by Dick Armey
It was a paradigm shift that would make the old guard uncomfortable, inducing some carping and nitpicking from think tank elitists who should have been praising this grassroots rebellion. “No one asked our opinion,” the ivory tower crowd seemed to intone from on high.
This “big tent” inclusiveness had one important caveat. The working coalition had to be united, like the Tea Party activists themselves, around the principles of limited government. This was a grassroots movement built upon a stage of ideas. We were motivated by good policy, not partisan politics. At the time, the sting of betrayal over the TARP fiasco was still fresh in our minds and it seemed like a perfect measure of one’s commitment to good ideas over political parties.
It is quite easy to be on the right side of the ball in opposition to President Obama’s outrageous stimulus spending spree when you are part of the Loyal Opposition. It is quite another thing to stand up against a Republican president perceived to be your guy and oppose him on good policy grounds.
As House majority leader, Dick Armey had occasion to say no to two Republican presidents named Bush, most famously in opposition to Forty-One’s “read my lips” tax hike. It’s no fun being the skunk at the garden party, but anyone can say “Yes, Mr. President.”
So we made support for TARP a disqualifier. If the Tea Party movement was to grow and sustain itself as a social movement against big government past the present policy threats driven by Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, it had to maintain a fidelity to the values of individual freedom. No elected official or organization that had voted for or publicly supported the Bush/Obama/Pelosi/McCain bailouts would be included at the march. We politely declined inquiries from a number of friends, including a number of otherwise good congressmen and groups like the Heritage Foundation and Americans for Prosperity. This wasn’t the easiest part of the job, but it was necessary.
Dick made an official announcement about the march at the April 15 tax day rally in Atlanta, Georgia, in front of an amazing crowd of fifteen thousand people who gathered on the steps of the state capitol. On April 17, after the massive protests across the country on tax day, we sent out an e-mail to all the state and local coordinators of Tea Parties we knew. One of the first local leaders to respond was Kellen Giuda from New York City: “You can count on my cooperation!” More feedback came in over the next few days, from Lorraine in Reno, Nevada, to Nikki from Mobile, Alabama. We had already been helping the folks in Atlanta with their tax day protest, and so we knew that Jenny Beth Martin, Amy Kremer, and Debbie Dooley all loved the idea of a march on Washington. Other key local leaders started to respond with excitement and a willingness to help. Some of these first responders included Diana Reimer in Philadelphia, Robin Stublen and Tom Gaitens in Florida, and Toby Marie Walker in Waco, Texas. The march had passed from an idea to a vision we shared with thousands across the country. There would be no going back.
ON THE MOVE
IN PREPARATION FOR AN official march announcement, we built a new Web site at 912dc.org for citizen organizers to use as a resource for logistics and as a place to meet up with other activists in their area. It was nothing fancy, but it did deploy important peer-to-peer networking functionality that helped eliminate FreedomWorks as the middleman in connecting local organizers trying to meet like-minded folks in their local communities. In practice, peer-to-peer networks create a multiplier effect that allows for exponential growth of local grassroots communities.
We used our Web site to sign people up to participate in the march, but the most important aspect it served was as a portal for a coordination of disparate people and their local knowledge. A great example of this was the organizing of local buses. Organizers from around the country would put down deposits on buses and then recruit riders to join the caravan and share costs online. On September 7, for instance, Suzanne from the Woodlands, Texas, posted: “We have started registrations for a second bus, so we still have space available. The bus leaves Thursday 9/10 at 10:30 A.M. and returns on Sunday 9/13 at 11:00 P.M.”
Buses were organized this way all across the country, from Burlington, Vermont; from Montana, Idaho, and South Dakota; from Palm Beach Gardens and Jacksonville, Florida; from Bloomington, Evansville, and Fort Wayne, Indiana; from Portland, Maine, Joplin, Missouri, and Travers City, Michigan; all over Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia; Zanesville, Ohio, Oklahoma City, Ephrata, Pennsylvania. Seemingly every state had caravans forming—buses were coming from all over the country, self-organized on our site and countless others.
We even had a delegation coming in from Hawaii. They had to fly, of course. Judging from their enthusiasm, however, they would have swum across the Pacific Ocean to participate on September 12 if necessary.
As we monitored the online chatter, we saw something new and special emerging, taking root and growing into something unexpected. In a word, this was going to be big. Publicly, we downplayed the numbers; better to be a pleasant surprise than a bitter disappointment. Internally, however, we talked about the possibility of breaking 100,000 people. We expanded our sound system to accommodate the big crowd. We also added more Port-a-Johns. To accommodate the expanded demands of the growing crowd, we created a fund-raising message at 912dc.org asking participants to pitch in. A donation of $45 would help pay for a foot of security barricade needed to manage the crowd during the march and around the stage. A Port-O-Let could be sponsored for $185. The JumboTron was funded in $1,000 installments. People who were coming and others who could not but still wanted to support the march quickly pitched in, allowing us to expand the facilities for the expected crowd.
THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY
LEFTY BLOGGERS HAD GOOD fun with our fund-raising strategy, particularly as it related to on-site bathroom facilities. But at this point they had nothing left to throw at us except nastiness, smears, and name-calling.
The Democrats sensed that the momentum was on the side of those who were rising up in defense of liberty. They were getting anxious, and their nervousness led to mistakes. On August 18 former Clinton cabinet secretary Robert Reich called for a countermarch the following day, September 13, telling advocates of government health care and the euphemistically named “public option” that they had “to be very loud and vocal” if they hope to save their beloved vision of socialized medicine.
“We won’t get a public option1, or anything close to it, unless people who feel strongly about it make a racket,” Reich told Politico. The “first step is to be very loud and very vocal: Write, phone, e-mail your congressional delegation and the White House. Second step: Get others to do the same. Third step: Get voters in Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, and other states where Blue Dog Dems and wavering Senate Dems live and have them make a hell of a fuss. Fourth step: March on Washington.”
That sounded like a challenge. Listening to the attacks leveled by Democrats against the citizens who showed up at town halls over the summer, you would have thought that the Left eschewed citizens who “make a racket,” “a hell of a fuss,” and anyone who is “very loud and vocal.” Were we not just lectured to about such things? Was there a double standard?
Organizing for America, Barack Obama’s lauded grassroots machine, did in fact pick up the cudgel and organize a counterprotest on September 13. Sophia Elena, a video blogger2 whose compelling footage of the Taxpayer March on Washington is some of the best on YouTube, captured the counterprotest the next day. All of 175 advocates of government-run health care attended. It was little noted and quickly forgotten.
The real power revealed on September 12 was the actual people who organized the march. True to the independent libertarian spirit of these decentralized protesters, there were tens of thousands of organizers for the march, and thousands of assorted caravans of buses from every corner of the nation. No speaker or attendee was paid a fee, and no transportation or hotel was subsidized.
EXPLOSIVE IDEAS
ON THE AFTERNOON OF September 11, 2009, staff and volunteers were gathered at Freedo
mWorks’ headquarters at 601 Pennsylvania Avenue, scrambling to finish up the many projects that needed to be done. Campaign manager Nan Swift was working with the volunteers who were printing maps and directions, rolling T-shirts, and making protest signs. Brendan and Jenny Beth were working out a final order of speakers. Melissa Ortiz, a FreedomWorks volunteer, was working out the logistics of directing people around Freedom Plaza, along the route on Pennsylvania Avenue, and inside the barriers around the stage. Everyone else was on the phone, calling local organizers to bolster turnout.
And then Alberta, our office administrator, received the call: “There’s a f—ing bomb in your building, bitch.”
According to ABC News: “On the eve of what organizers call a ‘Big Ol’ TEA Party,’ the Washington, D.C., offices of FreedomWorks were evacuated by D.C. Metro police on Friday afternoon after the conservative organization reported to authorities at 3:42 P.M. ET that it had received a bomb threat3. Tens of thousands of anti–big government activists are expected in Washington on Saturday as part of a march on Washington being organized by FreedomWorks, a conservative group headed by former House majority leader Dick Armey, R-Texas. . . . D.C. Metro police has confirmed to ABC News’ Jason Ryan that the D.C. Metro police had, indeed, evacuated the organization’s offices. . . . Fifty volunteers were forced to leave the office where they were making calls encouraging people to come to tomorrow’s event.”
At the time the call came in, Matt Kibbe was being interviewed by Luke Livingston, who was shooting footage for Tea Party: The Documentary Film. Luke had traveled to Washington on a Tea Party bus from Atlanta with some of the activists he was following and filming for the documentary. When they knocked on the door to tell Matt and Luke’s crew that the police were evacuating the building, the crew kept the cameras rolling. It made for a little drama in the movie, and Luke actually put together a short vignette that we played the next day. It was like a scene taken from a Hollywood production: police cruisers, sirens, bomb-sniffing dogs—we had it all.
It all happened so fast it was surreal. Certainly, some of the staff and volunteers were shaken up by the threat. Most of us were far more annoyed than scared. The incident, like the march the next day, was underreported, if acknowledged at all, by many liberal reporters in the media. Where was the outrage? Where were the scolding lectures to the Democrats and their liberal attack machine about political civility?
The best part of the incident was the resolve demonstrated by the volunteers who were making the march a reality. “What are they going to do,” a volunteer asked while waiting to return to the building, “kill me, I guess?” The activists just shrugged it off and headed back up to the office as soon as D.C. Metro police was certain it was safe.
We would witness and hear this sentiment repeated over and over again among the activists of the Tea Party movement: Call us names. We will not take the bait. Ignore us. We will not stop. Threaten us. We will not back down. We love our country, we love our liberties, and this fight is too important.
When we finally worked our way up to the appropriately named Freedom Plaza on the morning of September 12, it all seemed worth the risk. It all seemed worth the work and the hassles and the threats. A beautiful sea of humanity greeted us as we worked our way to the stage.
NOW OR NEVER
WE NEVER DID GET to the stage. The plaza was too crowded with people. Tom Gaitens, FreedomWorks’ Florida director, was firing up the crowd. “What do we want?” Tom asked the crowd. “Freedom!” The whole scene looked and felt like a carnival or a concert. Everyone was laughing and joking and enjoying the fact that they were participating in something that mattered. That day we all became a cohesive community of concerned, and now mobilized, Americans: 9/12ers, conservatives, Tea Partiers, libertarians, grandmothers and granddaughters, fathers and sons, independents, Republicans, and Democrats. You could find one of anything and/or everybody in the crowd that day.
We had planned to arrive at the stage on Pennsylvania Avenue at around 10:00 A.M., rally the gathering crowd with some quick comments, organize the various delegations by state, and march together down to the Capitol. Many of the groups that traveled in from across the nation had brought their state’s colors to fly above the crowd in case things got chaotic. That way, people could find their local groups and march in an orderly procession down Pennsylvania Avenue at the designated time.
Billie Tucker and her First Coast Tea Party group from Jacksonville, Florida, had towed a massive replica of the HMS Dartmouth to Washington with them. The original Dartmouth was the first of the three East India Trading Company ships to dock in Boston Harbor in 1773 before the “Mohawks” emptied their cargo into the ocean in protest. The Jacksonville crew planned on “sailing” the Dartmouth down Pennsylvania Avenue when the police gave the signal.
Ready to lead the march was a contingent of Revolutionary War reenactors who planned to call the procession forward promptly at 11:00 A.M.
On the morning of the march, we arrived at Freedom Plaza. That is, we were trying to get to Freedom Plaza. In truth, we couldn’t get anywhere near the area because that whole quadrant of the city was closed off by the National Park Service officers and D.C. city police who were trying to manage the mass of humanity that had started flooding into the plaza at 7:00 A.M. Freedom-loving activists from all over America were shutting down a good part of the city simply because of their sheer numbers!
So we walked toward Pennsylvania Avenue after police roadblocks stopped our cars far away from the center of the gathering. We were already behind schedule and scrambling to catch up with the citizens who had already claimed the 9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington as theirs. As we walked, wading through the growing crowd, it was clear to us that it was now their day. It was their march. It was their moment to petition their government for a redress of their grievances.
Everyone was in great spirits4. We wandered around looking at all of the posters and flags. It really reminded me of a tailgate party at a football game. Groups would gather on one side of the plaza and cheering and singing would ensue, then it would start up on the other side of the plaza. There was a float parked along Pennsylvania Avenue that looked like a sailing ship hosted by a group called The First Coast Tea Party. A speaker on deck would rouse the group gathered there into frenzy and then they would play some patriotic music and when that was done they would start all over again.
—RON KAEHR, ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
As we gathered at Freedom Plaza that morning, the crowd quickly overwhelmed the space and spilled out into the streets as the sun rose above Washington. The crowd became so huge, so fast, that the National Park Service officer in charge came up to Brendan Steinhauser at the stage and said, “It’s time to go. You’ve reached critical mass.” So, a full two hours earlier than scheduled, Brendan yelled into the microphone, “They are telling me that we’ve reached critical mass! If you’re ready, I’m ready to march!” The roar of the crowd was incredible, and the mass of a million people began to make its way down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol.
It was an emotional moment. We were overwhelmed about what we were seeing. It is still overwhelming to think about it. We had always said that government goes to those who show up. We always knew that good policy would be considered inside the halls of Congress only when America beat Washington. We hoped that the citizens of our great nation valued freedom, free enterprise, and limited government as much as we did—not just because freedom is the only efficient way to allocate scarce resources and create economic prosperity for all, but because it is right and good and just to leave people free. And we always believed that the American people were with us, ready and willing to step up and take to the streets in defense of their liberties, just as the founders envisioned. Now we were seeing it with our own eyes: this beautiful mob of happy people—in the process of shutting down Washington, D.C.—was a dream realized for a small grassroots organization fighting for lower taxes, less government, and more freedom.
FACES IN THE CROWD
ONE OF THE GREAT things about true grassroots gatherings is how different the culture is from a typical political event. This is not the place for partisan agendas, or politicians for that matter. There are none of the mind-numbing policy lectures typical of free market events. There are, in fact, no canned speeches carefully crafted from the best opinion polling data and focus groups. There is lots of music and singing and chanting and talking and mingling and cheering.
The sheer size of the crowd could have been a logistical disaster because we simply were not prepared to accommodate and manage nearly a million people. Neither, apparently, was the city, the D.C. Metro service, the Capitol Hill Police, or the National Park Service. But it did not turn into a logistical debacle. Everybody seemed to go with the flow.
I loved seeing people of all ages marching5! Elderly folks, lots of veterans, families with children, college kids, bikers, you name it! It was definitely a cross section of America, and as I looked at the crowd I was struck with the fact that these people aren’t your normal protesters. They are normal people—the kind that make this country work! Most of us left jobs, school, family, and our normal responsibilities to go try to be heard and make sure the world knows we are out there and won’t be silenced.
—MARILYN, DAVID, AND ANDREW TAYLOR, CODY, WYOMING
By the time we got to the stage, set up in front of the U.S. Capitol, we knew that September 12 was one of the most important days for economic freedom and individual liberty we would witness in our lives. This wonderful mob of humanity quickly overwhelmed all of our carefully planned logistics and the city’s transportation infrastructure, appropriating Washington, D.C., at least for that afternoon, to the cause of freedom.