“So here’s my idea. I promise Granny I won’t ask for a tarantula, and she lets us keep the kittens. What do you think?”
WHITE HOUSE PROTESTS: ONE WAY THE PEOPLE TELL THEIR GOVERNMENT WHAT TO DO
In The Case of the Bug on the Run, an organization called the Bug Liberation Front (BLF) protests the First Kids’ adoption of a pet cockroach because they believe insects should not be caged. The BLF is fictional, but real protests take place near the White House all the time.
For example, an animal-rights group called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) protested the White House Easter Egg Roll in 2012. Their idea was to call attention to the cramped and dirty conditions in which many chickens have to live. Instead of chicken eggs, the Easter Egg Roll ought to use plastic eggs, said PETA.
Why do people protest in front of the White House? For that matter, why do people protest at all?
Read on for the story.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
The government of the United States of America is what’s called a representative democracy. The word “democracy” comes from the language of ancient Greece, where demos meant “people” and kratos meant “power,” so in other words, a democracy is a government in which the people have the power. The representative part means we don’t have to vote every time someone wants to build a school, make a law or buy an aircraft carrier; instead, we go to the polls periodically to elect representatives who make those decisions on our behalf.
The president, who is elected every four years, is the most powerful and best-known of those representatives. Others include senators, congressmen and congresswomen, governors, mayors and school board members.
Government is just like any other enterprise. If the bosses don’t know what they’re doing, the enterprise is in trouble. Since the people are the bosses in a democracy, any person who wants good government should make it his or her business to understand how government works, what issues are important and what’s going on in the country and the world.
People who go to the trouble to do that will probably want to express their opinions and, when necessary, work to make things better.
PROTEST LEADS TO CHANGE
Protest can be a step toward making things better. And if you want to attract the attention of the president, the members of Congress and the news media—or as Cammie Parks likes to call them, “the news guys”—then Washington, DC, is the place to go.
Among the many groups that have staged protests at the White House over the years are women demanding suffrage, the right to vote. These women were called suffragists, and they marched in front of the White House during Woodrow Wilson’s second term as president, starting in 1916.
Wilson had never been a big fan of the vote for women, but at first he didn’t mind the protesters. In fact, he often greeted them with a friendly wave. Then the United States entered World War I to oppose Germany, and the atmosphere became tense. One suffragist banner suggested Wilson was a hypocrite. In a speech, he had said he sympathized with the German people because they were not self-governed. The banner pointed out that American women were not self-governed, either.
In 1917, a few suffragist leaders were arrested and jailed for protesting in front of the White House. When some of the jailed leaders refused to eat, the guards force-fed them—making the news stories even more dramatic.
Wilson knew that press coverage of women being force-fed looked bad for his presidency. In 1918 he spoke out in favor of women voting, and in 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, giving women the right to vote once and for all.
It wasn’t protests by themselves that gave women the vote. For many decades, the forces of history had been moving toward that end. Still, the suffragists’ White House protests did focus the attention of a nation . . . and a president.
CIVIL RIGHTS AND BEYOND
During the 1960s, protesters demanding civil rights for black Americans often gathered in Washington. The most famous of these gatherings was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. As many as two hundred fifty thousand people came to the National Mall on August 28 to listen to songs and speeches. Among the performers were Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary.
The speech everyone remembers, the one taught in the history books, was made by the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, thirty-four-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. In time it became known as the “I Have a Dream” speech. In The Case of the Bug on the Run, Cammie, Tessa and Nate stand on the Lincoln Memorial’s steps very close to the spot where Reverend King stood.
An important White House protest for civil rights came almost two years later, in March 1965. That month, activists walking from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital, Montgomery, were stopped and attacked by local police. Their supporters gathered at Lafayette Park across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to demand that President Lyndon Johnson send federal soldiers to provide protection.
It was unusually cold that year, and some of the protesters huddled under blankets in the falling snow. The president paid attention, and on March 20, he ordered United States soldiers to go to Alabama.
Later in that decade and into the 1970s, protests targeted the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War. A banner unfurled on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1966 read: WE MOURN OUR SOLDIERS. THEY ARE DYING IN VAIN. In 1970, antiwar activists stacked thirty-seven cardboard boxes full of end-the-war petitions against the iron fence in front of the White House. Protests by some thirty-five thousand people on May 2, 1971, resulted in thousands of arrests and increased pressure on President Richard Nixon to end the war.
Over the years, the cause of peace has been promoted by antinuclear activists whose message is also proenvironment. In 1979 a serious accident at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania inspired some sixty-five thousand people to go to Washington to march near the Capitol and the White House.
Probably the most persistent protester in American history is Concepcion Picciotto, whose antinuclear peace vigil in Lafayette Park began in 1981 and, as of 2013, was still going on.
ALL KINDS OF CAUSES
While a protest over the fate of a single Madagascar hissing cockroach may be unlikely, it’s true that all kinds of causes have drawn activists to the president’s residence. In recent times, protests have called for action on gun control, abortion, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, funding for AIDS research, gay rights and US support for the Baloch people of Pakistan.
In the spring of 2013, environmentalists and people worried about climate change protested a proposed pipeline to bring Canadian oil to refineries in the United States. Several were arrested after they tied themselves to the White House fence.
But wait a second.
If protesting is such a good thing, how come people are arrested for it?
The trouble is, protesters sometimes risk their own safety or get in the way of other citizens, like government employees, neighborhood residents and tourists. The suffragists arrested in 1917, for example, were convicted of obstructing the sidewalk and failure to disperse when told to do so by police.
Currently, there are regulations making it illegal for more than 750 people to demonstrate on the White House sidewalk. There are also limits on the size of protest signs, in part to ensure that tourists can take nice pictures of the White House. In 2011, a new law took effect that further restricts protests in places protected by the Secret Service.
Guess what happened after President Barack Obama signed that law?
Protests, of course!
CONSTITUTIONAL GUARANTEE
After the March 1965 protests, President Lyndon Johnson introduced important legislation to protect the voting rights of citizens regardless of race. Speaking to Congress, he credited protesters with helping to bring about reforms:
“The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro. His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this nation. Hi
s demonstrations have been designed to call attention to injustice, designed to provoke change, designed to stir reform.”
Whether the goal is civil rights, women’s rights, animal rights or something else altogether, the government can’t make improvements unless its bosses, the people, tell it what ought to be done. One way the people have done this throughout history is to protest in front of the White House.
If you want to know more about White House protests, a great source is the White House Historical Association, at www.whitehousehistory.org.
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