ROBERT HAMPTON was barely visible amid the shoeless hippies, the “lesbians for peace” and the Palestinians wearing checked bandannas and “Intifada” T-shirts.

Wearing a cashmere sweater, blue suit trousers and sensible brown brogues, he looked as though he had stumbled out of San Francisco’s financial district by accident and into the biggest peace march in the city’s history.

The armed police motorcyclists, whose sirens were barely audible above the roar of an estimated 200,000 protesters beating drums, singing songs and shouting slogans on Market Street, shot him bemused glances.

Nevertheless, Mr Hampton, a bespectacled middle-aged dentist, was marching with the rest of them on this cold and bright Saturday morning. He had no banner, he did not raise his voice, but he had his head down and was stomping purposefully towards San Francisco’s Civic Centre, a tree-lined square where the march would turn into a rally, at which speakers included the actor Martin Sheen.

“I normally don’t do this kind of thing,” Mr Hampton admitted as a teenager brandishing a placard reading “Bush is an empty warhead” brushed past.

“But I’m so against the Bush Administration. It’s an embarrassment to be an American right now.”

With his dental practice and expensive hobby as a Napa Valley vineyard owner, Mr Hampton was aware that he did not fit the financial profile of the average peace-march protester, but he said that President Bush’s determination to wage war on Iraq had prompted him to act. “It’s outrageous what Bush is doing,” he said. “I’ve never seen so much propaganda foisted on the American people, it’s an insult to our intelligence.”

Mr Hampton was not the only business-class radical at the march. Thousands of other members of California’s famously affluent middle class also joined in.

They arrived in their German cars, checked themselves into the city’s swankier hotels and, when it was all over, skipped the Market Street hot-dog stands and headed to the brasseries in Union Square for burgers and cabernet sauvignon. One family said that they had spent the last part of the rally trying to stop protesters stomping all over the flowers in the Civic Centre square. Many of the middle-class protesters looked uneasy with the more radical elements of the march — particularly a poem read by an Iraqi woman through the public address system that featured extensive use of the word “mother****er”. But at the same time they seemed to be grimly satisfied that they had made a statement to Washington.

Many of the protesters seemed convinced that Mr Bush’s primary reason for invading Iraq was oil. The most common placards featured slogans such as “No blood for oil” and “Corporate terrorists have hijacked our Government”. One of the wittier slogans was “Regime change begins at home”.

Not everybody was against the Bush Administration. In one corner of the Civic Centre square, a small group of military veterans in Old Glory baseball caps held up signs reading “America’s enemies thank you for your support”, “Leftists hate America” and “Martin Sheen: traitor”.

Mike Ellis, a former helicopter pilot for the US Army, was one of them. He said: “I’m not pro-war, I’m pro-US national security, pro-Iraq regime change, pro-supporting the US effort to make sure Iraq takes the United Nations resolutions seriously. I understand people who are concerned about getting into a war. It’s better to act now than to sit on the sidelines and let Saddam sell weapons of mass destruction to other people. But what you see here is democracy in action. You would never see this kind of demonstration in Iraq.”

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