During the last weeks of April 1894, no American could pick up a newspaper without reading unsettling news. Journalists detailed an alarming “wave of industrial unrest.” On April 21, while the Great Northern Railway was still tied up by the ARU strike, bituminous coal miners from Pennsylvania to Illinois and beyond ceased working. Rail and river transportation depended on the fuel. So did heat, electricity, gas lighting, and most manufacturing.
John McBride, president of the United Mine Workers of America, declared that the men were not striking. This was a “suspension” of work intended to reduce the current glut of coal. Higher prices would allow mine operators to raise the miners’ abysmal pay to a “living wage.”
The walkout succeeded in squeezing the nation’s coal supplies. “It will not be long,” McBride said a week into the action, “until there will not be coal enough left in the general market to boil a tea kettle with.” Railroads felt the pinch immediately. Some engineers had to fuel their locomotives with wood. Streetcars were forced to shut down. Coal became scarce in many communities.
As mine operators brought in strikebreakers, miners fought against them with clubs and rocks, then with pistols and rifles. The killing of four miners near Pittsburgh fueled anger. Parts of the coal fields grew chaotic as local sheriffs found it impossible to keep order or arrest lawbreakers. Illinois saw widespread violence—Governor John Peter Altgeld sent National Guardsmen to enforce the law in one community after another.
The work stoppage went on through May. Miners grew desperate. Their wives and children, lacking flour and meat, subsisted on spring dandelions. By late June, members’ indigence, combined with the flow of coal from anthracite mines where workers were not on strike, forced the union to accept a rate of pay lower than the one in effect before the strike. Wildcat strikes and sporadic violence continued into the summer of 1894.
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That wasn’t the only trouble brewing that spring. On a blustery Easter Sunday morning, a band of unemployed idealists had marched out of Massillon, Ohio. Their goal was to walk to Washington, D.C., and petition the government to take concrete steps to address the lack of work.
All along the route of the five-week hike, farmers stood at fences and townspeople lined streets, alternately nodding and shaking their heads at the peaceful, patched army, whose troops a journalist called “sandwich-men of poverty.” Local people, glad for the diversion and inspired by the men’s determination, were generous with meals and gifts of old clothes and shoes.
As it proceeded, this mass appeal to the nation’s lawmakers increasingly grabbed the attention of the nation. People traveled for hours to see a group of ragged men and a brass band marching the dusty roads. Crowds near Pittsburgh became so dense that police officers were “swept away and lost in the crush.”
Many members of the working class agreed with a Terre Haute, Indiana, man, who said, “They may be wrong. They say their scheme is only an experiment. If it succeeds, every laboring man will be benefitted.” With the depression still sapping the nation’s spirit, the march offered Americans hope.
The organizer of this “petition in boots” was an Ohio businessman named Jacob Coxey. His goal was to induce the federal government to prime the economic pump by pouring millions of dollars into improving the nation’s roads. There was nothing militant about the protest. In fact, Coxey had added some religious trappings to the movement and deemed the protesters the Commonweal of Christ. Yet reporters insisted on labeling them Coxey’s Army and endowing their mild-mannered leader with the title General Coxey. Over time, the military metaphor helped to stoke the anxiety of newspaper readers, who envisioned armies reminiscent of Mongol hordes sacking cities.
The forty-year-old Coxey was not himself a workingman. He had made a small fortune in scrap metal and the mining of silica sand and had spent a good deal of it on his passion for racehorses. He had applied a businessman’s logic to the nation’s problems. Roads in America had always been atrocious. With the coming of the railroads, even the improved national roads had fallen into disrepair. Farmers struggled to get their crops to towns and to railheads. Work to improve roads would create jobs, alleviate the pervasive unemployment in the country, and leave behind a valuable economic resource.
So convinced was Coxey of the soundness of his solution that he bankrolled a movement to bring a hundred thousand—perhaps half a million—unemployed men to the capital to demand action. In the process, he teamed up with Carl Browne, a journalist, labor agitator, and carnival barker. In contrast to Coxey’s gold-rimmed glasses, conservative suit, and stiff white collar, Browne dressed in fringed buckskin with Mexican silver dollars for buttons and a ten-gallon sombrero. It was a costume, a reporter noted, that a bad actor would don to play the role of a cowboy.
Although he was the type of rambunctious character that Mark Twain might have dreamed up, Browne had a genius for igniting a movement. He possessed a penetrating mind, an overabundance of energy, and a mad sincerity that won over skeptics.
Both contemporary observers and many later historians emphasized the outlandish qualities of those who accompanied Coxey. They commonly depicted the movement’s leaders as classic American cranks.
The sensationalism hid the truth that Coxey was a serious political organizer and that most of his followers were unemployed factory workers with legitimate grievances, not tramps or buffoons. They were living proof of the dysfunction of the unregulated industrial system.
Coxey’s plan for temporarily expanding the money supply and stimulating the economy—a scheme that predated the theories of John Maynard Keynes—suited the stagnant, deflationary times better than the hard-money instincts of Grover Cleveland. The president’s fetishizing of the gold standard did little to restore confidence but much to deprive businesses of the cash needed for recovery.
For reporters, the Coxey movement was a boon. The march was novel, colorful, and it turned the grim news of mass unemployment into a daily melodrama. Would the men reach the capital? Was the march the beginning of a nationwide revolt by the unemployed? Or was the whole thing a massive humbug?
The press had their pick of eccentrics. The ever-present Carl Browne was an avowed Theosophist with theories about reincarnation. Cyclone Kirtland was a Pittsburgh astrologer. Oklahoma Sam, a genuine cowboy, became a particular hero of boys along the way. So did Honoré Jaxon, who posed as a Métis Indian, wearing a blanket and carrying a hatchet. In fact, Sam had been a worker on Coxey’s horse ranch. Jaxon was a college-educated Canadian who had fought against the oppression of both Native Americans and industrial workers.
Another who joined the march was a handsome, thirty-five-year-old dressed in an expensive coat and patent leather boots. He said he would be known as Louis Smith, although that was not his real name. “I am the Great Unknown,” he declared. “The Great Unknown I must remain.” This was irresistible fodder for reporters. The Unknown, along with his veiled female companion and his collie, Nero, was featured in all accounts of the march. Reporters knew he was actually a Chicago patent medicine seller known as E. P. Pizarro and by several other names, but the “Unknown” sold papers.
As the march progressed, some journalists began to appreciate the seriousness of the effort. Ray Stannard Baker of the Chicago Record saw it as “a manifestation of the prevailing unrest and dissatisfaction among the laboring classes.… It seems to me that such a movement must be looked on as something more than a huge joke.”
Coxey had spent $2,000 to print and mail out pamphlets and circulars in the run-up to the event. He knew that plenty of observers, including his ex-wife, considered him crazy. He averred that “it doesn’t hurt me to be called a lunatic.”
The success of his plan, Coxey said, would allow “peace and plenty to take the place of panic and poverty.” A reporter wrote that Coxey “leaves a trail of new thought in the minds of many.” For all its outlandish aspects, the march of the Coxeyites made Americans think. Coxey was talking about new ways to create and distribute wealth.
“Is there anything foolish or anarchistic or wild in the demand for good roads?” a union official asked. Like many, he thought the plan was legitimate, practical, “and above all, American.”
To others, Coxey was a threat. A military man declared the Coxey phenomenon “a symptom of the dreadful unrest that is just now, like the effects of a fever, afflicting and weakening our whole people.” New York City police superintendent Thomas Byrnes labeled the Coxeyites a serious danger to American society. These “idle, useless, dregs of humanity,” he wrote, were intent on “intimidating Congress.” He went further: “I think this movement is the most dangerous this country has seen since the Civil War.” He was sure that if Coxey’s march was successful, the country would “fall into a chaos in which mobs will be fighting mobs everywhere.”
Among those spooked by Coxeyism were Grover Cleveland and his attorney general, Richard Olney. Olney imagined that Coxey could be the initial wave of a general insurrection. The commander of the U.S. Army, John Schofield, stated, “There is no telling to what proportions the movement may swell.”
Cleveland assigned two Secret Service agents to join the Coxeyites in disguise. He put troops on alert at Fort Myer in Virginia and at the Washington Barracks. Fearful that the industrial “army” might sack the Treasury Building, whose creaky vault was stuffed with the nation’s currency reserves, Cleveland ordered that rifles be handed out to department employees.
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Even as the high command worried about the Ohio recruits due to arrive in Washington at the beginning of May, they grew even more concerned about the “industrial armies” following in their wake. These men were setting off for the capital from the West and were in a far more militant mood. They were generating a mixture of sympathy and fear as they moved across the country.
“General” Lewis C. Fry of Los Angeles, inspired by a Carl Browne manifesto, announced that he would have a million men with him by the time he reached the East. The written constitution of his group cataloged some of the widespread grievances that prevailed across the country. “The evils of murderous competition; the supplanting of manual labor by machinery; the excessive Mongolian and pauper immigration,” the members complained, “have centralized the wealth of the nation into the hands of the few and placed the masses in a state of hopeless destitution.” Fry suggested a ten-year ban on immigration. His men were determined that “something must be done and done quickly.”
Charles T. Kelley led one of the largest armies, departing San Francisco with well over a thousand men. The thirty-two-year-old printer looked like a divinity student but had a magnetic personality. He was hoping to get his men to Washington to present a scheme similar to Jacob Coxey’s good roads idea. His plan was to employ the jobless to dig irrigation ditches in the West, providing both jobs and productive land for farmers. “We Demand Nothing but Justice,” was the group’s motto.
Like the other western contingents, Kelley and his men had no practical alternative for reaching the nation’s capital except to ride the rails. Lacking funds, the men would have to beg, borrow, or hijack trains.
Other armies marched in Kelley’s and Fry’s wake. In Portland, Oregon, men led by an unemployed stonemason named S. L. Scheffler marched out of town and then appropriated a locomotive. They were halted by U.S. cavalry troops 120 miles down the line. Frank T. “Jumbo” Cantwell, a Tacoma saloon keeper, gathered seven hundred men for the journey to the nation’s capital. “We ain’t too good to steal a train,” he declared. “Congress broke the law, why can’t we?” His motley crew made it all the way to Chicago before Cantwell plundered their treasury and fled to South America.
“General” Henry Carter formed an army in Utah as a “protest against plutocracy.” His men made it to Denver, where hundreds more joined them in the largest Coxeyite camp in the nation. An attempt to float down the South Platte River ended in disaster as more than forty inexperienced boatmen drowned.
Another army of protesters, who followed Kelley’s contingent out of San Francisco, was led by Anna Ferry Smith. She had been a nurse in the Civil War, had studied law, and had found her calling as a reform lecturer. “I’m not afraid of anything,” she said. “I have a woman’s heart and a woman’s sympathy.” The men had chosen her so as to have an effective speaker on hand “when we get to Washington.” The group never made it out of California. They commandeered a fruit train but were captured in Barstow.
During that chaotic spring, as citizens found themselves out of work, short of coal, and haunted by armies of the unemployed stalking the countryside, real fear began to grip the populace. Those who had lived through the Civil War knew that a divided society could give rise to bloody conflict. Across the country, many came to agree with Henry Adams that Americans no longer knew where they were driving.