Margaret Gilleo, 84, deceased; Made a yard a beacon for free speech
Margaret Gilleo, who turned a local dispute over an anti-war sign on her lawn into a free-speech showdown at the Supreme Court, died June 8 at her home in Ladue, Mo. She was 84.
Her husband, Charles J. Guenther Jr., said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
Mrs. Gilleo (pronounced GILL-ee-oh) never intended to become a First Amendment crusader. But she refused to allow her rights to be violated, even when neighbors questioned her patriotism or decency.
“I consider myself extremely patriotic,” she told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1991. “I love this country. I love the flag and I would never burn it. But I reserve the right to differences.”
It all started in December 1990, when the United States was on the brink of the Persian Gulf War. Ms. Gilleo expressed her opposition to the conflict with a 4-by-6-foot sign that read: “Say no to war in the Persian Gulf. Call Congress now.
Mrs. Gilleo lived in Ladue, an affluent, leafy suburb west of St. Louis that had long been known as an exclusive community, filled with residents who demanded a certain level of aesthetic beauty.
Her signboard was stolen and a replacement one was pulled over and thrown in the yard. When she complained to the police, they told her she was at fault: She had violated a local ordinance that banned virtually all yard signs, which was defined as a form of visual pollution.
The municipality can make exceptions to this. But when she asked about it, the members unanimously voted against her. So Ms. Gilleo sued Ladue, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Ladue Mayor Edith J. Spink said the rationale for removing the sign was strictly aesthetic, not a response to Ms. Gilleo’s anti-war stance. Yard signs “would give a messy look — visual blight,” she said in testimony in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, The Post-Dispatch reported. But Ms Gilleo said she had previously put up a sign at the yard in support of an environmental initiative, and it had not caused a stir.
The case took a circuitous path to the Supreme Court. A district court order stopped the ordinance, which a judge called “plainly unconstitutional.”
But the city council drafted a new ordinance, which allowed for a wider range of signs. Ms. Gilleo promptly challenged the rule with a sign in her window reading “For Peace in the Gulf,” and the district court overturned that ordinance as well. Ladue appealed, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed the lower court’s decision.
Even as legal costs mounted, Ladue took the case to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case in 1993.
“I’m really shocked” that the case took so long, Ms Gilleo told The Post-Dispatch at the time. She added: “Many very powerful people live here; they may feel threatened. You don’t challenge the government on something like that, at least not in Ladue.”
The Supreme Court heard arguments on February 23, 1994. Judge Antonin Scalia noted that a provision of Ladue’s ordinance that allowed rectangular flags but banned triangular pennants was “a pretty stupid judgment.”
“Tell me why — why triangles are worse than rectangles,” he said, laughing at observers.
In June, the court issued a unanimous decision in support of Ms. Gilleo. Justice John Paul Stevens noted in his opinion that “residential signs are an unusually cheap and convenient form of communication”, and that restricting them in the arbitrary manner described in Ladue’s Act violated the First Amendment.
“A special respect for individual freedom in the home has long been part of our culture and our law,” Judge Stevens said. He added: “That principle has special resonance when the government tries to limit someone’s ability to do so speak over there.”
Ms Gilleo said she was delighted but not surprised.
“I always expected to win,” she told ABC News after the ruling.
Margaret Mary Odile Pfeffer was born in St. Louis on January 23, 1939. Her father, Francis Joseph Pfeffer, ran a metal business and her mother, Ruth (Gander) Pfeffer, was an equestrian and horse breeder who helped establish a charity horse show in St Louis.
Margaret grew up primarily in Creve Coeur, a town on the outskirts of St. Louis, and graduated in 1956 from Villa Duchesne, a nearby private school. She earned a degree in music from Maryville College (now Maryville University) in 1960 and married Peter Muckerman, a management consultant, the same year.
She taught music at Villa Duchesne and had three children before she and Mr. Muckerman divorced in the mid-1960s. About ten years later, she married Alten Gilleo, a physicist, and moved to New Vernon, NJ
After Mr. Gilleo died in 1980, she moved to Philadelphia, where she worked in the development office of the Academy of Vocal Arts. She later moved to Manhattan and, after earning a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia University in 1987, worked for a bank. In 1989 she moved back to St. Louis.
Ms. Gilleo was working with the nonprofit St. Louis Economic Conversion Project, which aimed to educate people about the dangers of the military-industrial complex and redirect US military spending to other areas, when she filed the lawsuit. In 1994, shortly after her Supreme Court case, she ran for Congress but lost a Democratic primary to Patrick Kelly, a patent attorney. (He lost the general election to James Talent, the incumbent Republican.)
In addition to her husband, Mrs. Gilleo is survived by two daughters, Lyle Seddon and Elizabeth Muckerman; a son, Lawrence; two stepsons, John Guenther and Louis Smith; a stepdaughter, Sarah Guenther; a brother, Joseph Pfeffer; eight grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
After Mrs. Gilleo’s Supreme Court victory, she completed a master’s degree in theology at the Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis in 1998. In the mid-2000s, she began teaching comparative religion and philosophy at Fontbonne University in St. Louis. She retired in 2014.
An unexpected outcome of Ms. Gilleo’s lawsuit was her marriage to Mr. Guenther. They met when he wrote her a supportive letter in 1993, after the Supreme Court decided to hear her case.
As a result of the Supreme Court decision, Ladue had to pay a total of more than $335,000 to cover Ms. Gilleo’s legal fees and her own, The Post-Dispatch reported in 1995.
“Someone told her it was a very expensive personal ad,” Mr Guenther said.