Protest at the People's House

Is the White House a public building or a private residence? Americans have struggled with the answers to these questions since it's cornerstone was laid in 1792. The country has striven to strike a balance between public ownership of the symbolic space and the safety of those who work and live there.

In the 19th century the American people had been accustomed to almost unlimited access to the White House. Tourists wandered in and out and presidents often came out of their offices to greet visitors. In the 20th century the White House remained a popular destination, but its relationship with the people would be redefined. The next century would see the people finding new ways to take ownership of the ‘People’s House’, and would exemplify the struggle between the people and the government to define the limits of the rights of the people to the space around the White House.

In June 1917 a group of suffragists set up a silent picket outside the White House gates with the purpose of “making it impossible for the President to enter or leave the White House without encountering a sentinel bearing some device pleading the suffrage cause.”

At first, law enforcement stood in the crowd watching the women, but did not interfere. Soon, however, the women the newspapers referred to as “the picketing nuisance” were chased from their post by policemen and those who refused to move were arrested on the grounds that the women were violating “section 5 of the police regulations which forbids ‘blocking traffic, unlawful assemblage, etc.’”

When they appealed their convictions, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that the women’s gathering in front of the White House “was not unlawful unless [the] gathering was for an unlawful purpose,’” establishing a precedent for the legitimacy and legality of future demonstrations.

The veterans’ occupation ended after several months without the men receiving their bonus when President Hoover authorized the eviction of the veterans by military force. This would be far from the last time that the people and the government would clash during the people’s attempts to claim the space in front of the White House as a public forum for their concerns.

From its very beginnings in the 1950s until its official end in 1975, the Vietnam War provoked intense public reactions of both protest and support. The peak of the protesting arguably occurred with the Mayday Protest during the first week of May in 1971, when groups of protestors worked in tandem to stop all traffic in the city of Washington, DC, in an attempt to bring the work of the government to a halt.

The Civil Rights Movement produced many demonstrations at and near the White House. One of the largest events was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, which centered on the National Mall and its surrounds, including the White House.

The first direct legislative attempt to contain public White House demonstrations came in 1954. Brady Gentry, a Congressman from Texas, sponsored a bill to prohibit any and all picketing in front of the White House. He was upset that some of his first sights upon entering Washington, DC in January 1953 were crowds of protesters petitioning the president at the Executive Mansion for clemency for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

The House voted to pass the bill, but it was stopped in a Senate subcommittee by Senator Wayne Morse, who declared that such a bill would “infringe rights of free speech and petition.” Morse articulated the argument of the people in a concise statement: “’The right to walk in an orderly fashion in front of the White House is a pretty important part of the right of petition…It advertises that the President is our servant, not our master, and that we have the right to petition him.’”

In the early sixties, protestors were subject to few regulations: remain orderly and stay 500 feet away from the White House if a foreign dignitary was present, but by the mid-sixties more restrictive laws had been put into place. On August 10, 1967 regulations limiting the number of people protesting in front of the White House at any given time to one hundred were issued by the National Park Service. Any group organizing a protest was required to secure a permit for their demonstration from the National Park Service in advance. The year before, in 1966, protestors had been banned from five streets surrounding the White House and Lafayette Square-all the surrounding streets except for the most famous and most frequently used by demonstrators, Pennsylvania Avenue.

In mid-September of 1967, an antiwar demonstration put on by the group Women Strike for Peace, who had obtained a permit, became a melee when several demonstrators tried to join those already assembled, a group that police judged to have reached the one hundred person limit. When police attempted to stop the newcomers, several women were knocked to the ground.

The incident spurred the Washington bureau of the American Civil Liberties Union (A.C.L.U.) to charge that the limits on picketing that had been put in place violated the Constitutional rights of assembly and free speech, calling them “arbitrary, unnecessary and undemocratic.” The A.C.L.U. took on the case of Joyce Doreen Williamson, who was arrested at the Women Strike for Peace demonstration specifically to “challenge the constitutionality” of the restriction of White House protests.

In April, 1969, U.S. District Court Judge William Bryant ruled that limitations on the number of demonstrators in front of the White House were unconstitutional. Bryant called the restrictions “’invalid and void as an unconstitutional infringement on the…rights to freedom of speech and to assemble peaceably and petition the Government for redress of grievances’.” The space in front of the White House was declared officially to be, according to the rights of citizens as laid out in the Constitution, shared public space between the people and their president.

In 1971, in a ruling directed at ending a year-long peace vigil whose participants had camped out in front of the White House, Judge George L. Hart, Jr. declared that “’sleeping, lying down, sprawling or sitting down’ in front of the White House is not protected by law.” The ACLU challenged that the right to free speech covered a live-in protest, but the judge disagreed, declaring that the group’s demonstration was “’an insult to the American people’ and showed disrespect for President Nixon.”

In January 2017 Women’s March held a rally in Washington, DC that encompassed the National Mall and streets around the White House. The march, like all that take place in Washington today, required a number of permits and massive planning that included informing marchers beforehand of restrictions on bag size, poster materials, and more.