Doubting Thomas and the Longest Vigil
By Colman McCarthy
At 1601 Pennsylvania Avenue, his anti-war protest site for nearly 28 years at the Peace Park Anti-Nuclear Vigil facing the north front of the White House, William (“Doubting”) Thomas was the closest neighbor to a succession of presidents. A self-educated pacifist and steeled practitioner of the First Amendment, he considered all of them dangerous and deceitful when holding forth on nuclear weapons. “If they don’t use them, which they swear they don’t want to,” he wrote in his book “Life. Liberty and the Hot Pursuit,” “then they just wasted all that money. And if they do use them, they’re going to cause a real good problem.”
William Thomas, AFTER YEARS OF WANDERLUST IN THE 1970s THAT TOOK HIM FROM THE EAST COAST TO NEW MEXICO AND THEN WALKING ACROSS NORTH AFRICA FROM CASABLANCA TO ISRAEL, CAME TO WASHINGTON TO VOLUNTEER AT THE HOMELESS SHELTER AT THE COMMNUNITY FOR CREATIVE NONVIOLENCE.
AFTER A CCNV DEMONSTRATION IN FRONT OF THE WHITE HOUSE, THOMAS DECIDED TO MAKE IT PERMANENT. ON JUNE 3, 1981 APPEARED WITH a placard, “Wanted: Wisdom and Honesty.” In time he lettered other signs, varicolored and large: “Ban All Nuclear Weapons or Have a Nice Doomsday” and “Live By the Bomb, Die By the Bomb.”
Standing or sitting by his signs, and protected against nature’s inclemencies by an improvised shell of umbrellas, blankets and tarps, the stout believer in nonviolent solutions to international disputes endured blizzards, downpours, heat waves, lightning bolts, traffic fumes, lawn and sewer rats, dozens of arrests, court appearances, a prosecution by Kenneth Starr, jailings, surveillance by ready-to-shoot Secret Service snipers, beratings by a judge who wanted to “deter others from adopting your lifestyle,” lip from out-of-town strollers who saw his signs as an eyesore detracting from the majesty of the White House, editorial writers and similar Brahmins who dismissed him as a First Amendment zealot.
Still he stayed.
At his death of pulmonary disease on January 23, Thomas, who was born March 20, 1947 in Sleepy Hollow N.Y., had been spending his days at Peace House, a once-abandoned structure on 12th Street NW that he renovated with money inherited from his mother. It was there that he ate, showered and enjoyed quiet-time breaks from a vigil that he believed, with modest pride, was the longest uninterrupted antiwar protest in U.S. history. Having no income, he accepted donations but never cadged for money. Enough came in.
When students in my peace studies classes at School Without Walls needed an airing-out, which was just about every week, I walked them five blocks to the vigil for a lesson in purebred American dissent. MY STUDENTS TOOK TO THOMAS. NEITHER PREACHY NOR LOUD, AND NOT GIVEN TO SUBTERFUGE, THE SLIGHTLY BUILT AND FULL-BEARDED PACIFIST WAS REAL The students revered Thomas, savoring his conversational stories of dropping out of high school to read books
OF HIS, NOT A TEACHER’S, CHOOSING. Back in the classroom and well-tutored by Thomas, my students took to heart the writings of Henry David Thoreau or Dorothy Day on civil disobedience and unjust laws.
A STEADY RUN OF OTHER VISITORS, FROM JAPANESE SURVIVORS OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI TO PHILIP BERRIGAN, dropped by the vigil to be oxygenated by Thomas. In 1991, the Berlitz Travel Guide ran a photo of the vigil with the caption: “It is the right of every American to take a stand and make a point.”
Months after the 1981 arrival of Thomas, Concepcion Picciotto, a Spanish-born woman of like pacifist bent, joined the vigil. She constructed a snug well-insulated tent as a refuge. In 1984, Ellen Benjamin, an official at the National Wildlife Federation and who is currently affiliated with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, noticed Thomas as she walked through Lafayette Park. She liked his signs. They spoke. “I finally met someone” she recalled last week, “who thought about peace as I did.” They soon WED. Though not your typical Washington power couple, they were surely the most visible in defying power.
Politically canny, Thomas was one of the unflagging forces in the early 1990’s of Proposition One, a ballot initiative calling for nuclear disarmament that was approved by 57% of the District of Columbia voters. Eight times since, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton has introduced similar legislation in Congress, “The Nuclear Disarmament and Economic Conversion Act. The bill has yet to get out of committee, which never bothered Thomas: he was busy living out Mother Teresa’s line that it’s more important to be faithful than successful.
Thomas’s legal scrapes came from his insistence that he was vigiling, not camping. In case after case, usually U.S. v Thomas, the courts sided with the government’s claim that Thomas was no more than a happy camper--or unhappy camper, as it were--violating federal regulations. Except for one three month prison stretch, which included co-lawbreaker Ellen, he was usually held overnight and released in the morning.
Thomas and his wife, as well as Concepcion Picciotto, occasionally took breaks, spelled by friends who TOOK SHIFTS TO KEEP the streak going. Introspectively, Thomas wrote in May 1996 that he sometimes “questioned the practicality of my vigil.” But not for long: “Figuring that it is more realistic to try to keep the world from changing me than for me to try changing the world…I’ve decided to continue my vigil until I’m shown something better to do.”
He was never shown.
Colman McCarthy, a former Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace. He teaches coursed on nonviolence at six Washington area schools.