Wall Street protest's long historical roots
source: http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/11/opinion/mills-occupy-history/
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http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/11/opinion/mills-occupy-history/
Spend any time with Occupy Wall Street, as I have during the last two weeks, and you come away believing the movement is here for the long run. In New York, where I live, they have made a home out of Zuccotti Park. The park, which is dominated by honey locust trees and a 70-foot-high, red-steel Mark di Suvero sculpture, is just one block square in size, but Occupy Wall Street has made inching through the park and its overflow crowds feel like being at an old-fashioned family picnic.The challenge Occupy Wall Street offers to Washington politics has caught media observers by surprise. It defies their assumptions that a movement without formal leaders or lots of money to publicize itself can't make a difference. But it is a mistake to think Occupy Wall Street is without historical roots. It joins a long list of political movements that have made their cause known by occupying public space.
The best-known early example was Coxey's Army, which in 1894 marched down Pennsylvania Avenue and briefly occupied the Capitol grounds. Led by Jacob Coxey, a quarry owner from Massillon, Ohio, the men and women of Coxey's Army, who called themselves the "Commonweal of Christ," sought to get Congress to end unemployment with legislation authorizing road building and other internal improvements. Coxey was eventually arrested, his army dispersed, but they set a precedent for how to get the attention of Congress and the media.
More than three decades later, in the early years of the Great Depression, a group of World War I vets, the Bonus Marchers, adopted a similar strategy. In 1932, they came to Washington, asking to have immediate payment of their Adjusted Service Certificate -- their bonus, as they called it.
(More @ link http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/11/opinion/mills-occupy-history/)
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