TROUBLEMAKERS
THE WASHINGTONIAN MAGAZINE,
FEBRUARY, 1996
WE GET MORE PROTESTERS THAN ANY OTHER CITY IN THE WORLD. THERE
HAVE BEEN GREAT AND AWFUL MOMENTS. BEHIND THE SCENES,TWO MEN
Decide WHAT YOU CAN AND CAN'T DO.
By Larry Van Dyne
Reply
EVERY SUMMER, AN INTERIOR DEPARTMENT mail carrier delivers to
Room 6556 of the agency's Washington headquarters an ordinary
picture postcard. On the front, there's usually some glorious
western landscape from one of America's national parks--a geyser
in Yellowstone, perhaps, or a sunset over the Grand Canyon. On
the back, the handwriting is so familiar that Rick Robbins, the
occupant of Room 6556, can recognize at a glance that it's the
latest in a string of cards he's been getting every summer for
more than a decade. Robbins is a 51-year-old lawyer--his
official title is assistant solicitor--who handles the legal work
for the National Park Service in the Washington area. The Park
Service administers the White House and its grounds. the Mall,
the Ellipse, and Lafayette Park--all at the symbolic center of
American Government and used by thousands of citizens each year
for political protests. That makes Robbins a central figure m
crafting the rules governing what these protesters can and can't
do.
He's been fine-tuning these rules for 25 years; they now cover
ten pages of small type in the Code of Federal Regulations (Title
36, Chapter 1, Section 7.96). They're designed to balance the
guarantees of the Constitution's First Amendment (free speech,
right of peaceable assembly, right to petition the government)
with the desire that Washington's "monumental core" remain
orderly and attractive. And that raises more is sues than you can
imagine-from the legality of building an igloo in Lafayette Park and the size of protest signs
on the White House sidewalk to how many portable toilets are
needed for a demonstration and who pays for damages to the grass
on the Mall.
The postcard is from Art Spitzer, a New York-born attorney who
has lived in Washington since the mid-1970s and a man who likes
to spend his summer vacation hiking and camping in the national
parks. But the more important thing to know about Spitzer--who
was trained in the law at Yale--is that for the past 15 years he
has been the legal director of the Washington office of the
American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU has been an unyielding
watchdog of First Amendment freedoms since the 1920s, which means
that every time Rick Robbins draws up one of his rules for
protests, Art Spitzer is right there with a lawsuit suggesting it
is too restrictive. "Since I arrived in this office in 1970,"
says Robbins, "there has not been a single day when we did not
have at least one First Amendment suit against us."
Spitzer's postcard, which usually reports that he is on guard
against threats to the First Amendment in the wilderness, is a
running joke between two men who have developed a mutual respect.
They see themselves in fundamental agreement about the
constitutional right of Americans to bring their grievances to
Washington's powers that be.
Their tug of war is just one of the hidden forces that determine
how protests--and other events on the Mall--are acted out. Why
can you tie a yellow ribbon around an old oak tree but not around
the Washington Monument? Why do feminists wear white when they
march for women's rights? Why do some protesters come outfitted
with cloth diapers? Why did Tom Hanks get to plunge into the
Reflecting Pool in Forrest Gump while Arnold Schwarzenegger
didn't in True Lies? Why do volunteers always pick up and turn
the AIDS memorial quilt every couple of hours? What do Beavis and
Butthead have to do with the First Amendment?
SAVING WHALES AND SAVING SOULS
CAPITAL CITIES ALWAYS ATTRACT people with causes--whether they
come to speak in London's Hyde Park or to brave the authorities
in Beijing's Tiananmen Square--but Washington may well have more
demonstrations, marches, rallies, and vigils than any place in
the world. The Park Service got permit applications for about
2,000 such events last year.
The number is far greater than a generation ago, and
political protests are now so common that many Washingtonians
give them the same notice as elevator music. Tourists pay the
most attention, frequently stopping for a snapshot, while
teachers have been known to bring their students to
demonstrations on field trips.
Protesters have been coming to Washington for much of its
history. During the economic depression of the 1890s, Ohio
businessman Jacob Coxey led an "army" of unemployed men into the
city, where he was arrested for trespassing on the grounds of the
Capitol. In the early 1900s, women's groups conducted several
marches to demand voting rights; in 1916, a number of socially
prominent Washington suffragists were among those arrested and
sent to jail for picketing the White House.
In 1925, some 50,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan, in robes but
without masks, paraded through the city carrying American flags.
And during the Great Depression of the 1930s, a "bonus army" of
20,000 World War 1 veterans marched into Washington demanding
advance payment of a promised federal bonus; after several weeks
their encampment along the Anacostia River was burned by Army
troops, and they were run out of town.
ASIDE FROM THE MASSIVE DEMONSTRATIONS against the Vietnam War
in the 1960s and '70s, many of the biggest demonstrations since
World War II were aimed at calling attention to the grievances of
minorities. Black Americans have marched on Washington several
times, from the gathering in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial where
Martin Luther King delivered his famous I-Have-a-Dream speech to
last year's Million Man March.
Women's groups have paraded through the streets several times
since the mid-1970s to support abortion rights and the Equal
Rights Amendment. Gays and lesbians have sponsored two big
marches, the most recent in 1993, and several times have laid out
the huge AIDS quilt.
Religious conservatives have taken to the streets of
Washington as well. An antiabortion "March for Life" has drawn
thousands each January since the Supreme Court's decision
legalizing abortion in 1973. One evangelist is planning his
second "Washington for Jesus" rally this summer, and another has
approached the Park Service seeking a date to assemble a million
Christian men on the Mall.
Washington also has become a stage where foreign conflicts are
played out. In 1987, some 200,000 Americans rallied on the Mall
to protest the refusal of the Communists to grant exit visas to
Soviet Jews. In the 1970s, warring factions of Iranian
students--some supporting the shah and others opposing
him--marched through the streets clashing with each other and
with police. Those confrontations grew so ugly--students poured
gasoline on a Park Police horse and were stopped just short of
lighting it--that a "cooling off' period was imposed before the
students were allowed to march again.
BEYOND THE 40 OR SO MAJOR demonstrations each year are
hundreds of smaller ones that attract only a handful of people.
Saving the whales, feeding the homeless, remembering John Lennon,
protecting pets, demanding money for AIDS research, promoting
vegetarianism, celebrating wetlands, demanding an end to Star
Wars, begging for the return of major league baseball--the
protesters come in "every season" and for "every reason," a Park
Service official once marveled.
Remember too that political protests are just a part of the
crush of events competing for space on the Mall and around the
White House. Presidential inaugurals get a turn every four years,
and every year there's time set aside for official events like
wreath layings at the memorials, the Cherry Blossom Festival, the
Easter Egg Roll, the Pageant of Peace, the Smithsonian's Festival
of American Folklife, and the Fourth of July fireworks spectacle.
Once in a while, too, the parks are taken over for a
celebration of some national triumph or moment of thanksgiving,
like the return of America hostages from Iran in 1981 or the
celebration of the military victory over Iraq in 1991. The Park
Service also issues dozens of permits each year for non-political
"special events," including sports activities, fundraisers, band
concerts, private parties, and weddings.
If you have your calendar handy, you may want to mark down
these events coming soon to the Mall near you. The Race for the
Cure, a major breast-cancer fundraiser, will be back in June; the
AIDS quilt will be displayed in October; George Washington
University, embarrassed last year when rain cut short its outdoor
commencement and it had no alternate site, will try again on the
Ellipse in May; and the Smithsonian is planning a big outdoor
celebration of its 150th anniversary beginning in late July.
Or try these: the annual rare-breed dog show (April), the
national finals of a student auto skills contest sponsored by the
Ford Motor Company and the American Automobile Association
(June); and an appearance by the Wildcatdets dance team of
Humble, Texas (March).
There's also a permit request in for a tent party on the Mall
in April to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a son of the ubiquitous
political analyst Norman J. Ornstein.
SEE YOU IN COURT
RICK ROBBINS WAS 24 YEARS OLD and just out of law school when
he moved to Washington to take a job at the Interior Department
in the summer of 1970. The son of a Houston petroleum engineer,
he'd gone to Colorado State and the University of Texas as an
undergraduate, then stayed in Austin for law school.
Though he had never made it to Washington for any of the big
anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of the late '60s, he'd had plenty
of experience in the antiwar movement. He had marched against the
war on campus both in Colorado and Texas, was active in the
radical Students for a Democratic Society, had once applied to
his draft board for conscientious-objector status, and wore his
hair long in the fashion of the day.
Robbins intended to stay at Interior just long enough to learn
something about water law, then head back to Colorado and enter
private practice. Figuring that a government lawyer ought to
project a buttoned-down image, he got a haircut as soon as he
pulled in to Washington--short enough that there was a ring of
white, untanned skin visible around his neck when he reported for
work.
He was surprised to team that his first assignment would be as
the Park Service"s liaison with the antiwar protesters who were
descending on Washington more and more frequently. He had lucked
into an ideal job: "I had no idea I could make a living
negotiating demonstrations." And it would require a change in
personal style--so as not to appear too Establishment, the
government wanted him to grow his hair long.
The level of anger and violence in portions of the antiwar
movement in those days makes the protests of the 1990s seem tame.
J.J. McLaughlin, who now heads the special forces branch of the
US Park Police, remembers working his first demonstration as a
young officer and having a protester taunt him about being "a pig
behind Foster Grants." Demonstrators some times hurled rocks and
bottles into police lines, and the flags and benches ringing the
Washington Monument were burned-with repairs to the benches
courtesy of pacifist Amish carpenters. The first few feet of the
monument got hit so often by antiwar graffiti that the Park
Service kept a sandblasting team at the ready.
It was such a wild time that the longhaired Robbins ("our boy
with the page boy:' as a supervisor called him) would sit around
in the Park Service"s mobile command trailer assessing the
prospects for violence by counting how many helmets and gas masks
were in the crowd.
The Park Service, which includes the Park Police, did not
always handle demonstrations with finesse. Some in the agency
believed antiwar protests were not a legitimate use of park
lands, and some officers displayed deep animosity toward the
longhaired demonstrators. "We had one policeman who emptied a
canister of Mace and split a pair of pants kicking ass in nearly
every demonstration," says Robbins, and another who stood poised
with his night stick to crack the skull of any hippie caught
picking tulips in the park. Another problem: The Park Service had
no consistent code of regulations about what it would and
wouldn't allow.
AS THE MIDDLEMAN BETWEEN THE Park Service and the anti-war
movement, Robbins often found himself negotiating with protest
leaders. If they planned to engage in civil disobedience, the
Park Police liked to make arrangements in advance about the
arrests--less chance that anybody on either side would get hurt.
These negotiating sessions did not always go well, as with a
meeting in 1971 with Rennie Davis, then renowned as a member of
the Chicago Seven, who had been indicted for their roles in the
antiwar protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Davis was
planning to march his people from the grounds of the Washing(on
Monument to the front of the White House, where he wanted to
stage 3,000 arrests on Pennsylvania Avenue. Robbins and the Park
Service wanted to move the arrest site farther east, in front of
the Treasury Department, prompting Davis to storm out of the
meeting with a promise to "see you in the streets."
After the meeting, Robbins and the group's young lawyer went
out to dinner and ended up later with a bunch of people at an
apartment near Dupont Circle, where somebody suggested a
potential solution to the impasse over the arrests. They'd dump
all their marijuana on the table and have a joint-rolling contest
between the antiwar lawyer and Robbins--best two out of three. If
Robbins won, Rennie Davis would come back to the negotiating
table and work something out about the arrests--a condition Davis
agreed to by phone.
"He rolled for the peace movement, and 1 rolled for the
government." Robbins says. "And the government won." A few days
late, Park Police peacefully made about 800 prearranged arrests
in front of Treasury.
The Park Service, convinced that demonstrations on park land
in Washington were here to stay, began trying to approach them
more professionally. The Park Police stepped up its crowd-control
training and promoted a cooler, more dispassionate attitude.
The solicitor's office where Rick Robbins worked began forging
the first of its detailed regulations. Robbins was in on the
ground floor of that effort, which was immediately targeted for
special attention by the American Civil Liberties Union. At first
the legal work was handled by an ACLU lawyer named Ralph Temple,
who was then succeeded by Art Spitzer.
THE OPENING SKIRMISH IN THE legal battle arose when the Park
Service issued its first set of comprehensive regulations in
1969. One of the more controversial provisions put strict limits
on the number of protesters allowed on the sidewalk in front of
the White House (100) and across the street in Lafayette Park
(500). The ACLU, which believed that freedom to protest was all
the more sacred in such showcase spots, challenged the
regulations on behalf of a group of antiwar Quakers.
The courts issued a split decision. The Park Service won the
right to require demonstrators to get a permit, to require
48-hours notice of any demonstration, and to limit protests
during rush hour. But the courts agreed with the ACLU's argument
that the numerical limits were too restrictive, eventually
raising the number to the current limit of 750 on the White House
sidewalk and 3,000 in Lafayette Park. These limits may be waived,
however, if demonstrators provide their own marshals to keep
order.
The scene then shifted to the Ellipse, where the Park Service
every year allowed a local civic group to set up the traditional
Pageant of Peace display, complete with a stage, a burning yule
log, Christmas trees, a pen of reindeer, and a petting zoo. A
group of pacifists, operating under the banner of the "Women's
Strike for Peace:' applied for a permit to erect a mock graveyard
on the Ellipse, with Styrofoam tombstones symbolizing the death
toll in Vietnam. When the Park Service turned them down--on
grounds that no structures were allowed on the Ellipse--the ACLU
went to court again.
Noting that the Park Service had allowed the Pageant of Peace
display, the court ruled that the pacifists had equal rights.
Religious symbolism in the Pageant of Peace has had an
on-again, off-again history as the Supreme Court has refined its
ideas about separation of church and state. When the pageant
began, in 1954, it included a creche with the infant Jesus. In
the 1970s, Jesus was deemed legally inappropriate and was put
into storage, but further rulings in the 1980s allowed his
return. In fact, religious practice now has fairly free rein on
the Mall -- protected under the First Amendment's free-speech
clause. In one case, in 1979, courts rejected a suit by atheist
Madalyn Murray O'Hair to prevent Pope John Paul II from
celebrating mass there.
Now the big issue each winter is the reindeer, which have been
kept in a pen on the Ellipse near the national Christmas tree for
several years. The Humane Society, acting on a complaint from an
unidentified animal-rights group, inspected the reindeer
enclosure last year and deemed it satisfactory, with the proviso
that something be placed over the pen so people couldn't injure
the creatures by throwing objects at them. This year, the Park
Service decided to avoid all controversy by excluding the
reindeer, in part because the rental fee on reindeer had become
too expensive.
THE WHITE HOUSE SIDEWALK HAS been a popular place to mount
demonstrations for years, out of the hope they will capture the
attention of tourists and perhaps even the president or visiting
heads of state. Many of the rules governing White House
demonstrations date to the early 1980s, when people began holding
longterm, round-the-clock peace vigils there-more or less living
in large plywood structures filled with beds, chairs, and other
belongings. A man named William Thomas, who even today continues
a vigil in Lafayette Park, lived there for a there in a sort of
"sidewalk mobile home" built of wood and featuring wheels and
bunk beds.
In 1983, the Park Service banned such structures--as well as
large-scale signs-- from the sidewalk, and the ACLU took the
agency to court on behalf of a group of women who had marched in
favor of the Equal Rights Amendment with signs that were bigger
than allowed. The courts sided with the Park Service, as they
also did in a case involving the late Mitch Snyder, the advocate
for the homeless, who was arrested for sitting on the sidewalk in
a chair, which the Park Service classified as a prohibited
structure.
The limitations on use of the White House sidewalk are quite
detailed. No structures are allowed, and you can't leave any
parcels, containers, packages, or bundles unattended--they might
contain explosives. All signs or placards must be made of
cardboard, poster board, or cloth (no wood allowed); they can't
be bigger than three feet wide, 20 feet long, and one
quarter-inch thick; and they must be in physical contact with a
person at all times. You also can't tie placards on the White
House fence or set up signs closer than three feet from it, which
might set off the Secret Service's detectors.
There's even a rule protecting the Kodak moment: For ten yards
on either side of the center point of the sidewalk, protesters
with signs must keep walking so as not to impede the right of
tourists to slip in and snap a picture of the presidential
mansion.
THE PARK SERVICE AND PROTESTERS have always played a kind of
cat-and-mouse game, in which the Park Service slaps its paw at
the protesters one place only to have them pop up somewhere else
that the Park Service hadn't thought to cover. So it was no
surprise that the peace vigil protesters had only just been
cleared from the White House sidewalk when they reappeared across
the street in Lafayette Park. One woman--a Spaniard named
Conception Picciotto, who continues her anti-nuclear vigil there
today--erected 187 signs, many of them on eight-foot-by-four-foot
plywood scrounged from Metro construction sites.
Before long, the park was crowded with other billboards, huts,
beds, chairs, desks, tables, bookcases, cabinets, cans of paint,
even a kitchen sink--and the Park Service began getting letters
from senators and congressmen passing along complaints from
constituents who thought the park had become a "sickening dump."
Rick Robbins came up with another set of anti-squatter rules
custom-designed for Lafayette Park--rules the courts upheld. A
person is allowed to display signs in the park--any size if they
are handicapped. But if signs are stationary, they can't be
larger than four feet by four feet, no individual can have more
than two, and he has to stay within three feet of them at all
times. No structures are allowed, except small soapboxes or
stages that must be taken away when a demonstration ends.
And one other thing: Signs can't be arranged to make an
enclosure of two or more sides, which rules out unsightly huts
and reduces the Secret Service's anxiety about someone hiding
behind a couple of signs with a missile aimed at the White House.
Virtually every line of these regulations has been litigated,
and some protesters still complain that the Park Service is
nitpicky and overregulates their activities. But there are others
who think of the agency's rules as a model for balancing the
rights of citizens to speak freely and petition the government
with the rights of those who just want to use the parks for
sightseeing or recreation.
In 1993, when the American Bar Association was asked by the
former Soviet Republic of Belarus to help it draft legal codes
for its transition to democracy, the organization put together a
task force of lawyers. Among the most experienced members of the
subcommittee on demonstrations were Art Spitzer and Rick Robbins.
Continued
Pennsylvania Ave. Closure || Peace Park