Crowd Size Estimates

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Saturday January 27, 2007 · 7:32 PM PST

2007/01/27 · 19:32

The hysteria has begun. Every time there is a mass protest on the National Mall crowd estimates vary wildly depending on political point of view. I hope that we here at DK inhabit the reality-based world and can take a rational look at this issue.

I was at today’s protest and was up high enough to get a good look at the crowd at its peak. I see now that the organizers are claiming that 500,000 attended. That just is not true. I'm sure that the wingnuts have equally ridiculous estimates at the opposite end of the spectrum.

A few years back, Salon had an article on crowd size on the National Mall. Salon Crowds Article. The article quoted Clark McPhail, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor McPhail, according to the article, is considered America's preeminent authority on protest crowd size. He has studied protests at the Mall going back to 1967.

A crowd of 500,000, McPhail says, would fill all eight of the mall panels from the Capitol Building to the Lincoln Memorial, or from Third Street to 14th Street. Today’s crowd filled about one and one-half panels with some stragglers and overflow. (Also, you just can't count anarchists - they don't stay where they're supposed to, they're all in black and look kind of the same.) I figure that the crowd was about 100,000. (This estimate also fits my equally scientific "about two Three Rivers Stadium full" guess at the crowd size – I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 70s and that’s how I think of large crowds.) There may have been some people on the fringes of the Mall, but not 400,000 people.

In the article, McPhail reminds us that who protests is as important as how many protest. My son and I were there with a beautiful crowd and Jane Fonda – so it was pretty damn important. Jane was just a dot with a voice, so I imagined her as Barbarella.

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