Seattle To Gingrich: "Eat the Rich!"
How to Organize a Large Demonstration in No Time

By Geov Parrish
I was on the phone with a local Earth First! organizer last Dec. 5 when I learned Newt Gingrich was coming to town Jan. 10. We were talking about creative, effective ways to risk arrest and impede loggers for a series of Earth First! actions to halt the cutting of Olympic Peninsula s old-growth forest (newly permitted under the "compromise" devastation engineered by President Clinton, the Republicans and the timber industry).

Then my friend asked me for a phone number for the anarchist bicyclist group Critical Mass. He had heard that Gingrich would be in Seattle for a Republican fundraiser the next month and mused that it might be nice to jam up downtown traffic during his appearance with a few dozen protesting bicyclists.

My immediate reaction was that my friend had been isolated in the radical environmental movement for way too long. This was the first I had heard of Gingrich s planned visit, but it seemed to me that lots and lots of people, not just bicyclists and tree-lovers, would want to participate in some kind of confrontation with him.

First, Call Everyone...
So I got back on the phone. A few calls to Newt s congressional and political offices in D.C., then to those of local Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-Suburbia) confirmed that Gingrich would be at a fundraiser at Seattle s Westin Hotel Jan. 10. (Through Dunn s office, we also requested press passes for the event, which for some reason never materialized.) A few more calls yielded the information that other activist groups had heard rumors of Gingrich s visit, but no one had planned anything (yet). Lots of people liked the idea.

Three days later, by Dec. 8, I had set up a meeting for the following week to plan our action. In the hope of establishing and starting to publicize the event before people scattered for the holidays and in time to make calendar listings and newsletters with mid-month deadlines, we scheduled a daytime meeting in the Seattle Labor Temple for two reasons. We hoped to get strong union involvement, especially with the enormous solidarity effort that had gone into support of the recently settled Boeing machinists strike; and a daytime meeting would attract larger groups with paid staff, the kind that could mobilize large numbers of people, letting us incorporate subcommittees, individuals, smaller groups, and others who could mobilize on shorter notice in evening meetings later. The specific hall I booked at te Labor Temple came through the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, Local 8, on the theory that involving them would give us an in for possibly disrupting the event at the Westin. I also called a friend in the stagehands union, which would be responsible for microphones, sound systems and other technical setup for any large event Gingrich spoke at. I put the meeting notice on the Internet; I sent it to about 20 groups electronically, posted it on a local peace calendar and the University of Washington Rabble Rousers list and started making phone calls to people I knew, people I sort of knew, people I didn t know at all and people they knew.

All sorts of people dislike Newt; fairly or not, he has come to personify the class warfare and the assault on human dignity that has lately characterized U.S. politics. I talked to unions, church groups, peace groups, social justice groups, folks fighting the cutbacks in welfare and inaccessibility of healthcare, antimilitary activists, gay and lesbian groups and so on. I talked to the Boeing machinists supporters. I talked with the planning committee members for the annual Martin Luther King Day march, which would be five days after Gingrich s appearance, about coordinating our events. Getting so many groups that rarely talked with each other into the same room for a month to plan the event made it worth trying even if only 20 people showed up to greet Newt which didn t seem likely.

... Except the Democrats
In short, I talked with everyone except local Democratic Party officials; I didn t want an event where media coverage could focus on a Democrats-vs.-Republicans spat, rather than on the effects that vicious policies have on real (and angry) people. Besides, as far as I m concerned, Clinton s Democrats are complicit in many, if not most, of the things I want to protest and resist. At the Dec. 14 meeting and a subsequent meeting Dec. 20, about 25 groups were represented; another couple of dozen had expressed interest but couldn t make the meetings. By that time, we knew that Gingrich was holding two events at the Westin the night of Jan. 10: a $1,000-a-head fundraiser at seven o clock, followed by a mere $250-per-plate dinner at eight. Their combined goal was to raise over $250,000 for reactionary Republican candidates for the 1996 campaign. We decided on a two-pronged strategy: We would hold two events ourselves, one "outside" and one "inside." Outside, we would hold a rally that would gather a few blocks away at six o clock and then march to the Westin and start picketing in time to greet (and inconvenience) people arriving for Gingrich s events. We also booked a meeting space for a reception at the hotel under the name of a sympathetic consulting firm; this would get people with invitations into the hotel regardless of security and would enable us to do direct actions inside the hotel during Newt s reception and banquet.

Do a Mailing
With three weeks to plan the two events including two weeks of holidays getting endorsements or creating a formal coalition was impossible; it was also hard to get offices, staff people, boards or volunteers involved. But by the first of the year, we d already gotten flyers out, done a 4,000-piece mailing to the lists of several local groups and had set up additional mailings, flyer distributions and phone bank to help turn people out for the rally. After the holidays, momentum increased. Breaking events gave us even more help; the federal government shutdown handed us unions of local federal and state employees who held Newt and his policies primarily responsible for their furloughs. Local media coverage of the shutdown focused heavily on the personal stories of people dependent on threatened government serices, which tied in nicely with our message. By the end of the week prior to Newt s appearance, it was becoming obvious that I d created a monster or, more precisely, that the monster Gingrich had created was coming back to haunt him. We had commitments for people, groups and buses coming from Olympia, Bellingham, Port Townsend and other outlying cities; KVI (Seattle s Rush Limbaugh talk radio outlet, which fills the rest of its day with local reactionary ideologues) was urging its listeners to come and counter-protest, and to phone in harassing messages to event sponsors (we got dozens); CNN and local television and the dailies were calling even before we had a media committee formed; flyers, posters and handbills were out all over town, some from groups with no connection at all to the event. Polls nationally show Gingrich and his policies to be quite unpopular, but there hadn t been any widely reported street-level activism yet that reflected just how unpopular he was. We were starting to talk openly with groups and the media about this as an event that could have a national impact: a turnout so large that national media and politicians would have to recognize that, at least in Seattle, the right-wing assault on everyone was finally provoking resistance. We had decided not to apply for permits for the rally, both on practical and political grounds. We didn t want the police telling us where we should go and how we should go there, and we felt we d have the numbers to be very hard to remove from wherever we went. Moreover, we didn t want to be in the position of negotiating with the city for the privilege of exercising our First Amendment rights.

However, with the prospect of a massive turnout, heavy security, violence-prone counter-protesters, an inside action and limited public space around the hotel, we had a lot of logistical problems. It wasn t clear where, or whether, we d be able to set up a stage. It was obvious we would be taking over the streets we d have far too many people to fit on the sidewalks, and there would be nowhere else for them to go. How to do this safely, the effect on downtown traffic (likely to be disrupted for many blocks), whether to have moving pickets, whether to have people sitting down in the streets, whether to spread people around the block-wide hotel or keep them on one side, how to deploy our peacekeepers, how to occupy our angry protesters and avoid a riot all this happening in winter, in the cold and rain, after dark those were a few of our concerns.

Work the Media
By the final large planning meeting Jan. 3, we d delegated groups to work on stage logistics, peacekeeping, program, chants and songs, banners and signs and media. An initial list, for press packet purposes, of folks participating in organizing and publicizing the rally included about 80 local groups. On Friday, Saturday and Monday I did three interviews on local public television and radio promoting the event. Meanwhile, the inside action was (to use the modern phrase) being downsized. Over the holidays, and without being able to discuss details over the phone, we had a hard time recruiting folks; only about 20 showed up for the nonviolence training Jan. 7. We decided to go ahead with the action, using dinner reservations in the hotel rather than the (much more expensive) reserved reception room. The inside group started meeting and planning separately from the rally. On Tuesday morning, the day before Gingrich s visit, we held a press conference with a number of community leaders (but without any Democratic party officials or politicians). The roster was a reflection of the amazing diversity of groups and constituencies we d welded together on short notice: labor, environmental, youth, social services, health care, religious, community. By that time, we d already been fielding a lot of calls from media and from organizations as well. The American Federation of Government Employees was sending a buslad from Portland, Oregon, 180 miles away; folks were flying in from the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane, 300 miles away, for the evening. We were ready.

Showtime!
The East Coast was shut down by a blizzard, but it was dry and warm in Seattle for Newt s visit. The turnout was fantastic, and the rally happened well, not flawlessly, but smoothly enough. Organizers estimated a turnout of 3,000; Seattle Police estimated 1,500. We far outnumbered the 300 or so counterdemonstrators. A wing of the rally faced off with them, separated by peacekeepers; another blocked the street front of the main hotel entrance, where we set up the stage; another clustered around a service entrance where Gingrich was ushered into the building (we had scanners monitoring police and Secret Service transmissions); another briefly blockaded the parking garage, another occupied the valet parking area, and their loud chants, directed to the dinner patrons entering from the parking garage, were audible in the hotel and reportedly scared away many of the would-be Gingrich attendees. It was chaos, made more difficult for us by the failure, early on, of our radios (for stage, peacekeepers and tactical team), but very effective for communicating our message. The signs, costumes and noise, from an incredible array of groups and issues and from all over the Pacific Northwest, were something we hadn t seen in Seattle in years.

Meanwhile, inside, 11 Nonviolent Action Community of Cascadia folks were arrested in the fourth floor lobby adjacent to the ballroom in which Gingrich was speaking. They were arrested without a trespass warning, based on their appearance (someone s hand-drawn "eat the rich" T-shirt got on TV), charged with trespassing, and released at 5:30 the next morning. Charges will almost certainly not stick, as despite the ascendancy of Newt and his ilk not being "appropriately" dressed is not yet a crime. We announced the fourth floor interruption at the close of our outside rally (the two were connected by cellular phone, which we d also used to monitor the counterdemonstration); that put a nice topping on the euphoria most rally attendees and we organizers felt as we headed home.

The Score
By morning our local public radio had reduced the event to "outside the hotel, a few hundred pro- and anti-Gingrich demonstrators shouted at each other ..." I ve never before heard of media low-balling a police crowd estimate by a factor of four! Local television was a bit better, and we did get some of the national exposure we had hoped for, though it was similarly distorted. (But an aerial shot of the crowd on a CNN report supported our figures for the size of the crowd.) Happily, the arrests, at least, were reported accurately. And, of course, many reports included comments from our local Democratic representative in Congress, who showed up at the protest. Oh well. Someday we ll own the presses.

So what were the results? The rally and the direct action made a lot of people feel good and gave them a chance to vent. We scared off some Republican donors, though they doubtless still paid their money for the dinner. And according to press reports we annoyed Newt and his handlers a bit. (Various reports had Newt and his camp blaming the rally on "organized labor" and "unemployed pot heads.") Not only did we make them work a little harder for their quarter million dollars, but it will give people pause about attending a similar fundraiser next time. More importantly, we got a lot of like-minded people, often isolated in their different issues and circles, working together, and many will probably work together again; and we vividly demonstrated that there are many, many angry people behind all those polls showing widespread opposition to every acet of the Contract With America, "free trade," militarism, environmental destruction, social intolerance and all the other arms of this country s oligarchical assault. Most importantly, the event shows what first one, then a small handful of nonviolent activists with a good idea at the right time can do. I heard about Newt coming; I decided there should be a big, visible response, rooted in Nonviolent Action Community of Cascadia and WRL s basic precepts of nonviolence and social justice; I called and e-mailed some people; we got together in a room, agreed to do it, divided up the work, started calling other folks and set to it. We assumed we d make some mistakes, and we did; we also did not limit ourselves with assumptions as to who would or wouldn t help or be interested, and we made a lot of new allies that way. Enough of these sorts of projects, and we just might have one heckuva movement. We ll do it again, as often as needed. You should too.

[Top of Page]
[War Resisters League Website]

The Nonviolent Activist is published bi-monthly by:
WAR RESISTERS LEAGUE
339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012. (212) 228-0450, fax (212) 228-6193, e-mail:wrl@warresisters.org.

EDITOR: Judith Mahoney Pasternak. PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE: Virginia Baron, David McReynolds, John M. Miller (production), Judith Mahoney Pasternak (editor), Mary Jane Sullivan, Lisa Vives. NVA ADVISORY BOARD: Robert Cooney, Kate Donnelly, Larry Gara, Carol Jahnkow, Andy Mager, Matt Meyer, Craig Simpson. SUBSCRIPTIONS: Free to members, individual non-members of WRL $15 per year; institutions $25 per year; overseas airmail add $15 per year. Send check or money order to WRL. MANUSCRIPTS: Inquiries welcome via postal or e-mail. Paper manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by a SASE; poetry by assignment only. Letters to the editor, inquiries, advertising rates, etc. to the address above.