Washington On Edge As Marchers Prepare to Enter City on Sunday

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 8--Five days before the arrival of the first contingents of the 1968 Poor People's Campaign, the saccharin spirit of racial reconciliation which followed the death of Martin Luther King last month has been replaced by one of tension and hostility.

The atmosphere in Congress this week is like that of a Gulf Cost city awaiting a hurricane. To most Congressmen and Senators, the forces converging on the Capitol from the ghettoes and backwaters of the nation seem elemental, irrational, to be endured for as long as necessary and then, if possible, to be forgotten.

Demands

The demands of the campaign include the creation of 2 million federal jobs for the nation's poor, expanded model cities and rent subsidy programs, the establishment of a guaranteed annual income for those unable to work, and immediate relief for hungry people in hundreds of rural counties.

The leaders of the campaign have announced repeatedly that the marchers will remain in Washington until they are assured that their demands will be met, although the probability that Congress will respond positively to those demands is now generally thought to be nil.

Administrative Issues

And so the only issues being raised in Washington now are administrative ones: official Washington's greatest concerns this week are not how to handle the Campaign's militant demands for the eradication of poverty, but rather how to handle the marchers themselves. And that will probably be difficult.

The greatest source of difficulty for government and military planners right now is the uncertainly surrounding the actual plans of the Campaign's leadership, Ralph D. Abernathy's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In marked contrast to the organizers of last fall's militant anti-war demonstration here, SCLC officials have made no prolonged efforts towards arriving at agreement with Federal officials over such matters as tactics and sites for demonstrations in the Capital.

Shantytown

The site of the shantytown to be constructed here by the marchers has not yet been announced, and the government may not be informed of SCLC's decision on this until the arrival of the first group of marchers on Sunday. Details of the expected civil disobedience campaign in the federal area have also not yet been revealed.

Widespred speculation that the marchers would attempt to erect their shantytown on the Mall in front of the Capitol has preoccupied many Washington officials this week. Congressman William C. Kramer (R-Fla.), the author of the anti-riot provision of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, is pushing a bill to bar the marchers from erecting their shacks anywhere near the complex of federal buildings surrounding the Mail.

Permit

This bill will probably be unnecessary in keeping the marchers away from the Mall, since the Department of the Interior must grant them a permit before they can camp on federal property, and now it appears that this permit may not be granted.

But the critical question is whether or not the marchers will observe such restrictions as this one once they arrivein Washington. If the marchers' leadership should decide to build their shantytown on the Mall, even if denied a permit to do so, then the Government would have to decide whether to use force on the marchers. And if such a decision is not forced upon the Government over the campsite issue, it may still come at any time afterward, over the non-violent civil disobedience which Abernathy has forecast for the Campaign.

If federal money to meet the marchers' demands seems in scarce supply right now, military power to keep them under control is not. Backing up the D.C. Metropolitan Police Force next week is the 2000-member D.C. National Guard, and should more men be required, there are about 8000 soldiers now stationed in the area of the capital. After these, two brigades of the 82nd Airborne division at Fort Bragg are available for Washington duty, and a series of further brigades "in great number" will be available as needed, according to the Pentagon.

But it will be peculiarly difficult for President Johnson to order this impressive array of military power into action against the marchers. For unlike the riots or the anti-war protests over the last several years, the demands of the Poor People's Campaign are based on a liberal ideology which the Johnson Administration has often and loudly endorsed. It was only one month ago that President Johnson told the nation that he would immediately demand bold measures to meet the needs of the urban crisis.

That announcement--made on the night of King's assassination--has now been virtually forgotten, but the Administration's commitments to the general aims of the Poor People's Campaign remain the main rhetorical concern of Johnsonian liberalism. Thus a rout of the poor in the streets of the Capitol may destroy the credibility of the President's last pretensions to liberalism.

What will actually happen after the Campaign effort is still impossible to predict. Southern Senators such as Arkansas's John L. McCiellan are forecasting massive violence if the President does not somehow stop the march before it reaches Washington.

Meanwhile, liberal Congressmen such as Michigan's Conyers and California's Edwards expect that this march will be no more violent than the peaceful 1963 crusade. But the SCLC leadership has so far kept its distance from the Congressional liberals and thus far the liberals' predictions are not much more than hopes.

What seems certain is the marchers' demands will not be met, and that the marchers will be here for a very long time