The 'Parliamentary Picnic' at Washington’s Constitutional Convention
When the delegates gathering in Olympia in 1889 grew bored, they turned the formal proceedings of the state's founding into a chaotic, hilarious session of mock motions and procedural pranks.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Nearly the whole of the afternoon was spent in a parliamentary picnic. So many of the members were gone that those remaining relaxed the usual rigid decorum of proceedings and tried to confuse the chair and paralyze one another by motions and cross-motions, points of order, demands for roll call, and calls of the house. They succeeded in having a good deal of fun, but they finally got tired and then they adjourned. The Convention had but little more than a quorum this afternoon, a condition that was unfortunate for the article the United States government wants passed regarding the cession of certain lands to the Federal authorities. Earlier, a humorous petition was presented by old settlers of Puget Sound, satirizing the land-grabbing schemes of the day by proposing to define 'tide lands' as 'maak-a-muck blaha' or clam lands, and suggesting that the Governor should distribute these tracts to the old settlers via a lottery, with the National Guard tasked to keep them in their 'original condition.'
“They succeeded in having a good deal of fun, but they finally got tired and then they adjourned.”
Today, the Washington State Constitution serves as our fundamental governing document, but this account reminds us that its origins were defined by the same bickering, humor, and lobbying pressures that define the state legislature today. The satirical petition regarding 'tide lands'—often a hot-button issue in Seattle's waterfront development—perfectly captures the cynicism of frontier politics.
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