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Review
| Marching on Washington, The Forging of an American Political Tradition, by Lucy G. Barber. Berkeley: U. of California. Press, 2002. 358 pages. $34.95, cloth.
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| Who among us hasn't marched (or wanted to march) on Washington for some cause or another? It's a national habit fully recounted by Lucy G. Barber in Marching on Washington. From 1894, when Jacob Coxey was arrested for stepping on the grass at the Capitol, Barber traces collective displays of citizenship that have gradually claimed national public spaces. Each of six chapters analyzes a march, looking at its organizers the responses of the authorities, and the coverage of journalists. She begins with Coxey's Army, 500 ragged men forming a "petition in boots" to ask the federal government for a public works program. Coxey's men tried to represent themselves as workers, fathers and family men, citizens worthy of attention, but the organizers spent twenty days in jail and felt that their claims were largely ignored. Not until 1913 did another group claim Washington's streets. Then Alice Paul organized a procession of suffragists down Pennsylvania Avenue on the day before Woodrow Wilson's inaugural parade. Suffragists wanted to make their cause highly visible and respectable, and they strove for beauty and dignity in their march. |
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The bonus marchers of 1932 wanted earlier payment of the bonus that had been promised for 1945. They set up camp in Washington, but Congress resisted the "intimidation" of protesters actually in the capital and looked for Communists among them. After two months of the veterans' presence, President Hoover used the army, under MacArthur, to force them out of their camps. The veterans didn't win their bonus until 1936, but the legacy of the march was an increase in federal tolerance and even assistance to political demonstrations. The first "march" that achieved an immediate federal response was the threatened Negro March of 1941, organized by A. Philip Randolph to demand a share of jobs in the burgeoning defense industries of World War II. President Franklin Roosevelt tried to argue the leaders out of the march, but when they assured him they could bring 100,000 people to town, he issued Executive Order 8802 establishing a Committee on Fair Employment Practice with the power to review complaints. The march was cancelled. Although enforcement of the order was lackluster, Randolph concluded that a mass protest in the capital had great potential to win public sympathy and support. |
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Randolph was the veteran organizer of the most effective "march" on Washington in the nation's history, the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom. Building on the acceptance established in the previous 70 years and using the premise that numbers count, the organizers worked to make the march acceptable to the general public. They received the tacit support of President Kennedy who had introduced a civil rights bill in Congress. 250,000 came to hear speeches, music, and fill the ceremonial center of the city, the Mall stretching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. In a fascinating analysis, Barber mentions the disparate speeches of the day which concluded with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s. "I Have a Dream" speech. With the media's focus on King, she notes, the crowd became the backdrop for his speech rather than a triumph of collective action. The media's focus on the dream portion of the speech blunted the march's broad political demands. Although many of its leaders came to see the march as ineffective, it set the standard of success: a massive, peaceful, orderly march that received official attention and extensive media coverage. |
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Since 1963, marches have tested the limits of the tradition. In 1971, the Vietnam Veterans against the War performed guerrilla theater on Washington's streets. A very free peace march brought an unprecedented degree of irreverence to the capital. When large numbers of Mayday protesters were arrested as they tried to disrupt the city, the public was apathetic. Barber analyzes the reasons why—as thousands continue to march for every year's cause—the excitement has dwindled. One trend she mentions is localization. Given the lack of response to several large city marches against the attack on Iraq, the decade of the '60s once again looks like the peak of optimism. Barber takes a balanced approach to this national habit, neither romanticizing the organizers nor defending the marches' opponents. Her book would be useful in graduate courses on mass events, in college political science courses, and U.S. history courses. Individual chapters on the marches and her extensive footnotes and bibliography could serve researchers and those students at any level wanting to go beyond the media snapshots. |
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| South Seattle Community College |
Judith Bentley |
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