On March 25, 1894, the eyes of the nation fixed on a small city in Ohio called Massillon. A growing corps of reporters had been gathered there for some weeks, equipped with a special telegraph room set up in a local hotel for them to send their stories. Curious spectators were there as well, waiting on that Easter Sunday to see whether a curious band of men called Coxey’s Army was going to materialize.
It was the second year of the country’s worst economic depression yet, and thousands of homeless and jobless men slept on the floors of city halls and walked from town to town looking for jobswork. But Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey, and his more colorful partner, a Californian named Carl Browne, planned to lead an army of unemployed men from Massillon to the nation’s capital to demand that the federal government provide jobs to the jobless, building and repairing the nation’s roads, and to expand the currency by paying the men in paper money. Coxey and Browne had told the press to expect a hundred thousand men. It was unclear whether they would muster even a hundred.
As it happened, they got somewhere around a hundred men to start out, and their numbers would grow in the weeks to come. Early in the morning, a bugle sounded in the camp by Ohio’s Tuscarawas River where the men had slept. By 8 am, they were in formation for a drill, led by a character from Chicago popularly referred to as “The Great Unknown.” After an hour of drills, Carl Browne—wearing cavalry boots, a buckskin coat with silver dollars down the front, and a white necktie—preached a sermon. He had a theology of his own, which included elements of Christianity, reincarnation, and the belief that he and Coxey had bits of the souls of Andrew Jackson and Jesus Christ in them. Indeed, Coxey and Browne preferred the name “Commonweal of Christ” to “Coxey’s Army.” After Browne finished preaching, the Great Unknown shouted, “Everybody march!”
At the head of the procession walked Jasper Johnson, a West Virginian and one of a number of black marchers in the ranks, carrying the American flag and accompanied by his dog Bunker Hill. Next came a seven-piece marching band, followed by Browne on horseback. Nearby rode the Great Unknown, bedecked in white and blue and atop a bright red saddle, continuing to yell orders, and alongside him rode a skilled trick rider known as Oklahoma Sam. Coxey followed in a fancy carriage known as a phaeton, along with his wife, her sister, and his three-week- old infant, named Legal Tender Coxey. Then came the wagons, including a panorama wagon displaying Browne’s artwork and sayings, including the official slogan of the marchers: “Peace on earth, good will toward men, but death to interest on bonds.” The marchers followed, with some Secret Service agents sprinkled among them, as well as the press corps.
Coxey’s Army was a nineteenth-century reality show, broadcast to Americans by the press long before the advent of Twitter, YouTube, television, or even radio. The men trekked from town to town through Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, arriving on the outskirts of Washington just in time to march to the Capitol on May Day. They were fed along the way by sympathetic townspeople and camped out at night. Newspaper readers nationwide became familiar with the names and personalities of Coxey, Browne, the Great Unknown, Oklahoma Sam, and several others.
When there were turf wars and power struggles, the reporters gleefully told their readers all about them. As the army approached Frostburg, Maryland, for example, there was a big blowup between Browne and the Great Unknown, with the Great Unknown calling his former bosom buddy a “leather-coated polecat” and Browne calling the Great Unknown a Pinkerton spy, the worst of all insults in laborite circles. Jacob Coxey’s 18-year- old son Jesse, who was with the company from start to finish, sided with the Great Unknown. It fell to the senior Coxey to settle the dispute, and he ruled in Browne’s favor despite Browne’s unpopularity with the marchers, showing that Coxey’s Army was not quite the democracy it purported to be. The brief father-son tension was quickly healed, with readers following the drama’s every twist and turn.
When the updates from Coxey’s own contingent grew dull, there were other groups of men from the West to follow. But to get anywhere near Washington, the westerners had to hijack a few trains. That resulted in some confrontations with sheriffs, marshals, and judges—which also made for entertaining copy, as did the schisms that were as rampant in those groups as in the Commonweal proper. Some of the western marchers made it to Washington, mostly late. Many of of the western contingents didn’t get there at all.
Newspaper readers avidly followed the preparations being made by authorities in Washington as well. Capital authorities had no problem with letting the Commonweal have a full-scale parade through the city. The Coxeyites’ problems would begin when they reached the grounds of the Capitol, because a law known as the Capitol Grounds Act prohibited displaying political flags or symbols onsite, and the Metropolitan Police had every intention of enforcing it. There were, in fact, 1,600 extra district militia troops ready for the Commonweal’s arrival.
There was debate about Coxey’s Army in Congress too, but not the kind that Jacob Coxey would have liked. Coxey belonged to the Populist Party in Ohio, and the election of 1892 had sent ten Populist representatives and five Populist senators to Washington. Even so, there was no support in Congress for Coxey’s actual proposal of a nationwide road-building mass employment project, not even from the lawmakers who had introduced Coxey’s bills to that effect as a courtesy to him. Rather, the congressional debate centered on how much courtesy Congress and the police ought to extend to Coxey. Conservatives were all in favor of enforcing the Capitol Grounds Act against the Commonwealers should they venture onto the premises; it was mostly the Populists who considered that a violation of the First Amendment and who favored sending a formal congressional delegation to greet them and receive their petition. Populist Senator William V. Allen of Nebraska queried his colleagues, “Are American citizens coming here for a lawful purpose to be met at the confines of the capital of their nation by a hired soldiery, by a police force, and kept out of the city and beaten into submission if they persist in coming?”
As it happened, the answer to Allen’s question turned out to be yes. First, there was a parade through Washington. Coxey’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Mamie, flagrant disobeying Coxey’s first wife back in Ohio, had ridden out by train just in time to lead the procession, dressed in white and on a white stallion, as the goddess of peace. But the peacefulness ended when the procession reached the Capitol. When Jacob Coxey and Carl Browne tried to ascend the Capitol steps carrying the Commonweal’s banner, intending for Coxey to read a speech he had prepared, a melee ensued. Police obstructed their passage, hit some members of the crowd on the head with billy clubs, and roughed up Browne before arresting him. Browne was heartbroken that the necklace of amber beads that he wore in memory of his deceased wife was torn off in the scuffle, and then deeply moved when Chicago reporter Ray Stannard Baker showed up at the jail where he spent that night, and handed him the beads he had recovered from the ground.
The idea of unemployed men being paid by the federal government to build roads would have to wait for an even greater depression four decades later. The different contingents of Coxeyites camped out in nearby suburbs until they were ultimately dispersed by Virginia and Maryland police. Coxey ran for Congress as a Populist from his Ohio district later that year and lost, and for years, Americans used the expression “Coxey’s Army” and a reference to anything frivolous and disorganized. But Coxey had earned sufficient respect that, in 1946, when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Banking and Finance to present his ideas on how to rebuild war-torn Europe, Chairman Alben Barkley addressed the 92-year- old witness as “General Coxey.”