The movement has avoided electoral politics even as big banks pour money into Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. Employees of financial firms account for eight of Romney's top 10 sources of campaign cash, according to Federal Election Commission data. Occupy was built to topple the system, not reform it, said Marisa Holmes, 26, who has helped organize protests since the second meeting.

Dark Knight

"If they're promoting ideals that don't ring sensible to large numbers of people, what they want doesn't go anywhere," said Todd Gitlin, 69, a former president of 1960s protest organization Students for a Democratic Society and now chairman of Columbia University's interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in communications. "It doesn't become a social reality. It becomes the expression of a subculture."

The combination of anarchist initiative and widespread revulsion to Wall Street that sparked the movement last year is no longer enough to drive it, according to Gitlin, whose book "Occupy Nation" was published this month. The movement needs to be "more identifiable, more available to people outside the inner circles," he said.

Protesters have discussed the possibility of alienating New Yorkers with their anniversary demonstration, McKeown, the organizer, said. The Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises," the second-highest-grossing movie of 2012 in the U.S., features a villain who takes over a stock exchange and instigates an uprising against the rich and powerful.

"We decided it's not going to be that big of a concern," McKeown said about the movie parallels. "We are a nonviolent civil-disobedience movement. That was homicidal maniacs."

Bringing Handcuffs

Occupy organizers met with representatives from unions and community groups for more than two hours on Aug. 16 to muster support for the anniversary protest. Sitting around desks pushed into a makeshift conference table at the United Federation of Teachers headquarters around the corner from the New York Stock Exchange, attendees asked about tactics, timing and a longer- term vision. Amy Muldoon, a Verizon Communications Inc. field technician and a Communication Workers of America liaison to Occupy, was ambivalent about union attendance.

"I don't think they'll try to turn people out during the day on a Monday," she said.

While some protesters oppose the idea of making citizens' arrests because they don't want to validate the U.S. prison system, two S17 organizers said other activists plan to bring handcuffs. They described the morning protest as a more ambitious and better-plotted version of a November attempt to disrupt the stock exchange, when the New York City Police Department arrested 252 people.