Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class SYMHC Classics: Coxey's Army About this episode This 2020 episode covers the first protest march on Washington, D. C., led by Jacob Sechler Coxey in the 1890s. His plan was job creation for the nation's unemployed population with projects that would build the country's infrastructure.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Happy Saturday. We got an email from listener Kiki, a high school history teacher, who alerted us to an error in our Great Episodic of 1872 episode. Now, this is my words, not Kiki's. Kiki was very kind, but the paragraph about how the episodic might have contributed to the Panic of 1873 is kind of an incomprehensible mess. The Panic of 1873 happened before historical things we talked about it possibly being connected to, like the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the failure of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. Somewhere along the way, I had muddled up the Panic of 1873 with the Panic
2:55 Tracy V. Wilson? of 1893. There were bank failures, railroad bankruptcies in 1873, just not the ones I specifically wrote into the episode. So my apologies for that very embarrassing error.
3:08 Holly Frey? This does give us an opportunity to bring back an episode about something related to the Panic of 1893, and that is Coxey's Army, which was an 1894 protest march by unemployed workers on Washington, DC.
3:22 Tracy V. Wilson? This originally came out on August 12, 2020, so enjoy.
3:29 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
3:40 Holly Frey? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.
3:43 Tracy V. Wilson? And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
3:44 Holly Frey? So in the midst of today's very bananas world, which I think we have both talked about a lot, has been informing our choices of topics lately, and which is involving this constant news cycle of economic instability and protests, and those things being hashed and rehashed and discussed for their various merits and lack thereof in some cases, I got to thinking about earlier protests and wanting to talk more about those, and specifically the first protest march on Washington, DC. And that is the story of Coxey's Army, and it is one that's been requested a lot of times. It's really easy when you look at the facts. ...acts of it to see why it is so compelling to people and why people request it.
4:27 Holly Frey? Because in addition to parallels to our current situation, there are also just a lot of really fascinating details in the mix. So today is the day and we're covering Jacob Coxey and what came to be known colloquially as Coxey's army.
4:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Yes, I feel like this one has been on both of our lists at points.
4:46 Holly Frey? Yeah.
4:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Because so many people have asked for it. So we've talked on the show before about the panic of 1893 and the economic crash that came along with it. Railroad overbuilding that was financed through just really unsound lending practices had caused a lot of railroads to go under. And then that coupled with a run on the gold supply. The country was plunged into what amounted to a financial freefall.
5:10 Holly Frey? Those are obviously broad strokes, but since we have covered this many, many times before, we're just doing the, the light touch version. But as a result of that panic, 500 banks closed across the country and 15,000 businesses shut their doors for the last time. And 74 railroads, which had been a huge economic driver in a lot of places, ceased operations. And this was, of course, all happening before things like unemployment insurance. So workers that had come into the labor market in a new industrial age and were prepared to work in that industrial age suddenly had no work and they also had no safety net.
5:50 Tracy V. Wilson? President Grover Cleveland continued his anti-welfare stance that he had held for a long time. We talked about this earlier on in our episode about Grover Cleveland's secret surgery. But in short, he thought that this rush to embrace silver with the Sherman Silver Purchase Act had been a woeful misstep economically. He thought there needed to be a course correction. And he also felt really strongly that financial assistance for the country's common man was just not the business of the government. In 1887, during his first term, he had vetoed a bailout for Texas farmers who were trying to get through a drought. And he wrote this as part of the veto. I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.
6:33 Tracy V. Wilson? And I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering, which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced, that though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.
7:02 Holly Frey? That's a whole bag of weasels to unpack. Chicago during this time reported an uptick in crime, not because people turned to crime as a way to make an illicit living in desperation, but because they wanted desperately to get arrested. Jail or prison, which offered shelter and regular meals, was preferable to the streets in a Chicago winter. And other cities also wrestled with similar problems and how to manage a population that was losing its housing and ultimately completely losing stability.
7:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Of course, everyone wanted things to improve, but not many saw a way to get through this turbulent time. And that is where we get to Jacob Coxey, who came up with a novel plan.
7:47 Holly Frey? So at the center of this story is this man, Jacob Sackler Coxey. And Coxey was the son of a sawmill engineer named Thomas Coxey. Jacob was born in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, on April 16th, 1854. And the log house he was born in actually now bears a historical marker. When Jacob was six, the family moved to Danville, Pennsylvania, where his father started working in an iron mill.
8:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Jacob completed nine years of school before going to work when he was 16, also at a mill, serving as the water boy. He worked his way up through various positions over the next eight years. When he was 20, he married a young woman named Caroline Ammerman, and the two of them had four children together.
8:28 Holly Frey? Coxey voted for the first time during this stage of his life in the 1876 election at the age of 22. Over the years, he would switch political parties multiple times, and he was a member of the Greenback Party at one point. He even organized its Danville, Pennsylvania chapter.
8:45 Tracy V. Wilson? He moved on to work with his uncle in a scrap metal business in 1878, and it was while on a business trip for this job in 1881 that he first visited Massillon, Ohio. He decided he would like to move there.
8:58 Holly Frey? And that was really the end of his scrap metal career. He sold his interest in the business, and his next move was to purchase a sandstone quarry in Massillon and convert it into a crushing mill to process silica sand. He also purchased a farm where he would eventually start breeding horses in the 1880s when he became interested in racing. And between the quarry and his fancy stock horse breeding, he was able to build a really nice living for himself.
9:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Coxey was also really interested in politics and the economy, and even before the panic of 1893, he was aware of the problems that were facing laborers in the US. This was things that he gave a great deal of thought to, and allegedly, a moment of inspiration led to the reform idea that would make him famous.
9:44 Holly Frey? Yeah, just for clarity, like even before the panic, there were economic downturn effects happening, and there were labor shortages already. But the story of his inspiration goes that as he was traveling home one day, he noticed that the road that he was on was in really sorry shape. According to a write-up in The Chautauqua in 1894, this was the result of an especially problematic mud hole in the road that hampered his progress. And after he got out of the mud hole and started thinking about how they really needed to fix that roadway, and they needed better roadways in general, he put together the idea that the many people who were out of work could be given jobs fixing the roads throughout the state.
10:28 Tracy V. Wilson? He started putting these ideas to paper in 1891, and he wrote The Coxey Plan for Business and Unemployment Relief: How the State of Ohio and Its Subdivisions Can Help Themselves. Coxey's idea evolved into what he called his Good Roads Bill. It called for fair wages and an eight-hour workday to achieve both prosperity for the common man and better public works. And the Good Roads Bill was no small potatoes in terms of its ambition and its scope. This was a $500 million plan.
11:00 Holly Frey? Yeah, it transitioned from being just about Ohio over the years to being a national effort on his part. And that $5 million that he was talking about was to come from the Treasury in the form of non-interest-bearing bonds. He also later on developed a second bill that ran alongside this one. And in that one, state or city improvement projects could deposit non-interest-bearing 25-year bonds with the Treasury and then get back the cash value of the bond in paper currency minus 1%. And his thinking was that that paper currency then paid as wages to the workers was going to reinvigorate the economy.
11:37 Tracy V. Wilson? He saw this as a benefit on a couple of different levels. One, it would improve US infrastructure in ways that were just desperately needed. Two, it would provide much-needed relief to laborers who had found themselves impoverished as the country went through an economic depression. In his write-up, he noted, quote, "Congress takes two years to vote on anything. 20 millions of people are hungry and cannot wait two years to eat."
12:03 Holly Frey? And he started pitching this plan in its earlier versions to his local politicians, as well as basically anyone who would stand still long enough. But he did not exactly get a warm reception initially. According to that same write-up in the Chautauqua that I mentioned a moment ago, quote, "His neighbors dubbed him crank and his wife secured a divorce, partly on the grounds of his craze. A new wife was secured and the jeering neighbors ignored." We should be very clear that this was not the only reason he got a divorce. There was also a gambling problem that was driving a wedge into his marriage to Caroline. That gambling was part of Coxey's passionate interest in horses.
12:42 Holly Frey? So sometimes people will use his interest in his bills and his efforts at labor reform as the reason his wife left him, but it's a little more complicated than that.
12:53 Tracy V. Wilson? So Coxey wasn't entirely without interested listeners. He presented his plan to the St. Louis Populist Convention in 1892. It was adopted into the Ohio Populist Party's platform that same year, but it really didn't get much farther than that.
13:08 Holly Frey? It wasn't until 1893, again, while the nation was really hitting this panic, that Jacob Coxey found like-minded collaborators to really champion this plan alongside him. That year, at the Colombian exposition in Chicago, he met a man named Carl Brown. Brown was on assignment from San Francisco Business Weekly as an artist and correspondent at the event. He was there to send back reports with illustrations of what was happening. He was basically like a contractor. He kind of was one of those people that worked a lot of different jobs. He wasn't a regular reporter for the San Francisco Business Weekly. And Brown was also sent to the expo with a costume suit intended to make him look like Buffalo Bill so that he could be part of a living exhibit about the Wild West.
13:53 Holly Frey? So he was wearing a number of different hats, both literally and figuratively here.
13:58 Tracy V. Wilson? Brown was a big personality. He was a gifted speaker. He was a showman. He was a jack-of-all-trades. And he's been described as a labor agitator. His ideas of reform, which centered around ensuring that any able-bodied person who sought work could find it, really aligned with Coxey's. His orations on labor reform had so irritated the leadership of Chicago that the mayor kicked him out of the city.
14:21 Holly Frey? He was not a quiet, subdued man, at least. But Jacob Coxey saw Carl Brown's potential, and he saw that he could be the megaphone for the Coxey plan. And while they sort of are often described as an odd couple as partners, Brown and Coxey aligned on their shared vision that something big and drastic had to be done to get the country back on track.
14:43 Tracy V. Wilson? Carl came with some quirks, though. He believed, and told anyone who would listen, that Coxey was the reincarnation of Andrew Jackson. Brown had some interesting views, religiously speaking. He thought that he had absorbed his wife's soul into his own as he sat at her deathbed. He also thought that he, and many others, that they eventually rallied to their cause, had absorbed the soul of Jesus Christ, and that that was what was driving their efforts, and that Jacob Coxey had absorbed a significant amount of that soul. He also didn't stop wearing that Buffalo Bill costume when the expo ended. Instead, he just made it part of his personal brand.
15:21 Holly Frey? He is really a fascinating character. As for Jacob Coxey's views of all of this reincarnation talk, one reporter at the time wrote, quote, "Coxey's religious views did not prevent his ready conversion to Brown's abortive theosophy. He does not claim any supernatural wisdom as Brown does, but modestly poses as the living representation of Christ because Brown says so."
15:45 Tracy V. Wilson? Though he was an eccentric, Carl Brown was crucial to the growth of Coxey's support base. He was really good at communicating with people and gaining their trust. Carl's orations and the desperation of the men that they were speaking to, that was a powerful combination. Slowly, they garnered a pretty significant following.
16:04 Holly Frey? And at this point, Coxey was more passionate about his plan than ever. He was a wealthy man, but his own businesses had struggled due to the panic. He had to sell his horse farm and his crushing mill was struggling. On December 7th, 1893, Brown and Coxey formed the J.S. Coxey Good Roads Association of the U.S. Brown was the organization's secretary and Jacob Coxey was, of course, its president.
16:29 Tracy V. Wilson? In Coxey's eyes, one of the villains in all this was the press. He felt that all the reporting about a currency crisis had actually caused some of the worst problems as panicked readers started to hoard gold. His relationship with the press only became more contentious as his activism became more high-profile. That's something we'll get back to shortly.
16:49 Holly Frey? Yeah, it's interesting and you'll, you'll see it as we talk about it, but even though Coxey has this sort of like dim view of the press and what they have done at various points, it's really Carl Brown that kind of gets into it with them. Just a few months after its founding, the Good Roads Association was making very real progress. Senator William A. Pfeffer, a populist from Kansas, was willing to introduce Coxey's two bills in Congress. But this idea of getting the Federal Reserve to print money to fix the economy didn't go over all that well.
17:23 Tracy V. Wilson? But Coxey and Brown were just undeterred. They had hatched a plan earlier in the year that was intended to underscore their idea and make it clear to elected officials just how much support Coxey's plan had among the working men of the country, who were voters who were unable to find jobs. Coxey and Brown, who was likely the architect of this whole idea, organized a march on Washington. This was an unemployment protest that would be too big to be ignored.
17:50 Holly Frey? And before we dig into how that all plays out, let's pause for a quick sponsor break.
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19:01 Speaker 01 That sound? That's pro squash. Some of the fastest rallies in sport played inches from the crowd. The National Squash League is back in full swing for season four. The sport is heading to the 2028 Olympics for the first time, and you can see it up close right now in a city near you. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.
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21:41 Holly Frey? So this march that we mentioned before the break was conceived as what Coxey and Brown called "a petition in boots." They intended to gather supporters as they traveled with the hopes of reaching Washington with a huge throng of men.
21:56 Tracy V. Wilson? The men they had won over while still in Ohio started their journey in Masillon on March 25th, 1894, which was Easter Sunday. The residents were not all that enthused about being a convergence point for this rally. A lot of them believed that the participants in Coxey's protest march were just itinerant troublemakers, and they wanted them to hurry up and get out of town quickly. This perception would follow them throughout the whole trip. A lot of write-ups referred to Coxey's men as just a band of tramps. There were also always people who were suspicious that they would bring lawlessness and violence as they moved through the country.
22:33 Holly Frey? Yeah, they definitely got like a duality reception in most places, where some people were really genuinely enthusiastic about them and what they were trying to do, and others were like, "Keep those troublemakers out of our town." In the beginning, there were an estimated 50 to 100 participants in the march. That number varies depending on your source. And there were also 43 reporters that marched with them, but they were, of course, not counted among their numbers. These reporters were there on assignment because this story was sensational, and in chasing that sensationalism, their coverage was not always accurate. It also sometimes made fun of the whole effort. But the important thing to Jacob Coxey was that his march was getting national coverage.
23:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, as I was looking for a picture to use on our social media and stuff with this, I found a lot of editorial cartoons satirizing Coxey and his march.
23:25 Holly Frey? Mm-hmm.
23:26 Tracy V. Wilson? The start of the march had been a show. Coxey's wife, Henrietta Jones Coxey, and their newborn son were at the front of the parade. Coxey had named this baby "legal tender" to show his commitment to legal tender currency as a revitalizing force for the nation. Though there are some accounts that Henrietta and the baby marched with the group, that's actually a little misleading. They were part of the procession as it was headed out of town, but they didn't stay with the march. They arranged to meet back up with Coxey at the destination of the nation's capital. That's still quite a trip with a five-week-old baby, though.
24:00 Holly Frey? Yeah, not an awesome thing to do with the best modern conveniences and health standards. Really unwise in the 1890s. Brown had set up the structure of this whole march. He's often really, really cited as being like the guy who is running the actual march. And as we said, he was a showman. He dubbed the march "The Common Wheel of Christ." He made banners and fabric badges for the men to wear, all of which read things like "Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward Men, But Death to Interest on Bonds." And these banners all had a mix of religious symbolism and economic commentary in the art. I've seen them described in a number of sources as being really confusing, because he was trying
24:43 Holly Frey? to get a lot of different ideas and ideologies represented in them, like his religious views, as well as his political views, as well as issues of the economy, and kind of blending them together, leaving some onlookers to kind of scratch their heads. Brown continued to wear that Buffalo Bill costume, and Coxey wore a Union Army uniform.
25:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Brown also may have cost Coxey a lot of money. It was reported that the bill for printing up recruitment flyers had come to a whopping $2,000. That's $2,018.94. On top of that, Coxey was footing the bill for some of the camp supplies, although they did take donations to cover most of their needs, particularly being food. Food turned out to be an ongoing problem as the march played out, because in a recession, donations could be pretty sparse. The men really weren't ever getting enough to eat.
25:36 Holly Frey? Yeah, there are lots of descriptions of how like, in some towns, you know, volunteers and people that wanted to welcome them would come and they would have brought food and prepared like these huge meals, but like, there was never enough to go around. And so it was like, well, you might get soup one day and only bread the next, or you might only get two meals this day and one meal this day. It just was not consistent. And when you think about how much they were walking in any given day, you realize that this was a very, very difficult undertaking.
26:08 Holly Frey? Because of all the press coverage, though, more groups had started marching from all over the country, some as far as California, in the hopes of joining what had, at this point, colloquially come to be known as Coxey's Army. Some of this coverage had actually started way back in January, when Coxey and Brown announced that they were planning this. And to be very, very clear, the reason people were so willing to do this was because there was a lot of desperation throughout the country at this time. This was only the second year of what would be a four-year recession, and families were going hungry, and there was no relief on the horizon. So for a lot of men, this seemed like the only way that they were ever going to make their voices truly heard by people with power, and hopefully catalyze an improvement in
26:53 Holly Frey? their family's quality of life. Some of them traveled in wagons, some on horses, some were simply on foot, but all of them had the intent that they were going to meet up with Coxey and converge on Washington.
27:06 Tracy V. Wilson? So while there were occasional deserters who probably joined up for the promise of free meals along the way, maybe even just the security of traveling with a group, the spots that they left filled in behind them as the Army kept moving through more towns. Increasingly, it was made up entirely of men who were just tired of waiting for better times, and they wanted to take some kind of action.
27:27 Holly Frey? And as they traveled, the press became more and more critical of this whole operation. They started writing commentary about how Brown's cowboy gear was an affectation, and then they started talking about how dirty his suit and he was, and they started calling him "old greasy," which he enjoyed about as much as you might expect.
27:47 Tracy V. Wilson? The press characterization of the rest of the marchers similarly degraded over time. While some of the accounts in the early days described the participants as enthusiastic and idealistic, that shifted. Soon, they were referring to the protesters as "an unwashed army."
28:03 Holly Frey? For example, there's one early article at the start of the march in Massillon, where the New York Times reported, quote, "Most of those now here are hard-looking people, but up to the present time, they have shown no disposition to be unruly. Coxey and his lieutenants are elated and declared that they will have 10,000 men in line when the word 'forward' is given."
28:24 Tracy V. Wilson? But in a story from mid-April, a few weeks into the march, The Times first outlined how the Fife Corps of Coxey's army traded their instruments for beer and then got arrested. The write-up of the incident describes Coxey handling the situation well, explaining that there would be no tolerance for that kind of behavior and that the point of their march was much more important than getting drunk. But then it completely discredits him at the end, saying that he was "made happy when he met a fortune teller on their journey, who told him that he would live to be 100."
28:56 Holly Frey? Yeah, it's the, when you read the, the flow of that particular brief article, it's the weirdest thing because it really is like this great portrait of like, wow, he's really a good leader, like he explains to them like why they are doing what they are doing and reminds them of the gravity of this effort. And then they're like, oh, and then he got all into a fortune teller for a little while. It's like, oh. Eventually, Carl Brown got really tired of all these jabs from reporters and he started calling them Argus-eyed demons of hell. This actually quite delighted the press. They started a little club amongst themselves that they dubbed the Argus-eyed demons. And this club even had elected officers, but really, it was mostly just about like finding a good watering hole and drinking wherever they stopped for the night.
29:39 Tracy V. Wilson? But even without the press commentary, the group was not helping its own reputation. Because of the hardscrabble nature of their day-to-day survival, when Coxey and his men arrived in a town, they could basically watch the faces of the people who greeted them fall as they saw how ragged everyone looked. The movement sounded so robust on paper, but in person, it was often really disappointing. And men who had planned to join Coxey sometimes opted out of that plan once they saw how rough things had become.
30:09 Holly Frey? When Coxey's army finally arrived in Washington DC on May 1st, that was after 35 days of walking, it had quintupled in size, at least by some counts. There are others that put it closer to being 400 men versus 500, others listed as thousands. But this gets a little bit unclear because there were multiple groups that were starting to come together. So the numbers shift really quickly and like in big... Chunks depending on how any given reporter defined Coxey's group, whether it was only counting those that traveled with him and Brown specifically, or whether other groups that joined up towards the end should be part of that count. But it quickly got to be really pointless to try to count the newcomers anyway,
30:52 Holly Frey? as thousands of thousands of locals had also shown up for the march, some to support it and some just to watch the spectacle of it. But they were kind of all traveling in this huge throng together.
31:03 Tracy V. Wilson? Coxey really hoped that he and his marchers would be able to enact rapid change. After all, he had the bill written and ready to go for Congress, and it read in part, quote, "Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives and Congress assembled, that the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States is hereby authorized and instructed to have engraved and printed immediately after the passage of this bill $500 million of treasury notes a leal tender for all debts, public and private. Said notes to be in denominations of $1, $2, $5, and $10, and to be placed in a fund to be known as the General County Road Fund
31:44 Tracy V. Wilson? System of the United States, and to be expended solely for said purpose."
31:49 Holly Frey? Mamie Coxey, who was Jacob's 17-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, joined this procession at some point before it arrived in Washington. And when they approached the Capitol Building, she was at the front of the parade, dressed as the goddess of peace, all in white, and she rode a white Arabian horse that was one from Coxey's farm. Like, she was intended to be a visual harbinger of change. But Mamie had a primary admirer in Carl Brown, who said of the young woman, quote, "I thought that she was the most beautiful sight I had ever beheld."
32:22 Tracy V. Wilson? So they had made it. Coxey and Brown had led their band to Washington. They were right there, ready to demand a jobs bill that they believed would help get the lives of so many Americans back on track. But the end of Coxey's march for reforms that would reinvigorate the working class and the economy was a bit of a letdown.
32:40 Holly Frey? And we're going to talk about their arrival at the Capitol Building and what happened there after we first take a quick sponsor break.
32:53 Speaker 01 That sound? That's pro squash. Some of the fastest rallies in sport played inches from the crowd. The National Squash League is back in full swing for season four. The sport is heading to the 2028 Olympics for the first time, and you can see it up close right now in a city near you. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.
33:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends
34:05 Tracy V. Wilson? proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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35:31 Tracy V. Wilson? Long hours, work deadlines, family commitments. You give so much to everyone else. Isn't it time to invest in yourself? The University of Arizona Global Campus is built for working adults with flexible online degree programs designed to fit your life. Your previous education, training, and eligible experience may even help you earn college credit. At UAGC, you can take one accelerated course at a time, helping you move toward your goals in five and six week class formats. Visit uagc.edu today.
36:06 Holly Frey? So when he and all of his followers had arrived in Washington DC, Jacob Coxey had applied for and received a parade permit. He had also applied for a permit to speak on the steps of the Capitol. That permit was denied. And really, if Jacob Coxey had been paying attention and actually accepting certain truths, he probably would have seen that coming.
36:29 Tracy V. Wilson? As early as March 24th, the day before the march started, reports out of Washington had made clear that this common wheel or army was not going to be welcomed by lawmakers. A report from Washington that ran in the New York Times from March 24th read, quote, "Nothing but ridicule is heard in regard to the Coxey movement among well-informed persons here. There is not the remotest prospect of any congressional action to grant a permit for any mob to assemble on the Capitol grounds in violation of a specific act of Congress."
37:03 Holly Frey? So as they got up to the Capitol and Coxey and Brown moved through the crowd of onlookers and police in DC as the parade got to their destination, the scene quickly turned frantic. They had been headed for the steps. That was off limits and the police were watching. Brown, who of course, in this nutty garb and was very a large man, stood out in any crowd. So he was pursued by police. He was tackled and beaten. A chant of Coxey, Coxey started among the thousands of spectators and supporters.
37:35 Tracy V. Wilson? The police, realizing they had no control over the situation, panicked and they also turned on bystanders. They swung their clubs without regard for who they were striking. After about 15 minutes of mayhem, it was over and no speeches had been given.
37:51 Holly Frey? The headlines the next day read, Coxey Driven From The Capitol, Not Allowed To Deliver His Harangue. That same story often ran with another subheader that indicated that Coxey had not even been arrested, but he and several of his associates were in fact arrested and they did face charges.
38:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Jacob Coxey, Carl Brown, and Christopher Columbus Jones were all found guilty of carrying illegal banners onto Capitol grounds. They were sentenced to 20 days in jail a week after the rally. They also had to pay a fine of $5 each for trespassing on the grass.
38:26 Holly Frey? Yeah, that was one of those things. It was off limits. While the three movement leaders, Christopher Columbus Jones had come in later and kind of served in a capacity of wrangling some of the people on the march. While they were serving out their jail term, the men who had followed them to Washington did not all disperse. They still wanted to advocate for Coxey's plans, so they had made a camp at Bladensburg, Maryland, and they waited the three weeks out. But most of them at that point had moved on. And while there really were some efforts to keep the protest and the movement going, including a second, smaller protest in which Carl Brown allegedly appeared in drag as the goddess of liberty, this whole thing was
39:09 Holly Frey? really over though. By mid-July, even the most ardent supporters and stragglers had moved on.
39:15 Tracy V. Wilson? After the march, Jacob Coxey had stayed heavily involved in politics. He also expanded his business and bought a second quarry in 1914 in Dundee, Ohio. He ran for public office 11 times for various positions. He was elected mayor of Masalun, Ohio in 1931. This was his only election win and his time in office went pretty poorly.
39:40 Holly Frey? He also spearheaded a second march on Washington in 1914, once again championing the cause of laborers. And he made it to the Capitol and he addressed a small group of protesters from the steps. He wasn't arrested that time, but he also didn't have much press coverage and not many people really seemed to care about what he was doing.
39:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Although Coxey had been ridiculed for his ideas by a lot of people, a lot of those same concepts were part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, including the make-work projects of the 1930s.
40:11 Holly Frey? On the 50th anniversary of the original march on the Capitol, Jacob Coxey was invited and finally able to give the speech on the Capitol steps that he had planned for 1894. Tracy and I are going to take turns reading it because it's quite long and this is an abridged version, but it begins, "The Constitution of the United States guarantees to all citizens the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances, and furthermore declares that the right of free speech shall not be abridged."
40:40 Tracy V. Wilson? We stand here today to test these guarantees of our Constitution. Here, rather than at any other spot on the continent, it is fitting that we should come to mourn over our dead liberties and by our protest arouse the imperiled nation to such action as shall rescue the Constitution and resurrect our liberties.
41:00 Holly Frey? Upon these steps where we stand has been spread a carpet for the royal feet of a foreign princess. Up these steps, the lobbyists of trusts and corporations have passed unchallenged on their way to committee rooms, access to which we, the representatives of the toiling wealth producers, have been denied. We stand here today on behalf of millions of toilers whose petitions have been buried in committee rooms and whose opportunities for honest, remunerative, productive labor have been taken from them by unjust legislation, which protects idlers, speculators, and gamblers. We come to remind the Congress here assembled of the Declaration of a United States Senator, quote, "That for a quarter
41:43 Holly Frey? of a century, the rich have been growing richer, the poor poorer, and that by the close of the present century, the middle class will have disappeared as the struggle for existence becomes fierce and relentless."
41:55 Tracy V. Wilson? We are here to petition for legislation which will furnish employment for every man able and willing to work. We are engaged in a bitter and cruel war with the enemies of all mankind, a war with hunger, wretchedness, and despair, and we ask Congress to heed our petitions and issue for the nation's good a sufficient volume of the same kind of money which carried the country through one awful war and saved the life of the nation.
42:21 Holly Frey? We have come here through toil and weary marches, through storms and tempests, over mountains and amid the trials of poverty and distress, to lay our grievances at the doors of our national legislature and ask them, in the name of him whose banners we bear, in the name of him who plead for the poor and the oppressed, that they should heed the voice of despair and distress that is now coming up from every section of our country, that they should consider the conditions of the starving unemployed of our land and enact such laws as will give them employment, bring happier conditions to the people, and the smile of contentment to our citizens.
42:58 Tracy V. Wilson? In his later years, Coxey continued to pursue new business endeavors as well as politics. He sold a mild laxative called Coxylax, which he swore was the source of his longevity. He also sold copper and zinc discs to wear inside of shoes, were supposed to help with aches and pains, and he gave instructions out to people who wanted to make their own.
43:21 Holly Frey? Incidentally, Carl Brown and Mamie Coxey did become a couple. They were married in 1895. That was much to Jacob Coxey's chagrin. The couple had a son together, but that marriage did not last.
43:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Jacob's second wife, Henrietta, died on January 13, 1951. After their child, Legal Tender, who only lived to be seven, the couple had three other children. They were Jacob Jr., David, and Ruth. After Henrietta's death, Jacob Coxey's own health went downhill pretty quickly. He had a stroke on May 18, 1951. He had lived only four months longer than his wife did.
43:59 Holly Frey? Yeah, he is one of those eccentric and marvelous characters in history that we don't really get all that much information about normally, but I both love his idealism and shake my head and go, oh, man.
44:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook URL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is [email protected] . You can find us all over social media at Missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
45:10 Speaker 01 That sound? That's pro squash. Some of the fastest rallies in sport played inches from the crowd. The National Squash League is back in full swing for season four. The sport is heading to the 2028 Olympics for the first time, and you can see it up close right now in a city near you. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.
45:38 Tracy V. Wilson? You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T: Connecting Changes Everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.
46:11 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community. What comes after diagnosis through Stories of Hope, Progress, and Connection? Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
46:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Long hours, work deadlines, family commitments. You give so much to everyone else. Isn't it time to invest in yourself? The University of Arizona Global Campus is built for working adults with flexible online degree programs designed to fit your life. Your previous education, training, and eligible experience may even help you earn college credit. At UAGC, you can take one accelerated course at a time, helping you move toward your goals in five- and six-week class formats. Visit uagc.edu today.
47:12 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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