The discontent of workers at a manufacturing plant in Chicago was not yet news. During the period when Pullman employees were demanding to be heard, Americans were focused on other crises, including the widespread strikes in the coal fields and the militant action of the Great Northern employees. The most frightening development for many was the progress of Jacob Coxey’s industrial “armies” marching across the nation.
Members of the large battalion that unemployed typographer Charles Kelley had led out of San Francisco were making good progress toward their goal. They had managed, with the complicity of railroad officials, to secure train passage all the way to Council Bluffs, Iowa. Chicago was only a day’s train ride away. Iowans were friendly and supportive. The men, however, found themselves stranded. A spokesman for the Chicago & North Western Railway said, “If these tramps and bums try to capture one of our trains, there will be trouble.”
Kelley rejected the idea of having his men steal a train outright. If they had to walk, they would walk. They soon set out on the 130-mile trek to Des Moines, where they hoped to arrange for passage from a more cooperative railroad.
Even more alarming were the audacious actions of a rough crowd of miners and railroad men in Montana. Their leader was a thirty-four-year-old Butte teamster named William Hogan. A slender, even-tempered Irish immigrant, Hogan was a gregarious sort who occasionally delivered lectures explaining Shakespeare to his fellow workers. Like many miners in the region, he had lost his job when metal prices had collapsed at the onset of the depression. Now he and his companions, desperate to reach the nation’s capital, were about to become the quarry in one of the great train chases of American history.
The thirty-five hundred members of the Butte Miners’ Union had come together around the compelling, democratic idea of carrying their complaint directly to their representatives in Washington. Hogan emerged as the man who would take them there. Like all the Coxey armies, the men crafted their own set of demands. They hoped that their congressmen would make a priority of restoring the federal silver purchases they had curtailed in 1893, thereby reviving western mines.
The third week in April, more than five hundred of them gathered in the Butte rail yards, which were nestled in a valley of the western Montana mountains. Hogan negotiated with officials of the Northern Pacific to provide transportation eastward. He found the railroad’s managers eager to rid themselves of the threatening mob. But then he ran into a roadblock.
Following the panic of 1893, many heavily indebted railroads, including the Northern Pacific, were unable to pay their obligations. Typically, they were placed under the control of a federally appointed receiver until their finances were reorganized, a process similar to today’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The receivership of the Northern Pacific was being overseen by Judge Hiram Knowles. He wired Attorney General Olney that “a dangerous mob sentiment still prevails” in western Montana, with thousands of miners idle. “May have further trouble here.”
Olney refused to allow any accommodation to Hogan’s men. He and President Cleveland were determined to clamp down on the dangerous Coxey movement before it gained even more adherents. The government’s authority over railroads in receivership gave them the power to act. Olney contacted U.S. Marshal William McDermott in Butte, who replied: “Public sympathy strongly in their favor.” The attorney general ordered McDermott to hire more deputies and quell the threat of the Coxeyites.
On April 24, with an armed force gathering around them, the miners took matters into their own hands. Led by the railroad men in their ranks, they broke into the Northern Pacific roundhouse, fired up engine No. 512, and coupled on six coal cars to hold the men and a boxcar for provisions. With nearly five hundred men aboard, they chugged up the thousand-foot grade to Homestake Pass, then picked up speed on the downslope. Their means of transport was, in railroad lingo, a “wild train,” meaning one not on the schedule.
Marshal McDermott assigned Deputy M. J. Hailey the unpleasant task of catching up to Hogan’s renegades and stopping them. Hailey had to scour Butte saloons to round up sixty-five men desperate enough to go after the protesters. By the time they got under way at six the next morning, Hogan’s men had ridden their stolen train all the way to Bozeman, another mining city eighty-five miles east of Butte.
The people in Bozeman warned Hogan of the posse approaching from behind. They added the news that railroad superintendent J. D. Finn was ahead of them on the tracks with a crew of maintenance workers. Finn had suggested to railroad executives that they simply give the men a train and be rid of them. Now he complained to his superiors: “How in hell do you expect one Irishman to stand off the whole of Coxey’s army?” Nevertheless, he was determined to do what he could to obstruct the tracks down the line.
He was in luck. A landslide had already blocked the track just beyond a long tunnel twelve miles east of Bozeman. Finn told section men who had begun to clear the tracks to leave the rocks, earth, and trees in place.
The obstruction brought the wild train to a halt there. Hogan’s men began digging, knowing that Hailey’s deputies were gaining on them. They decided the work was proceeding too slowly. The volunteer engineer and fireman were told to get up a head of steam. They backed the train into the tunnel, then roared out. They crashed into the pile, used the cowcatcher as a plow, and forced a way through. The train continued down the line.
At five that evening, the men stopped at Livingston, thirty-five miles east of Bozeman. They gave speeches to enthusiastic townspeople and took on more recruits. While the men changed engines, residents supplied them with food, blankets, and words of encouragement. A festive, comradely atmosphere prevailed, with local people happy to see workingmen getting the better of the railroad.
Ahead, Finn had used dynamite to create a number of additional landslides. Hogan’s men dug through each one. In some cases, they “thoughtfully replaced the obstruction” to make things harder for Hailey and his deputies in pursuit. Finn’s squadron spiked switches, a procedure that normally kept the switch from being thrown toward a deactivated side spur. They drained the water from tanks along the way. Hogan’s men struggled forward, barely keeping ahead of Hailey’s contingent. They formed bucket brigades to replenish the locomotive’s water supply from streams.
The next morning, Hailey and his men caught up with the renegades near Young’s Point, west of Billings. Hogan ordered his engineer to stop with the rear cars resting on a bridge that spanned a steep canyon. Hailey deployed armed deputies along the banks and demanded the Hoganites’ surrender. The protesters waved the flag of the Butte Miners’ Union and dared their pursuers to shoot. The deputies backed down. The hijackers continued eastward.
Halfway across the state and beyond the high peaks, the Coxeyites pulled into the town of Billings late in the morning. They were “met with enthusiasm and supplies,” a newspaper reported. Hundreds of townspeople rushed to the depot to witness the novel event.
Hogan’s men were still there when their pursuers arrived. Hailey stopped his train up the tracks and his men climbed down. Wary of the large, cheering crowd that surrounded the stolen train, the deputies sauntered toward the depot and casually mixed with the locals. They slowly worked their way forward. Two of them suddenly pulled revolvers, jumped into the cab of the wild train, and confronted the men’s leader. “Shoot and be damned,” Hogan barked.
They hesitated. The crowd jeered. Suddenly one of their fellow marshals gave in to nervousness and fired his rifle. The crashing sound set off a fusillade of two dozen more shots. Several men of the industrial army were wounded. One bullet tore through the chest of Billings tinsmith Charles Hardy, who was watching the action. He dropped down dead.
The enraged crowd tore the rifles from the deputies’ hands. The local sheriff arrested several of them for the shooting. It took Hailey seven hours to resume his pursuit of the Hogan train, which was now chugging through eastern Montana.
BLOOD FLOWS FROM COXEYISM, the New York Times bellowed. BATTLE BETWEEN LAW AND ANARCHY.
The Billings Weekly Gazette, on the other hand, proclaimed it a wonder that the town did not “crucify every slinking cur of a deputy.” The federal marshals, the paper said, were “the scum of the great mining camp, mercenary ruffians who would assassinate their brothers if there was a dollar in it.”
Montana governor John E. Rickards wired President Cleveland that the deputy marshals were proving ineffective. State militiamen were unreliable because of their sympathy with Hogan and his men. Only federal troops could stop the rampage.
Cleveland called an emergency meeting of his cabinet. They decided that a federal judge had authority to issue an injunction against interference with any railroad in receivership. Whoever disobeyed could be jailed for contempt without trial, circumventing sympathetic local juries. Federal judges in the West began to issue a flurry of such injunctions. If U.S. Marshals were unable to enforce the edicts, Cleveland decided, the army would be called out.
Army commander Schofield was not enthusiastic about using his troops for domestic law enforcement. Attorney General Olney, who had spent most of his career as a lawyer for railroads, and Secretary of War Daniel S. Lamont, along with other cabinet members, urged Cleveland to act.
Cleveland shared Olney’s concern that Coxeyism might grow into a dangerous mass movement. Visions of a mob marching toward Washington unnerved him. He ordered Schofield to call out his troops. The general sent a message to Colonel J. H. Page at Fort Keogh in eastern Montana to hurry down the line and stop Hogan.
The Times trembled at the possible confrontation between the troops and “the 500 miners, who are known to be desperate characters.” In fact, Hogan had wired ahead the message that his men would surrender peacefully if confronted by United States soldiers.
Superintendent Finn sped eastward to pick up Colonel Page and five hundred soldiers from the Twenty-Second Infantry Regiment. Just before dawn, while Hogan’s train stealers took a needed respite for some sleep, the soldiers emerged from the darkness, rifles in hand.
The unemployed men surrendered without incident and were found to be armed with only a few pistols. The 350-mile chase was over 1,900 miles short of the nation’s capital. More than a hundred of Hogan’s men slipped away through the early morning gloom. Judge Knowles sentenced Hogan to six months in jail for contempt and gave his followers lesser sentences.
As the soldiers relaxed after their easy victory, they directed their contempt not at their prisoners but at the railroad managers and the politicians in Washington. These were the men who had forced them to bear arms against their fellow citizens, “whose only crime,” a newspaper said, “has been to help themselves to boxcars.”
* * *
Jacob Coxey noted that although Hogan’s men were in the wrong for stealing a train, “questions of ethics do not carry much force with hungry men, and these men are starving for lack of employment.”
Coxey’s own band of eccentrics had been trudging eastward along dirt roads for five weeks. At the end of April, the weary men finally arrived at Brightwood Riding Park in the District of Columbia, seven miles north of the Capitol. Mobs of curious citizens crowded streetcars to ride out and view the famous corps of protesters. Congressmen, senators, and diplomats also made the trip.
On May 1, under an ultramarine sky and a gleeful sun, the Coxey Commonweal, reinforced by a contingent from Philadelphia and numbering perhaps six hundred marchers, lined up for the walk from their camp to the Capitol building. A crowd estimated at as high as thirty thousand souls crowded the streets to watch the bedraggled men march past.
Following a brass band, Jacob Coxey rode in an elegant open phaeton with his wife and their four-month-old son, named Legal Tender in support of the cause. Following him was his titian-haired teenage daughter, Mamie, who portrayed the Goddess of Peace. Perched sidesaddle on a white palfrey and overwhelmed by the attention, she beamed with youthful ardor. Carl Browne rode behind her, decked out in his Buffalo Bill buckskins. Then came a color guard and the ranks of marchers.
This stalwart band of mountebanks and determined men trudged along the city streets, which through the outskirts were still unpaved. “Such a fantastic aggregation,” the Baltimore Herald judged, “never paraded itself in seriousness before the public.”
In 1882, Congress had passed a statute—an ironic one in the eyes of some—that made it a crime to deliver a “harangue or oration” on Capitol property. Citizens were also prohibited from parading or standing in a group on the grass. Neither the nation’s representatives nor President Cleveland would make an exception for these earnest petitioners who had come so far.
Congress had as yet taken no effective action to ameliorate the harsh economic conditions that in 1894 had already gripped the country for a year. The government effort to shore up the nation’s gold reserves and cut tariffs had done little to relieve the widespread suffering.
Public spending on infrastructure projects to relieve unemployment was anathema to the politicians’ view of small government. They equated Coxeyism with an objectionable paternalism. Coxey’s schemes would encourage citizens to “lean on the government instead of standing upright on their own two feet,” the Chicago Record said. This view ignored the government’s paternalistic handouts to businessmen, including land grants and generous subsidies.
Washington remained something of a sleepy southern town, and residents had little firsthand familiarity with factories or the hardened workers who manned them. For many, the approach of an industrial army had presented a menacing prospect. The press had predicted that the Coxey movement would mean class warfare. The Portsmouth (Ohio) Daily News reported that Coxey was “bringing terror to the national capital” and warned of “predatory gangs.” National Guard troops in the District of Columbia had been conducting emergency riot drills for days.
One source of fear was the fact that the capital was home to eighty-five thousand African Americans, the nation’s largest urban population of blacks. More than half of them were now unemployed. They turned out in large numbers to cheer Coxey’s legion. The city’s police chief pronounced himself more afraid of “colored people than he was of Coxey‘s Army.”
As the march threaded through the streets, the men were outnumbered by almost a thousand city policemen, many of them mounted on horseback. When the parade arrived at the eastern side of the Capitol building, confusion became general. With little provocation, the police charged into the crowd, setting off a panic. Mounted police blocked Browne, who tried to scramble up the Capitol steps with a flag. Browne’s shirt was ripped as he was knocked down and beaten. When the parade’s standard-bearer, a black youth named Jasper Johnson Buchanan, tried to come to Browne’s aid, he was roughed up severely enough to need hospitalization.
Coxey himself, in starched collar and gold-rimmed glasses, had tripped climbing over a low retaining wall. He regained his feet and made it partway up the steps. A police lieutenant told him he could not speak and officers pushed him back down.
Coxey instead handed reporters copies of the statement he had wanted to read. “Up these steps the lobbyists of trusts and corporations have passed unchallenged,” he pointed out. “We, the representatives of the toiling wealth-producers, have been denied.”
Coxey climbed back into the carriage with his wife and son. The police, warming to their work, again charged into the mass of onlookers, beating citizens indiscriminately. The members of Coxey’s Commonweal, still assembled in ranks, marched away toward a vacant field in an African American neighborhood, where they would make a new camp. The Goddess of Peace still led the way as crowds of onlookers cheered the conquered army.
* * *
The march turned into an occupation. Coxey’s followers, with nowhere to go, would linger in two District camps through much of the summer as additional recruits from across the country straggled in.
On May 2, Coxey appeared in court to see about Carl Browne and another Commonweal member who had been arrested. Police took Coxey into custody as well. A trial was set for May 21. In court, Coxey’s claim of a constitutional right to free speech was ignored. He was charged with having walked on the lawn of a public building.
“I appreciate,” Coxey stated, “that the preservation of the grass around the Capitol is of more importance than saving thousands from starvation.”
The judge labeled him a “dreamer.” Coxey answered, “Twenty million people are hungry and can’t wait two years to eat. Four million people idle for nine months. That is what Grover Cleveland has cost this country.”
Others concurred. Samuel Gompers, who had founded the American Federation of Labor eight years earlier, looked favorably on the Coxey movement. “Clubbing may subdue Coxey or Browne,” he said, after meeting with Coxey in the wake of the demonstration, “but it will not drive thought out of the people’s minds. A club will subdue one man, but it will recruit one hundred for the cause he represents.”
During Coxey’s three-day trial a prosecutor asked a witness if the cheering crowd at the Capitol was disorderly. “Oh no,” he said. “They had a right to cheer. They were American citizens.”
The judge found Coxey guilty. The sentence was twenty days in prison and a $5 fine.