Famous Marches on Washington

What do Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, the Vietnam War, the KKK, Martin Luther King Jr., and Gay & Lesbians have in common? They all inspired a march on Washington.

Americans have been pretty routinely marching on Washington since 1894. Before 1995 the government made estimates of the number of participants. In 1995 the organizers of the “Million Man March” were so critical of the National Park Services’ conservative estimate of 400,000 participants that the government discontinued making estimates of the number of participants at such events.

There is no effort at making an unbiased count of march participants today. Estimates of the “Restoring Honor” march on Washington range from 87,000 – 650,000. Estimates may vary by ideology.

Below are march numbers based on “conservative” government estimates of earlier marches on Washington:

Woman’s Suffrage March of 1913: 5,000

Ku Klux Klan March to protect America against Blacks, Jews, Catholics, labor unions, and communists of 1925 : Participants 35,000 (Overall national Klan membership reached 6 million paying members in 1924).

Martin Luther King Jr. march on Washington of 1963 (during which King made the “I Have a Dream Speech”): Participants 250,000

March to end the Vietnam War of 1969: Participants 600,000

March to end the Vietnam War of 1971: Participants 500,000

National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights of 1987: Participants 500,000

Million Man March of 1995: Participants 400,000



My titles on Amazon

My titles at Barnes & Noble

Download Free Kindle Reading Apps:

The best reading experience on your Android phone or tablet, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows 8 PC or tablet, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone.

The Populists, the Progressives, and Revolution in America

Link to:

The Gilded Age and Revolution

There was a mandate for change in the Gilded Age, but no agreement on what that change should be among the divergent groups that made up American society. (1) The upper industrial class engineered a wrenching economic transformation, accumulated staggering fortunes, and pursued notorious private lives, upholding a set of values at odds with the middle class, farmers, and workers. Even among themselves the upper industrial class disagreed how best to live their lives and secure their future. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, among the most successful, were, with their austere lifestyles and doctrines of philanthropy, revolutionaries to other members of the upper industrial class; (2) the middle class was split between old style Radicals such as Albion Tourgee with notions of color blind meritocracy and more cautious middle class reformers such as the Progressives who sought to avoid societal turmoil and remake workers, immigrants and the industrial upper class in their own image; (3) the agrarian class simultaneously pursued the agrarian myth of the yeoman farmer, while living the life of the rural small businessman; (4) labor divided between those seeking a re-structuring of society and those primarily concerned with wages and working conditions; (5) sectional and racial issues unresolved from the time of the Civil War continued to divide; (6) women increasingly questioned prescribed gender roles.

No group could unilaterally impose its will. Instead, each group usually had to make alliances, some of them strange and uncomfortable, and win over at least some of the enemy in order to achieve its goals. For example, by the end of the century, many women suffragists argued that Anglo-Saxon women’s votes, would serve as bulwark against the influence of foreign and black votes. Then, as now, the very fragmentation of America precluded revolution or the emergence of a successful radical opposition.



My titles on Amazon

My titles at Barnes & Noble

Download Free Kindle Reading Apps:

The best reading experience on your Android phone or tablet, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows 8 PC or tablet, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone.