendency to forget the horrors that were taking place around them. In their words, “Expanded consciousness is a selfish hippy kissing the system’s ass for the greater glory of the lonely dropout.”
Fred Turner, in his 2013 essay, “The Politics of the Whole Circa 1968 — and Now,” discusses how the prolific hippie communes of 1968 sought to “transform themselves, with smaller, more personal technologies, from the tools they used to build their gardens to the LSD they took to liberate their psyches” (Turner). The hippies aimed to do away with the hierarchies of the world through “attun[ing] to one another and to the invisible laws of the universe” (Turner). The hippies stayed connected through many publications, one of the most notable being Whole Earth Catalog. Founded by Stewart Brand, the publication allowed what Turner calls the New Communalists to stay connected and relevant to each other and to “countercultural possibilities”; however, the catalog also promoted a consumerism which was astounding in regard to its exclusiveness and narrowness of regard for the rest of the world. In this way, the catalog used cybernetics to insulate the New Communalists, who were largely white and middle class, and affirm their values which were white and middle class (and thus, ironically, hierarchical).
In many ways, then, the Diggers were cutting edge. They saw through this “politics of consciousness” and understood that turning away from society to focus on the natural world really meant the willful erasure of physical realities — for example, the Vietnam War, but more specifically, a lived experience inflected by race and class. I can also appreciate that the Diggers did not swing the opposite direction and espouse the values of the New Left (e.g. the Students for a Democratic Society), which could be equally white and middle class — though, to be fair, the Diggers, who were active from 1966 to 1968, slightly predated the New Communalism/New Left dichotomy as spelled out by Turner. Instead, the Diggers concerned themselves with the conceptual concept of being Free, and encouraged their followers to question the government and fiduciary systems around them.
However, as I considered the group further, it became unclear how truly revolutionary the Diggers were. As internal critics of the mainstream hippie movement, how should they be positioned in the larger political landscape in the late 1960s — a landscape which was dominated by workers movements, Chicano movements, women’s movements, anti-war movements, and closer to home in Berkeley, the Black Panther Party’s Black power movement. To examine the radical potential and limitations of the Diggers, this paper examines their prolific print media beginning with their early Digger Sheets in 1966 and ending with The Digger Papers in the summer of 1968.
The Power of ALL CAPS and Chicken Scratch
The early digger sheets, written solely by Emmett Grogan and Billy Murcott, were printed on colorful paper of pinks, yellows, and oranges and featured provocative text rather than relying on shocking images. One pamphlet titled “LET ME LIVE IN A WORLD PURE” features rhetorical questions such as “When will BOB DYLAN quit working on Maggie’s Farm?” “When will RALPH GLEASON realize he is riding in a Hearst?” “When will the JEFFERSON AIRPLANE and all ROCK-GROUPS quit trying to make it and LOVE?” “When will the NEW LEFT RADICAL POLITICS stop laying down limp and liberate the consumer?” “When will PABLO PICASSO take the seven thousand paintings he has in storage and give them away with a smile?” The sheets directly call-out of individuals central to the rise, and spread, of hippiedom (artists such as Bob Dylan and the Airplane; journalists sympathetic to hippies such as Ralph Gleason). Coupled with the fact that the sheets were printed anonymously (while we know core members of The Diggers today these original pamphlets were signed off only “THE D I G G E R S”), the psychedelic-obsessed streets of Haight Ashbury instantly took notice of this new collective.
Central to the Diggers ideology was the idea of reclaiming public space and being free. For example, in a pamphlet titled “PUBLIC NONSENSE NUISANCE PUBLIC ESSENCE NEWSENSE PUBLIC NEWS” the Diggers proclaim that “The Public is Any Fool On the Street” and invite the reader to engage in “2 (TWO) SQUARE EVENTS.” The left side of the page depicts a 3D square which is meant to represent a “frame of reference” through which the reader can view “reality.” The right side of the page depicts a traffic square and invites the reader to complete all the shapes in the diagram without walking (instead cake-walking, finger-crawling, squat-jumping, etc). Both of these exercises are probing the reader to see differently what has been right in front of them the entire time. Another pamphlet titled “where is PUBLIC at?” poses statements like “PUBLIC Streets on riot with truckloads of arms protecting the private property of super-charging merchants,” “PUBLIC streets where fantasy laws justify the concepts of LOITERING & VAGRANCY,” “the PUBLIC schools — here you can be conditioned to PUBLIC opinion in order to express yourself in PUBLIC consensus,” “PUBLIC streets where agents patrol, undercovered in ‘hip’ costumes,” and so on. The Diggers are challenging their countercultural peers to stop engaging and/or taking for granted the inequitable and hierarchical powers that be.
Whereas psychedelics chased sensory experiences, the Diggers were obsessed with conceptual ideas. For example, they conceptualized their ideas surrounding free and the public with a Digger Dollar, a reimagined, graffitied version of a dollar bill. “Within A Free Frame of Reference” tops the bill; instead of “The United States,” one reads “The Free Men Of The Whole World”; beneath these sentences reads “(Not To Be Construed To Be “Real” In Any American Sense).” George Washington’s face is printed upside down. On his right is an upside down American flag with a dollar sign where the 50 stars should be. “Hell of a Mess” is printed to the right of Washington’s flipped head. On the reverse side of the bill, the Diggers have added “TO ONE” after the printed “ONE” (for a final statement of “ONE TO ONE”) with the imperative “LOVE!” on top.
Clearly, the Diggers were unique not just because they were provocative; they mirrored their ideology through the media they dispersed. In the case of the Digger Dollar, they were less interested in creating something new than poking at the apparent fallacies in what was already being circulated (e.g. implying that Washington’s nation has turned upside down). Consistent with this, their early sheets were printed cheaply on mimeographs and widely distributed — for free. The lack of visual art and color in the early sheets may indicate the financial constraints of the group; however, I think they more indicate the Digger’s prioritization of legibility and clarity of ideas over aesthetics. The sheets did have visually interesting layouts with text indented, mis-aligned on the page, or printed in a staircase format, but being hip was strictly not the point. Through the all-caps words, the sheets were literally SHOUTING at the Haight-Ashbury community to wake up. The Digger Dollar is less art than the juvenile scribbles of someone with a clear-eyed frame of reference who could not help but notice how skewed American capitalism is. And rather than focus on quality or polish of the final format, the Digger sheets, which were printed by the Communication Company from January to September of 1967, were often printed immediately after something newsworthy occurred and distributed by volunteers throughout the neighborhood.
This is in opposition to the visual culture of hippiedom which fully embraced the visuals of psychedelics. Flyers were not just colorful and flower-full like one born in the 21st century might assume. Famous flyers from the Fillmore Ballroom, where newly famous groups like the Jefferson Airplane or The Grateful Dead performed, were barely legible, in fully saturated color and in difficult-to-read stylized alphabets. It took me several minutes to realize that one flier, designed by Wes Wilson for Fillmore promoter Bill Graham, even had words on it. This, mirroring a psychedelic experience through the poster media, was, of course, exactly the point. Even more tame outlets, such as the San Francisco Oracle, which was the self-proclaimed “underground” newspaper of Haight-Ashbury (and which the Diggers despised), featured illustrations reminiscent of hippiedom (lots of flower imagery, wavy text, and full-page intricate graphics inspired by mandalas). The Diggers, in contrast, resented this out-of-body nature of the hippie movement and craved a return to reality, freedom as truth.
The Diggers and Black Revolution
In another of their famous pamphlets, “TAKE A COP TO DINNER,” the Diggers protested a campaign by Haight-Ashbury merchants for hippies to comply in the effort to lessen tensions between the community and the cops (e.g. over use of public space). In this pamphlet the Diggers go after mainstay establishments in Haight-Ashbury like the acid-dealing Psychedelic Shop and coffee shop I/Thou as well as: the Catholic Church, Unions and Corporations, the Department of Justice, Establishment Newspapers, pimps, the Department of Defense, racketeers, Schools and Professional Clubs, and cops who themselves “take cops to dinner by granting them immunity to prosecution for misdemeanors” and also “take themselves to dinner by inciting riots.”
One question that plagues me in my exploration of the Diggers is their relationship to revolution and race-relations, and TAKE A COP TO DINNER, for me, lies at the nexus of this tension. The Diggers are clearly not aligned with the consumerism of New Communalism and the Whole Earth Catalog. One of their greatest imparts was the conceptualization and actualization of the Free Store, which as it sounds, was a store where people could come and get what they needed for free. In some ways, the Free Store was as radical as one could get (an intersectional analysis of society shows that class and race are intrinsically connected; providing for poor people was also a central tenet of the Black Panther Party, deemed radical and dangerous by the U.S. government). Additionally, the Diggers do directly speak against militarism, the cops, racism, and even imperialism in their broadsides (a great synthetic example from the pamphlet “TIME TO FORGET”: “FORGET U.S. billion dollar investment in South Africa. Money is.”)
On the other hand, the Digger sheets do not visually approach the circulations of other identity movements. As a case study, I will compare the Digger sheets to the work of Emory Douglas for Black Panther Party’s newspaper. Douglas became famous for his illustrations of cops as pigs but he was also behind the depictions of armed Black individuals found within the paper. These graphic depictions were revolutionary to the circulation and popularity of the Black Panther Party — and we know that the Black Panthers understood the power of rapid circulation to perhaps even a better degree than the Diggers because Emory designed full-page illustrations meant to be torn out and hung as posters. This is not to say that the Diggers had to espouse violence in the same way that the Black Panther Party did, but for all their rhetoric about truth, they tended to rely solely on the concept of Free rather than actual depictions of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, violence of white cops against Black bodies, poor laborers, etc.
As a distilled example, the early Diggers apparently coalesced around the murder of Matthew Johnson in the predominantly Black and poor neighborhood of Hunter’s Point, which directly neighbored the Haight. In the aftermath of the shooting, a riot broke out, the National Guard was called, and a curfew was imposed. Members of the New Left called for activists to protest the National Guard; mainstream hippies — the same cohort that put up Take a Cop to Dinner fliers in their storefronts — urged residents to abide by the curfew. The Diggers, in contrast to either of these stances, urged individuals to do whatever they felt like doing, as free men. While this is a great concept, it’s not a realistic possibility for any Black person.
The phrase ‘put your money where your mouth is’ falls flat here because the Diggers literally called for the abolition of money; however, I struggle to reconcile how the Diggers held the beliefs they did and did not become more radicalized. (One of their earliest broadsides called “MONEY IS AN UNNECESSARY EVIL” connects the prevalence of violence in San Francisco to society’s addiction to money, for goodness sakes!) Herein lies the apparent limitation of the Diggers ideology in my view: they were white. More specifically, they were white and middle-class. As Tim Hodgdon explains in his book Manhood in the Age of Aquarius, Haight-Ashbury was a promising neighborhood for white youth because it was cheap, already a site of much social activism, and welcoming to newcomers. Members of the community, who were interested in “bohemian concerns,” first started referring to themselves as hippies in 1965, and the influx of like-minded individuals peaked during the 1967 Summer of Love. The Diggers gradually emerged as a group that saw through the fluff of the hippie movement and sought more radical potentialities in general — for example, many core members came from the avant garde theater group San Francisco Mime Troupe and left the Troupe due to differences with the directory over the participatory potential of theater — but it doesn’t erase the fact that they arrived in San Francisco beating the hippie drum.
Sigh.
Despite the Diggers naively stating in their sheet “LET ME LIVE IN A WORLD PURE” that “there are no more negroes, jews, christians. there is only one minority in America,” their ideas did resonate with Black people who were familiar with the ideas of communalism. The Black People’s Free Store operated from 1967–1968 in Fillmore and was started by Roy Ballad, a member of the Organization of African American Unity who was familiar with the Digger’s various exploits in the Haight. (The Organization of African American Unity was founded by Malcolm X after he left the Nation of Islam as a secular organization to “reconnect African Americans with their African heritage, establish economic independence, and promote African American self-determination” (Burnett).) Roy understood that radical trust and love, intrinsic to the Digger’s idea of Free and diametrically opposed to capitalism, was pivotal to combating the conditions of the Black ghetto. To quote Roy at length on the impact of the Black People’s Free Store:
What I’m saying is that this whole store centers around this basic reality of understanding and sharing with each other. And you’ll notice that there’s a whole lot of black people from the community who know where it’s at. They’re not digging this stuff about black people — black people gotta do this, we gotta do that. No! None of that stuff! We’re people from the black community who feel the poorness, who feel the poorness of being knocked down and slapped down every time we turn around. The whole store is a center of bringing about that kind of communication of understanding and sharing with each other…Somebody said, “How long that ironing board gonna be here?” I said, “You just stand there and see how long.” It wasn’t hardly two minutes before that woman walks in and says, “Do you know where I can get an ironing board?” “There’s one there.” She said, “Here’s a dollar.” But no! We don’t accept no money here…We got a number of people that come in and pick up clothes and sell them. We don’t worry about that. But maybe that guy got to sell those clothes because he got two or three kids at home and he can’t work. Maybe the guy’s selling clothes because he wants to have some extra money in his pocket. We’re not concerned about that. We got four or five cats that come over here and sit every day and take out two or three boxes of clothes. Good clothes. And we know that they’re selling them. But at least that cat is not walking down the street to Littleman’s Market, taking all the meat from the counter and then going to jail for four or five years… (The Digger Archive)
The banner outside the Black People’s Free Store has wavy 70s style font. I mention this to say that Black people also existed in the 70s. Their Blackness did not somehow make them impervious to the era. Likewise, the Diggers did not just publish independently. A lot of their early articles were published anonymously in the Berkeley Barb, the student-run underground publication at UC Berkeley. The Barb covered a lot of the same topics that the San Francisco Oracle did and similarly featured hand drawn advertisements that heavily relied on stereotypical 70s motifs. Through this exploration, I don’t mean to suggest that the Diggers were completely siloed from their hippie environment or that they were completely antithetical to Black issues. One of their early happenings was a Free Fair held in Hunter’s Point, a Black neighborhood adjacent to the Haight. The Hunter’s Point event was far less successful than their Free Fair in Haight-Ashbury; Black community members loitered and surveyed the Diggers’ set-up with suspicion, afraid to approach. The Black People’s Free Store employed the Digger’s framework but it was run by other poor, Black people. It was successful. There are layers to everything.
Death of Hippie; Death of the Diggers
By late 1967, the term “digger” had come to mean anyone aligned with the Digger ideology, and the original Diggers were mourning the complete erosion of the hippie movement. They published their Death of Hippie pamphlet on October 6, 1967. The next day, October 7, 1967, was the Birth of a Free Man. Henceforth, “the Diggers” were dead and the Free City Collective began. This paper will not discuss the Free City Collective happenings in depth. However, I do want to discuss the shifts to Digger print culture after October 6th, 1967.
Though the Free City Collective used the same mimeograph technology that early Digger sheets were printed with, the graphics varied widely from the earlier stripped down style. These sheets were in full color with graphic illustrations in addition to punchy text. The images were also a lot more “political,” in the 21st century sense of that word. For example, one pamphlet called “The Story of Man” features the image of a NASA spaceship over the mirrored image of an Ape. Chapter 1 is titled “The Cave Man,” Chapter 2 is titled “The Roaring 20’s,” and Chapter 3 called “The 20th Century” simply reads, “Now scientists and architects built rockets to go to the moon. But they failed.” Another broadside titled “YOU” features a large image of U.S. army militants. Another called “IS FACT IS PROPHECY IS” features a cut-out of what seems to be a gloomy medieval era painting — the painting’s subjects are looking towards the sky and running away in terror. The reason for this change is unclear, but it may point to the fact that the Diggers were a collective — and thus the Free City Collective may have been spearheaded by members with slightly different political priorities than the early Diggers.
Nevertheless, the final Digger act was the publication of The Digger Papers in the summer of 1968. The paper, which featured reprints of the earliest sheets, e.g. TAKE A COP TO DINNER, in addition to new pieces, was published in a copy of a publication called The Realist (such that there are two versions of the cover — the Realist edition and the Digger edition). The body of the text remained the same in both editions and the visuals inside represent a moment stuck in time, the late Digger ideology crystallized.
The front cover of the Digger edition features a stylized swastika with a triangle inset at the center. Line rays emanate from the center of the triangle not unlike rays from a child’s representation of the sun. The swastika itself is inlaid in an ornate mandala and the whole figure is rendered as a compass with N, E, S, W printed in royal script at the respective quarters of the circle. In the top right corner is simply written, Free. In the same way that early Digger sheets invite the reader to wear a frame of reference, the cover of The Digger Papers suggests that to gaze into the eye of the mandala is to accept the pure, golden truth of Free. This image also speaks to the persistent idealism of the Digger vision, even as the group was in the midst of a mass dispersal.
This being understood, this late Digger idealism does not fall into the New Communalism erasure-through-utopia. Rather than relying on the conceptual (e.g. the Digger Dollar, the frame of reference), The Digger Papers directly addresses the political upheaval of the moment. In the poem “A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pentagon,” which opens with “As you shoot down the Vietnamese girls and men in their fields,” the speaker promises to serve the American white man “Chief Joseph, the Bison herds, Ishi, sparrowhawk, the Fir trees, The Buddha, their own naked bodies.” Surrounding the poem are black and white images of paper money, stars, an Asian man, a bat, a racetrack checkerboard motif, and a spread eagle motif. In opposition to U.S. imperialism, the Diggers propose returning the world back to its natural, indigenous state.
The issue also addresses racism and discrimination at home with a full page collage of images from the Black Panther Community News Service. An article titled “Huey Must Be Set Free” tops the spread and images of the iconic black panther and rifles — the only representation of guns in a Digger publication to my knowledge — dot the page. At the bottom of the page, the editors have made sure to include a call of donations of typewriters, office supplies, all tools of newspaper production and distribution, etc to the Black Panther office headquarters. Notably, all of this text and images are direct pulls from Black Panther publications. Nevertheless, the Diggers are clearly acknowledging if not endorsing the Black Panther Party’s mission, which is a far cry from the Diggers who just two years earlier took a universalist, and thus non-committal, stance to violence committed by the police against Black people.
Overall, the Diggers prove to be a complex subject matter. They are both universalist and political; idealistic and realistic. Luckily for me, they published a lot of print media, and through its exploration, to my initial query of The Diggers seem so cool, but were they just white? I now have the answer of yes, but not just. Their activism was informed by a white, middle-class point of view, and I hope I’ve made clear their cautionary tales; however, their ability to think outside of the box was their largest asset and gift to the world. They ask us to constantly interrogate the systems that be, and in our quest to escape the horrors of the world, not to lose sight of how we may be actively playing into the creation of our present reality. This is an important lesson in 2022 — in a world past cybernetics, a world of accessible internet and social media and so on — a lesson as important as it was in 1968. As they quoted in “PUBLIC NONSENSE,” “An informed public is its own worst enemy.” Be a public enemy. Ya dig?
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