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April 25 — May 1, 1894

Coxey's Army Marches on Washington To Obtain Jobs for the Unemployed

The terrible worldwide depression of 1893-1897 was agonizingly similar to the subsequent Great Depression of the 1930s. The first warnings were seen a decade before, when a severe agricultural crisis hit the South and Great Plains. Speculation and manipulation of the international money markets then led to an actual Wall Street crash in 1893. As happened during 1929, very little was done to restart the American economy, and the result was that a quarter of the nation's railroads went bankrupt, and in some cities unemployment among industrial workers reached 25%.

This depression hit only 28 after the triumphant end of the Civil War, and many veterans of that war were in a state of shock. Some unemployed veterans carried placards with the message that slavery had been defeated in 1863, and now, in 1893, a new kind of slavery had descended upon the country.

An ironic spectacle was provided by the 1893 Columbian Exposition that opened in Chicago in May, which was visited by 27 million people and featured the latest in American technology. Yet by the time it closed, Chicago had been overwhelmed by another large group of visitors who had come by the trainload from the West, desperate to find work in the industrial center of the Midwest. Many were well-dressed, yet they wound up crowding into police-station hallways, and even the unoccupied cells, at night to escape the cold. Every evening, a thousand men and boys filled the corridors and stairwells of Chicago's City Hall.

On Oct. 28, two days before the Columbian Exposition was to close with a gala celebration, Chicago's Mayor Carter Harrison, who had tried to mitigate the suffering of the unemployed, was shot to death in his home by a man described as a disappointed office seeker. The great "White City" was demolished a few days later, and the wood of many of its buildings was distributed to provide fuel for the increasingly desperate unemployed population.

While the Columbian Exposition was going on, another kind of meeting took place in Chicago. Six hundred delegates, mostly from the West, had attended the Bimetallic League convention in August, formulating plans for the free and unlimited coinage of silver. At the conference, Jacob Coxey, an Ohio delegate, met Carl Browne of California, and Browne later visited Coxey in Ohio to discuss Coxey's plans for public works, which he had been developing since 1891.

Jacob Coxey was born in Pennsylvania in 1854, and had worked in iron-rolling mills, operated a stationary engine, and then moved to Massillon, Ohio where he bought a sandstone quarry in 1881. The quarry yielded very finely ground silica which was used in the production of both steel and glass, and the business prospered enough to allow Coxey to buy three ranches in various parts of the country. But when the depression hit, and he was forced to lay off 40 of his workers, Coxey determined to do something about the economy and the problem of unemployment.

Coxey had been a Greenback Democrat and then became a member of the Greenback Party. He had been an unsuccessful candidate for the Ohio Senate in 1885, and by the 1890s his sympathies were with the Populist Party. He merged many of the ideas circulating among those circles and developed a program which he believed would aid the unemployed, and, at the same time, prevent future depressions.

Coxey's Good Roads Bill, which he sent to a Populist Party Congressman, called for the issuance of $500 million to construct a national network of rural roads. Wages for the unemployed who would be hired to build the roads would be $1.50 for an eight-hour day. Coxey's second bill was the Non-Interest-Bearing Bond Bill, which allowed state and local governments to obtain funds for public works from the Federal government, putting up as security their own state or municipal bonds which would be non-interest-bearing. These projects would also hire the unemployed at a minimum of $1.50 a day.

Carl Browne's suggestion for publicizing this legislation was a march on Washington by the unemployed, ending in a speech by Coxey from the steps of the Capitol. Up until this time, there had been no large protest marches to the Capitol, and there was an 1882 law, not changed until 1972 by judicial action, which prohibited the carrying of banners and the making of any oration or harangue on the Capitol grounds. The law had originally been introduced by Sen. Justin Morrill to counter vandalism and limit the hawking of souvenirs, but it now threatened to stifle any action by the unemployed.

Coxey and Browne sent out announcements of the march, setting May 1 as the day they would reach the Capitol. About 100 unemployed men assembled in Massillon, and this small "Commonweal," as Coxey called it, was dubbed an "army" by the 40 reporters who faithfully followed it all the way to Washington. Many newspapers portrayed "Coxey's Army" as a bunch of tramps, implying that violence would result. Further west, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Tacoma, Montana, and Chicago, larger groups of the unemployed were forming in response to Coxey's call. They called themselves an "industrial army," and were determined to meet Coxey's deadline for reaching Washington.

In the nation's capital, President Grover Cleveland's administration was fearful of violent protests by the unemployed, and planned for Coxey's arrival by beefing up security at the White House and the Capitol, and by sending agents to infiltrate the march. Cleveland himself was scornful of taking any action to help the unemployed beyond the ministrations of private charity. In his Inaugural Address, he had explained that, "The lessons of paternalism ought to be unlearned and the better lesson taught that while the people should patriotically and cheerfully support their government, its functions do not include the support of the people."

With the exception of a few members, Congress, too, sought to discredit the march. Sen. Edward Wolcott of Colorado asked his fellow Senators to have "the courage to stand together against socialism and populism and paternalism run riot, which is agitating and fermenting this country." Congressmen also claimed that Coxey's group was not representative of "the great voice of the American people," and Sen. Joseph Hawley of Connecticut claimed that it was the Senators who knew the "will of the people."

Coxey's small group of marchers set off from Massillon on Easter Sunday, supported by the Populist Party and by organized labor, who activated their networks to provide food and, sometimes, campsites. Samuel Gompers, the head of the new American Federation of Labor, had himself proposed a temporary Federal works program to improve the roads when he spoke at a 25,000-person rally in Chicago in August of 1893.

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