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Edward Jayne
Kalamazoo, Michigan
September 12, 2004

The demonstration on Sunday, August 29, at the Republican National Convention in New York City turned out to be an extraordinary experience. The New York Times estimated that a half million participated, but the number could have been anywhere between 300,000 and a million. The crowd was so big that its size didn't really matter. All the buildings around us were swallowed up in throngs of people. Skyscrapers were vertical; we were horizontal---and we were on the move, slowly at first but picking up speed. During the Vietnam War, I participated in two demonstrations about the same size--the 1970 and 1971 Washington events, both of which were unforgettable--but they were a long time ago. More recently, the February 15, 2002 NYC demonstration preceding the Iraq invasion was also impressive, but it was smaller, and too many participants were obviously leftovers from the Vietnam era. However, this latest protest event, the biggest since Vietnam, was once again on a gargantuan scale and with a solid balance among generations. Many younger participants were college students, again suggestive of trends when the Vietnam protest movement first gathered momentum.

Most of us marched with pride and dignity. We enjoyed our unanimity, and everybody seemed to have open and intelligent faces. It would be safe to estimate that at least two-thirds of us were from outside NYC, roughly the percentage of activists booked by the police later in the week. Our sources of information were pretty much the same--The New York Times, The Nation, The Progressive, Counterpunch, etc., as well as BBC, Amy Goodman's Democracy Now TV program and a multitude of internet blogs additional to the conventional media. Michael Moore, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, and Amy Goodman were collective heroes, and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly were no less universally despised. There was an almost ecstatic sense of outrage spurred by a garish 3-story sign at the site of the NYC Fox headquarters adjacent to Madison Square Garden, the site of the Republican Convention.

Most of us marched quietly, but there were also drummers, dancers, and piercing whistle blowers. Trotskyists put on an energetic show, the Palestinian cause was adequately represented, and Nader supporters were tolerated. As far as I could tell, a couple of Bush-enthusiastic counter-demonstrators stayed close to police lines. I photographed two of them, obviously to their discomfort as well as the policemen standing next to them. A third who was somehow connected with Wall Street, shouted his disagreement with my sign--"TRICKY-- GREEDY -- STUPID-- and very EVIL--that Bush isn't as stupid as he seems, which triggered a five-minute debate that ended with our shaking hands.

A few thousand police were present. They did not behave in a hostile manner, but were unwilling to speak to us or even to meet our eyes. I suspect they were more worried about federal laws regarding overtime pay than the merits of our cause. In any case, few arrests were made on the march route, and there seemed to be a sense of camaraderie on almost as cosmic scale, as if the entire universe was united in its collective loathing of the Bush regime. Massive columns of good and interested people kept swelling the ranks on 7th Ave. from side streets as low as 14th St. Our parade route went north to 34th St., east to 5th Ave. and south again to Broadway and then Union Square. Here the march mercifully dispersed at Mayor Bloomberg's insistence, without anybody being forced to listen to predictably militant speeches filled with empty slogans.

Once the march ended, many went on to Central Park, where there was reportedly little trouble with the police. Others, including the Kalamazoo group of roughly forty-five with which I had come, immediately returned to their busses and traveled home again. I myself had a place to stay in New York City, so I was able to remain for another couple days. In fact, I was not even able to complete the march, having burdened myself with too many water jugs additional to the full backpack I needed to remain in the city. Also, I was sleepless from the bus ride, my dress tennis shoes hurt, my underwear chafed, and my brain simmered under the blazing sun. So I left the march at the end of 34th St. in order to gather my wits and salvage what was left of me for later protests in the week.

Monday was an entirely different experience. It was a clear day and almost ten degrees cooler. I returned to Madison Square Garden and walked the entire area looking for an organized protest. I could only find a single individual with a poster, who answered my obvious question with the grandiose reply, "I'm the demonstration." Amazingly, Republican delegates were everywhere to be seen, but without advertising themselves as delegates or betraying any trace of macho triumphalism. Obviously they weren't New Yorkers, or demonstrators, but they didn't seem easy to target.

The one exception was a large flagrant woman from Texas who I recall wore a cowboy hat and a banner across her chest proclaiming her to be a delegate from the Chosen State. She was crowding more than her share of the sidewalk, and I refused to give up mine, so there was an energetic brush block without either of us losing step or making any apology. This was my one brief encounter with anybody representative of the Republican Party. I proceeded to Union Square, only to find that a relatively small march had departed to Madison Square Garden maybe an hour earlier, but on a different route than I had taken to the square.

Back at my quarters at the end of the day everything seemed to have been pretty much a waste of time. Suddenly, however, another march could be heard--one that hadn't been advertised in the morning--so I grabbed my sign and joined in. I had no idea of our destination, but the route turned out to be simple enough--down 2nd Ave. to 14th St. or so, across to 8th Ave, then up to the Convention Center, which was still in session. Somehow a permit had been granted letting us disperse at the Convention site, so a crowd of between two and ten thousand demonstrators was involved--again it was hard to tell how many. And in fact I still don't know, since there was no reference to this march in the next morning's newspapers. As it turned out, however, this unpublicized event was probably of pivotal importance to the outcome of the Convention.

As opposed to Sunday, almost all of the marchers were young and without posters, marching much faster than the day before. There were enough older people to avoid feeling totally out of place, but young protestors with obviously militant intentions obviously dominated the flavor and momentum of the experience. The police kept us to one side of the streets and avenues we used by pushing what seemed an endless chain of bicycles wheel-to-wheel along the center strip. They wore short pants, and their bicycles had as many as a half dozen plastic handcuff sets tied under the seats. Again, these police officers avoided eye contact and did not speak to us.

Things became more intense the farther we proceeded. Now and again a team of two or three police officers would slice through marchers to tackle and arrest one of them who somehow exceeded acceptable limits. Other police then followed to back them up and photograph the process. In response protestors would first scatter, then those with cameras would swarm in again to take their own pictures. Everybody seemed to be photographing everybody else, the camera having become an instrument of intimidation for both sides.

I was able to observe one arrest unobstructed, standing perhaps eight feet from the tackle as the crowd scattered in every direction. I had the impression that the police knew exactly who they wanted, and also that the young man was just as aware of their reason for tackling him. Struggling without making any effort to argue, he seemed primarily interested in protecting himself from being twisted out of joint while pressed against the pavement. I did nothing to help him, since any effort to intervene would obviously have led to my arrest and detention, which I preferred to avoid for a couple dozen reasons, most obviously my reluctance to go without prescription medication for an indefinite period in jail (as it turned out, 72 hours would have been the case). I felt somewhat guilty about my timidity, though nobody else went beyond photographing the arrest.

It was growing dark quickly, so each arrest was signaled by increasingly dramatic surges of flashing lights--"flash points," one might call them--up and down the line of march. The same small metal whistles from Sunday were once again used by marchers, echoing against the buildings, and now and again commands were shouted up and down the march either to speed up or slow down. The one command I recall the most vividly was a young woman yelling, "Tell them ahead, we are going to march all night along--tell them all night long." Her emphasis of the last three words both stirred and intimidated me, but all of us remained primarily aware of a very specific destination just a few blocks ahead, the Republican Convention on the first night of its deliberations.

When my portion of the march was just a couple hundred yards short of Madison Square Garden, a squad of policemen suddenly pulled a metal fence across an intersection to block the entire crowd behind it from making any further progress forward. A small cluster surged to the side to get through, so the police began running and the fence broke open in the middle. A brief gap presented itself, and I took advantage of the opportunity, sidestepping through to remain in the march. At least two others tried to follow, but they were not quick enough. The police tackled and arrested them while I mingled elsewhere with marchers, expecting the worst.

Suddenly the other side of the intersection was also fenced off, trapping everybody caught between the two fences from both ends of the march, as if we had been singled out for capture, beatings, or whatever the police might have had in mind. At this point a large and muscular African American moved among us, obviously a police officer disguised as a demonstrator. He repeatedly told us in a loud voice that we could make our escape along the side street to 7th Ave. Which we did, of course in the direction chosen by the police order to separate us from the march. At one point between the two avenues another officer came at me with his baton ready to strike, but I was able to catch his eye, telling him to calm down, calm down, and he actually spoke to me. "Get on the curb," he growled; "No problem," said I, and the encounter was over with.

As I walked away from what remained of the march, I fell in with a young woman who identified herself as a Lawyers Guild observer. We agreed the police had probably decided it was too dangerous to let marchers get any closer to the convention site. In order to prevent this from happening, they split the crowd in half at the intersection we had been in, then funneled all three groups they had created, beginning with the intersection contingent, to 8th Ave. and beyond.

In retrospect I cannot be indignant about their choice. In all honesty, I would have done the same thing if I were in their place, since NYC was up against a different kind of threat than anybody has seen since the sixties. A large number of young protestors, whether they realized it or not, were testing their willingness to go to jail for the privilege of throwing themselves against a national leadership which they frankly loath--as do I. And in fact they were looking for trouble, as was I, and the opportunity to disrupt the Convention was probably more than they could have resisted. I seriously doubt the march could have been allowed to reach the Convention without producing major repercussions in full view of the national media.

As result, city officials probably decided to resort to a contingency plan earlier contrived in case post-Sunday activism seemed likely to get out of hand. Probably with the full recommendation of the police based on the size and intensity of the Monday night march, Mayor Bloomberg and Republican Convention officials decided to curtail further demonstrations by the simple expedient of warehousing as many demonstrators as possible until the end of the Convention. Round them up and throw them in jail was the brand new strategy for coping with the situation, and it could begin with afternoon demonstrations the very next day. There was no civil disobedience early Tuesday, but the plan was put into effect and roughly 1100 demonstrators were arrested and jailed by late afternoon. And, no surprise, many of them were not released for one excuse or another until President Bush's speech Thursday night.

Tuesday was also unique for me, but for entirely different reasons. I decided late Monday night it was time to accept my daughter's repeated invitation to join her family near the end of Long Island, but only after I could purchase an adequate pair of walking shoes in Manhattan. My feet were about to drop off, and further activism was simply out of question. So, first things first, I ordered breakfast at a nearby cafe, only to be joined at the next table by a police officer on his way to duty. After perhaps ten minutes of dead silence while we were eating, I broke the ice and soon enough we were sharing our feelings in response to the maneuvers on both sides over the two previous days. He emphasized the lack of respect by demonstrators on Monday as opposed to Sunday, and I emphasized the foreign policy issues that have led demonstrators to vent their opposition with such aggressiveness. I actually praised the NYC police for their restraint, giving them an "A" compared to police tactics against demonstrations I've participated in elsewhere (the worst having been LA's Central City Plaza police riot back in 1967). We parted shaking hands.

What happened just a couple hours later, as this friendly (at least polite) police officer might wellhave known while we were talking, was that the police department initiated its new tactic of warehousing demonstrators first by driving motor bikes into the crowd and using plastic netting to arrest groups, and later by detaining them in unacceptable quarters at Pier 57 for an indefinite period that finally ended almost 72 hours later. Whoever came up with this strategy, it seemed obvious that an entirely new plan was being implemented to save the Republican Convention from any further threat of disruption. And it worked.

There are rumors now that the Republican party actually rented Pier 57, an abandoned warehouse, in order to let the NYC police warehouse demonstrators. Whether true or not, such an investment by the Republican Party made sense. Of course one or two demonstrators were still able to reach the convention floor, and others did continue to harass Republican delegates at parties, in restaurants and on the sidewalks. But, all in all, the situation was under sufficient control to bring President Bush into the city with relative confidence that his presence would not be challenged on a massive scale. As a final tally, more than 1800 arrests occurred in NYC, as opposed to maybe six arrests in Boston, when Republican demonstrators were said to have used union-printed signs and to have been taken to and from the convention site in rented limousines.

To buy comfortable shoes I caught a cab down to about 8th St., then hobbled back along Broadway without being aware that mass arrests were taking place just a couple blocks away. Soon I was on a bus to Greenport, and I only found out what had happened at dinner time. That night tossed and turned in a small, lovely guesthouse under a glorious full moon and surrounded by many acres of grass--but unable to forget everybody I marched with the night before, most of whom were in police detention at the same time.

As already might have been suggested, I'm seventy years old and not much to worry about. But Washington beltway Republicans and Democrats should be concerned about the young demonstrators I marched with as forerunners of a much bigger protest movement if the current foreign policy adventurism of the Bush administration is taken any further--either by Bush or Kerry. In particular, I suspect any attempt to resume universal conscription for this purpose would put the nation back again in the sixties for all to see, and with crowds many times more formidable than those I encountered the other night.

I can still recall having been arrested with four and a half thousand others in a 1971 sit-in demonstration at the Justice Department, all of us incessantly shouting at Attorney General Mitchell, who stood watching from a balcony above, "Join us, join us," as in fact he later did when he was arrested and served time for his Watergate connection. And I can still recall the 1970 demonstration, with smashed cars, smashed windows, throngs running in every direction, and the pervasive odor of tear gas throughout much of downtown Washington. I was with a contingent of marchers that was able to reach Lafayette Park and wave a large Viet Cong flag for everybody to see from White House windows. For five minutes, perhaps the apex ane epitome of my life's experience, I was the one who waved that flag. Things like this have been deleted from the official mythology of the sixties, but they did happen, and they can happen again. Suddenly the swaggering macho-triumphalism popular today among illiterate and quasi-literate young males would be supplanted by a new and more virulent animus pretty much as happened thirty-five years ago. Once again the entire nation would be marching into the night, and our current Washington leadership would have only itself to blame.