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The main support for the Moratorium came from the Northeast and the West Coast, where antiwar feeling has always been strongest. But plenty of action was in train in the South and Midwest as well, in small towns and at obscure colleges that have never seen a peace demonstration before.
In Washington, congressional staff members planned a noontime vigil on the Capitol steps; employees of more than 20 federal agencies planned ceremonies at their offices. Senator Frank Church of Idaho was scheduled to address a Peace Corps rally, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota to appear at an American University teach-in. Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr. planned to lead a candlelight procession from the Washington Monument to the White House gates.
More than 150 years ago, the Hartford Convention proposed returning defense responsibilities to the separate states in protest against the War of 1812; New England is now in the vanguard of M-day. Boston lawyers decided to meet in historic Faneuil Hall, and then stand by, wearing green arm bands, to provide on-the-spot legal assistance if needed at an afternoon rally on Boston Common. Republican Governor Francis Sargent, who says of Viet Nam that "the want-to-get-out sentiment has grown rapidly," was to address a peace rally on the town green in suburban Lexington, where the first shot of the Revolutionary War was fired.
Maine's Democratic Governor Kenneth Curtis backed the Moratorium, and senses among down-Easters "a more dovish position than existed before." Hampshiremen, by dialing 603 271-3535, could hear a tape of their Republican Governor, Walter Peterson, advising that "Oct. 15 can be a day of mature reflection on the proper leadership goals of a great nation." Vermonters were in for a bipartisan treat. Democratic ex-Governor Philip Hoff, an early McCarthy backer, and conservative Republican Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hayes agreed to speak at a rally—in the Bennington National Guard Armory. Following that: a candlelight march to the obelisk that commemorates the Battle of Bennington in 1777.
In New York, Senator McCarthy was due at a rally behind the public library; in an extraordinary gesture, Mayor John Lindsay, running desperately for reelection, ordered all city flags flown at half-staff beginning at noon. At Wall Street's Trinity Church, the names of war dead were to be read by a large cast of unusual protesters, including Publisher Bill Moyers, once L.B.J.'s press secretary; Lawyer Roswell Gilpatric, Deputy Secretary of Defense under Robert McNamara; and Banker J. Sinclair Armstrong, an Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the Eisenhower Administration. Children in the New York City public schools were allowed to stay home if they chose to take part in the Moratorium. In certain cases, the protest movement assumed ludicrous proportions: the West Side Montessori nursery school in Manhattan announced that it would close for the day to join the protest.
Better Than a Riot