The Washington Post Saturday, August 24, 1985

Liberty And Junk For All?

For reasons connected with the high cost of parking at the fancier Washington hotels, my occasional early-morning walking route to a press breakfast takes me across Lafayette Park, just opposite the White House.

Here, where Henry Adams once built a great house, and where Andrew Jackson still rears his horse in equestrian splendor,my dedication to the constitutional right of petition undergoes -and invariably flunks-- a stern test. It is not unlike the test your belief in free speech would undergo if someone were screaming political slogans in your ear every time you hit the sidewalk.

The test for me is the clutter of billboards, placards, tents, mock cemeteries and whatnot that now disfigures one ofWashington's most agreeable squares, and one of the few refuges of distinguished architecture.

I was delighted, therefore, to read that the National Park Service: intends to crack down on the demonstrators who (often in absentia) have turned Lafayette Park into a junkyard, a zealot's haven but a citizen's eyesore.

New regulations would restrict the size: of placards--a long, ugly row of which now conceal, at eye level looking across Pennsylvania Avenue, the north facade of the White House. They would also have to be attended, or they would be treated as abandoned property.

The Park Service is, if anything, over-cautious. But depend on those who confuse vandalism with liberty to find even these mild measures objectionable.

The American Civil Liberties Union, bless its myopic soul, predictably finds this tightening frivolous, perhaps unconstitutional. "They want to make Lafayette Park look more pretty," said an ACLU spokesman, "[but] we just don't think that is a very weighty concern to justify the infringement of First Amendment Rights.

Not a weighty concern An exercise of rights that blights, all day every day, a public square? How far, one is led to speculate might libertarian numskullery go?

If someone with a burning message is moved to bedeck the Washington Monument with a huge wraparound banner the 100-foot level, or hang a sandwich board with anti-nuclear slogans around Mr. Lincoln's neck in the Lincoln Memorial, must tho aesthetic interests of tens of thousands be dismissed?

Why must the rest of us suffer, in silence some trashing of the commonwealth every time a world-saver with $20 to spend for a signboard and a paint brush goes into action! By long legal usage, even the most essential personal liberties are subject to reasonable "time, place and manner" restrictions when their exercise becomes a nuisance or a menace to others.

It is, as Holmes told us. no legitimate exercise of free speech to cry fire falsely, in a crowded theater, causing a panic. And nd even the silliest judge in the land would uphold your right to ring my door- bell every day at 3 a.m. to deliver your urgent warning against nuclear power.

This is not a plea for banning the right of timely and appropriate petition. It is an argument for measure, and for what might be called the Fifth Freedom: the right to enjoy unlighted the graces of the American landscape.[WHAT WOULD THE LANDSCAPE LOOK LIKE AFTER A NUCLEAR WAR?]

And by the way, while thousands of tourists must seek their first southward glimpse of the White House across a forest o[ placards, just who is being petitioned for a redress of grievances! Ronald Reagan is at the ranch. Congress is in recess and even when in town does business near Lafayette Square.

The petitioners and demonstrators should be permitted to do their thing at set times in the park, or in front of the White House or wherever they wish, then fold up,their demonstration sets and move on.

Outrage over the casual spoliation of the American land and cityscape of which the trashing of Lafayette Park is part--is made the keener by visits to European cities. They somehow manage to avoid becoming political gulags without sacrificing their visual grace.

Not so us. Like the clutter erected on the west side of the Executive office Building, like disfiguring, shoddy, box-like office buildings, steamy parking lots, instant-food strips. daily litter sufficient to make a landfill of the Pacific Ocean bed the junking of Lafayette Park is of a piece with our national tolerance of ugliness: And this in the name of liberty! Thomas Jefferson, who had much to say on that subject, was a man of taste who saw that virtues need not be graceless, nor beauty incompatible with liberty. A citizenry that becomes visually brutalized exposes itself to political brutalization as well.

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January 1997

In case you're looking for us (White House Peace Vigil - Peace Park anti-nuclear vigil - and friends) our signs have been moved across Lafayette Park to H Street, as has happened every four years since the vigil began in June, 1981.

Meanwhile a dozen large mobile homes rest on the grass of the southern half of Lafayette Park for the construction crews' comfort. Police patrol regularly, in part to make sure no homeless people crawl under the empty trailers in the icy dark of night. The bricks where office workers and tourists usually walk have been torn up, and huge - ugly - three-story bleachers rise in the space where our vigil normally stands, along the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue, so the press -- for one afternoon -- may stay warm and dry and near bathrooms while President Clinton has his second inaugural parade. The bathrooms on the north side of the park are locked, though construction workers again (as in past years) have for their use several porta-johns which are locked at night. Fences of every variety are intricately laid out to block demonstrators into the northeast corner of the park during the Big Event.

Ronald Reagan tried to have a second inaugural parade but it was so cold Inauguration Day 1985, the president had to call it off, and the quarter-million-dollar bleachers went unused. We were shivering and dancing in the northeast quadrant of the park, giving credit to God for a good sense of humor.

The vigil began five months after Reagan's first inauguration. At that time, people were allowed to demonstrate on the White House sidewalk. After a campaign by the Washington Times in 1983, new regulations were written banishing the vigil to Lafayette Park. During the wee hours of the morning, when tourists weren't about, police hovered and often arrested the vigilers. Department of Interior lawyers wrote a "camping" regulation which was used to criminalize (see CCNV case, U.S. Supreme Court, 1984) what was formerly protected behavior (see Abney case, U.S. Court of Appeals, 1976).

Since there are private citizens who insist on paying for this desecration of Lafayette Park every four years (via the Inaugural Committee), we're stuck with the bleachers again this year. So I'm writing President Clinton asking him, as I asked President Reagan in 1985, at least to leave the bleachers up for the rest of the winter, for homeless people to get out of the cold, wet, snowy, icy streets. I'm not asking for us -- we will remain at our signs with the minimal amount of protection necessary to survive. We are asking on behalf of the homeless sleeping on the DC streets (in spite of police harassment) ... still, after all these years.

Ellen Thomas
PEACE PARK ANTINUCLEAR VIGIL
PO Box 27217, Washington, DC 20038 USA
202-462-0757
prop1@prop1.org

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