Sleeping-in at the Capitol

by Karl Kurtz

Yesterday in the New York Times, Dan Barry found a new angle on the Wisconsin capitol protest story: the perspective of the custodians who clean up the capitol. Some of them are union members and feel part of the protest and others are indifferent to it. All have had to deal with it in their jobs.

At NCSL we often talk about legislative staff as metaphorical "custodians of American democracy," but seldom does anyone look at the actual custodians.

The piece, "Thank you for your support. Now can we sweep the capitol?," contains some good writing about one of America's most handsome capitols:

Unionized or not, these state workers were united by a fierce sense of obligation to the job: to buff and polish this century-old secular church, this repository of Wisconsin memory. The French walnut furniture in the governor’s conference room. The Senate chamber’s French and Italian marble. The bust of that champion of progressivism, Robert M. La Follette.

Describing the work of one of the custodians, Barry concludes with one of the favorite lessons of NCSL's Trust for Representative Democracy:

He turned right, found some more trash, and piled it into one of his rolling cans. Then he wheeled his two barrels to the elevator, took them down a couple of floors, and out to a Dumpster containing an ever-growing mound of debris. Democracy, after all, has always been messy.

This story got me to thinking about whether anything like this extended protest at the Wisconsin capitol, involving hundreds of people sleeping-in for weeks on end, has ever occurred before. I probed the collective memory of a number of people at NCSL and didn't come up with anything. We remembered numerous rallies involving camping outside the capitol on the grounds and short-term sit-ins or other demonstrations inside the capitol, but nothing of the scope and duration of the Madison protest.

A Web search on "sit-in at state capitol" generated lots of stories of 1960s civil rights protests but nothing that involved sleeping-in. Virtually all of the first 250 hits on "sleeping in state capitol" were about the Wisconsin protest (or the Sleep Inns in Tallahassee, Montgomery and Indianapolis). The one relevant item that came up was a protest in the Kentucky capitol against coal mining practices in the state. It occurred in February this year, the weekend right before the Madison situation erupted. A group of 14 protestors led by author Wendell Berry slept outside the door of the governor's office in Frankfort for three nights.

So here's the question for our readers: Have there been any other protests inside a state capitol of similar scope and duration as the one in Madison?

 

Comments

[Kae Warnock]

Although numerous large-scale demonstrations have occurred on capitol lawns across the country throughout history, I couldn’t recall an incident where a capitol had been occupied for an extended period beyond those that were mentioned in The Thicket article “Sleeping-in at the Capitol”, 3/2/2011.

I do know of a few incidents where an individual or a group took over the chamber for a few hours, or overnight. But in all of those cases, the police were able to make arrests because the people were armed. FL – 1 protestor stayed overnight in the 1990s and was fed pizza and donuts by Senate Sergeant at Arms, Wayne Todd. CA -- The Black Panthers took over the Assembly chamber in 1967. They only occupied the chamber for a few minutes. OR – 2005 A man held a knife to his own chest and occupied the chamber for about an hour.

However, I decided that the subject warranted a closer look through the NCSL archives for records of large demonstrations inside state capitols. I found several articles describing large protests on capitol grounds and even cases where the protests moved inside the capitol for several hours. However, I found no instances of state capitols being occupied for more than a few hours during the last two decades. When I looked back at older newsletters from the National Legislative Services and Security Association (NLSSA), I did find another occasion where protestors took over the Wisconsin capitol.

In April 1986, the Wisconsin capitol was closed to the public on several days due to a series of anti-apartheid demonstrations. A group of protestors occupied the rotunda for 15 days and about 100 protestors built a shantytown on the east lawn of the capitol. Capitol security and state police tore down the shanties and confiscated the materials and protestors rebuilt the shanties each day for several days in a row. On April 10, 1986, nine hundred protestors erected a final shantytown and demanded a permit to demonstrate. As a compromise, the shanties were allowed to stay on the capitol lawn overnight and were dismantled the following morning. By the end of April 1986, only a handful of protestors remained on the capitol lawn.