I traveled by bus to Washington yesterday with about 200 people from various parts of Connecticut, converging in DC into a crowd that was the biggest one I’ve ever been part of.

Compared with other rallies I’ve attended–a couple of dozen over the past 35 years–this one had a more diverse population, many more mainstream types, veterans, mothers, teenagers, whole families. Even active-duty GI’s in civvies (their haircuts are distinctive). Half the people on my bus (43 riders) were mothers, one of them marching with the group Military Families Speak Out, which had a very high profile. Lots of guys with military insignia, many of them in their 70’s and 80’s.

I’d arrived at the mall with my cousin Paula at about 8 am, and it was sunny, about 25 degrees, with a little wind. We huddled together on a park bench in the sun to watch people arrive and set things up. The mall is the area between the Capitol and the Washington Monument, about a city block wide and maybe eight blocks long. The Smithsonian looks out picturesquely on one side and the National Gallery dominates the street on the other. The sort of vista of imposing official architecture that makes guys like Bush and Hitler tremble with ambition. The temperature eventually got up to about 50, and the sky was blue the whole day.

I saw peace groups and veteran’s groups with signs and banners from all over the east, south, and midwest, plus Arizona and California. One labor union, SEIU 1199, turned out at least 1000 people (they were wearing purple caps and assembled as a group, and you could count the ones you could see). No other union was prominent among the 100,000 or so people I saw up close. White-haired people in abundance, more women than men, all skin colors, more white than non-white, but less white than usual. Plenty of kids. One sixth-grader made an eloquent speech during the hour of speeches from noon to one.

I couldn’t hear a half-hour of the speeches, because I’d moved to the edge of the crowd and crossed the street to sit on something. I heard Dennis Kucinich, but I missed Maxine Waters and Jesse Jackson and Jane Fonda. The space on the street in front of me filled up over the hour I spent sitting on my rock. There was a constant stream of people from the Union Station side of the mall, behind the stage and to the left, and so the people coming in had to merge into an already dense crowd assembled for a couple of hundred yards onto the mall.

From the various vantage points I occupied, I never could see the whole crowd. There were hundreds of drums, and they never stopped from noon to 3:30, when I left. Very tall signs and effigies were visible in the far distance, but the crowd, half of whom had signs provided by sponsoring organizations, blocked any good view of itself.

The police had barricades along Third Street and Independence Avenue, so that the demonstrators were bottlenecked coming out of the mall, and had to merge into three lanes of the avenue. I was immobilized for an hour near the front of the crowd, which was too dense to move through for the two hours I was in it. The march up Independence Avenue started at 1:00 but it was 1:45 before I stepped off the curb onto Third Street from the Mall.

The police kept a low profile. Most were mounted on trail bikes, dressed in slick gear, but with a beltload of armaments. They were an intimidating force, although there weren’t many of them. I’m sure their brass would have them wearing kilts and red face paint if we let them. The police were there to chill the activities of the crowd, but not too much. I’d marched in the past when the route was lined with a phalanx of cops, but this was not one of those events. I didn’t see a black officer.

The police were agressive at first toward people who breached the barricades, which seemed to hinder the crowd’s progress by forcing them into a narrow procession, about thirty people wide. At the same time, the police were obviously reluctant to be caught pushing mothers and grandmothers around, and they eventually allowed people to breach the barricades and move a bit, but less freely than you would like under a respectable Bill of Rights.

I saw over a hundred drums and heard many more, and it was noisy. There were always several drumbeats audible at once. People with bullhorns tried to get chants going, all free-lance and unprogrammed, but you can wear yourself out hollering, and after awhile it’s hard to get everybody going at the same time. I tried to get a “String Him Up!” chant going, but civil people don’t like that sort of sentiment–I sympathize with them–and it didn’t catch on. I did get some interesting looks, however.

Estimating the size of a crowd without ever seeing all of them is difficult, but I saw at least five Fenways of people (a Fenway is a ball-stadium full of people, about 30,000) and I judged from their progress that there were at least that many more than I didn’t see, so I’m saying 300,000, which is, in fact, “tens of thousands” as the AP reported today.

The AP story raises this question: Why doesn’t AP want you to know how many people were there? It was the number six story on the AP website this morning, after “Kan. Governor Draws National Attention” and “Miss America Also Making Fans Out of Men.” Here’s what AP’s Calvin Woodward and Larry Margasak said about the size of the crowd.

“United for Peace and Justice, a coalition group sponsoring the protest, had hoped 100,000 would come. They claimed even more afterward, but police, who no longer give official estimates, said privately the crowd was smaller than 100,000.”

The police said privately? Maybe one reporter could be so incompetent as to leave the inquiry there, but two? Helicopters buzzed the crowd all day (along with a couple of peregrine falcons, who seemed to be waiting for me to drop), and the government obviously has pictures and can count the number of people, but, from AP’s standpoint, that’s a number you don’t know and you want to know.

My estimate of 300,000 is more reliable than what AP is selling, and I was one guy at ground level. On the other hand, the CNN web site doesn’t even mention the demonstration, so I guess we should be grateful for the liberal approach to news censorship at the Associated Press.

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