“Whose house? Our house!”
Protesters occupying the state Capitol in the winter of 2011 wanted to stress that the building belonged to the people of Wisconsin, not the legislators, or the lobbyists or the police who were trying to keep them at bay. In other words, it was “the people’s house.”
Michael Edmonds, author of a new book on the state Capitol just out from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press (The Wisconsin Capitol: Stories of a Monument and Its People), traces the phrase back to 1827, when it popped up during congressional debate in reference to the White House: “the People’s house, built and furnished by the People’s Representatives, with the People’s money.”
Edmonds says in an interview that it is unclear when the term was first used to refer to Wisconsin’s Capitol. But he notes that when the 1917 building was officially dedicated in 1965 (World War I got in the way of a timely ceremony), Gov. Warren Knowles called it “a living monument to the people who built our social order in Wisconsin.”