The Public "I": COXEY'S ARMY - Chapter One

Wednesday, April 07, 2021

COXEY'S ARMY - Chapter One - FIRST STEPS

I am glad I was not there on that Easter Sunday, 26 March, 1894, when what the press would call “Coxey’s Army” set out from Massillon, Ohio. It would have been a depressing sight. It was raining and it was cold, and only 86 men showed up to begin a march which was intended to change the course of American democracy.

On the plus side, they were joined by 42 reporters from various newspapers, just about one reporter for every two marchers. The press corps was further augmented by four Western Union telegraphers and two line men. Along the route they could tap into a telegraph lines, sending dispatches about the progress of the army. William Stead, from the magazine Review of Reviews, noted that “Never in the annals of insurrection has so small a company of soldiers been accompanied by such a phalanx of recording angels.” It would quickly develop that he was one of the few sympathetic angels.

"The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick," said the Witch, "so you cannot miss it. When you get to Oz do not be afraid of him, but tell your story and ask him to help you. "
1900 L. Frank Baum "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz"

History records that they were singing new words (written by Carl Browne) set to the tune "When We Were Marching Through Georgia!", sung by Sherman’s Army as it burned it's way to Savanna. “So now we sing the chorus, Wherever we may be, While we go marching to Congress.” But if they did sing, it was not for long. At least they waited until the "warmth" of the afternoon before, with collars turned up against the cold, they began their trek.

First there came a man on foot carrying an American flag, who was dutifully identified as a “negro” by the recording angels - thus mocking Coxey’s determination to treat all races in his army with equal respect. He was followed by Carl Browne, mounted on a stallion, and bedecked in his buckskin jacket and a huge western hat.

Behind him, riding in a Pheaton buggy drawn by a matched pair of magnificent horses, came the financial support and ideological inspiration for the march, Jacob Coxey. He was one of the richest and most successful businessmen in Ohio. And behind him came the “army”, all 86 of them, on foot and bicycle. But who were “them” really?

Later, Chicago University Professor Hourwitch actually tried to find out who they were. When the marchers had grown in number and in fame, he polled 290 of them. Their average age was 31 years old and on average they had been unemployed for five months. Almost two thirds were skilled mechanics, but less than half of those were union members. There were 88 Democrats in the army, 39 Republicans and 10 who declared themselves to be members of the Populist Party. One in four had needed charity to survive the winter just passed. The study also noted that five or six were of “questionable character”.

"After a few hours the road began to grow rough, and the walking grew so difficult...The farms were not nearly so well cared for here as they were farther back. There were fewer houses and fewer fruit trees, and the farther they went the more dismal and lonesome the country became."
1900 L. Frank Baum "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz"

The New York Times noted in their dispatch that by the end of the first day’s march of just eight miles, ending outside of Canton, Ohio, twenty-five men had “dropped out”. Another paper noted that of the “seventy-five stragglers” who had begun the march, several had spent the previous night in the local jail, and were released just before the march had begun.

And calling the marchers “stragglers” was one of the kinder characterizations. Routinely they were identified as “bums”, or “tramps”. The reporters did not pass up any chance to mock and degrade the "Army of the Poor".

But four days before the march began the magazine “The Coming Nation” noted, “There is to be a presidential election this year; in view of which it may be well to remark-- That workingmen will not be taxed less under a Republican president than they have been under a Democrat. That there will be no more opportunities open to labor in the next four years than there have been in the past four…That there will be no more flour in the bin with a McKinley in the White House than there has been with a Cleveland….We admit that this is rather a gloomy forecast; but experience warrants it and events will justify it.” They certainly did.

What Coxey wanted from the Federal government was not charity. He wanted half a billion dollars to be spent on building and improving roads. We know today, as the beneficiaries of the interstate highway system, that the investment in infrastructure Coxey was promoting would improve the nation, would create new wealth by creating new opportunities for business and in the short run provide honest work for the unemployed.

But the tired, plaintive ideological repetitions were heard just as loudly in 1894 as they are today. Then - that surface roads built by the government were somehow less “moral” than the railroads which were privately owned, even though both were built and run as government endorsed monopolies. In the eyes of the wealthy, who owned the railroads, one was moral and one was not. You need not guess which was which.

Put in such stark black and white imperatives the argument may seem absurd to us today, and, in fact there are indications it seemed just as absurd to the citizens of 1894. But at issue was not what the average American thought, but what the bought and paid for politicians in Washington and the various state capitals were willing to publicly seriously consider. For, much as they are today, the press and the politicians, to their mutual advantage, avoided any honest discussion of the middle ground, preferring instead to debate positions that most people considered absurd extremism.

Carl Browne was described as, “...strongly built with a heavy mustache, and a beard with two spirals. He wore a leather coat fringed around the shoulders and sleeves. A row of buttons down the front were shining silver dollars. Calvary boots, tight-fitting, well polished, came to his knees…He handed me a card with his written signature, at the end of which was a grand flourish and the words, ‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’”

Carl Browne (above) was a part Christian mystic, a part theatrical ham, part artist and illustrator and a part time poet. Coxey had conceived of the method to help the unemployed, but the march on Washington by "The Army of the Commonweal", was all Carl Browne.

But the cause of the common man was not helped by the men Browne (above, center) had brought in to be his Marshals - the second tier leaders of the army. David McCullaum was an economic author and a supposed Cherokee Indian who had written a pamphlet entitled "Dogs and Fleas" under the non de plume of “One of the Dogs”. Also there was "Mr. One" who claimed to subsist only on oatmeal. Then there was Cyclone Kirtland, an astrologer who predicted the army would be “invisible in war, invincible in peace.” Beside him stood Christopher Columbus Jones (above, left) , the leader of marchers out of Philadelphia, who always wore a silk top hat, which merely accented his diminutive five foot tall frame. There was also the trumpeter named “Windy” Oliver. Together they more closely resembled circus side show barkers than the managers of a political movement.

But the most disturbing of all them all was a man who insisted upon being known as “The Great Unknown”. It was not a name chosen at random, but self promoted. “The Great Unknown” was always followed about by a woman who wore a veil and never spoke. But Carl Browne knew the Great Unknown was an ex-circus barker and a current patent medicine “faker” named A.B.P. Bazarro.

In an earlier life The Great Unknown and his wife had made their living selling a "Blood Purify-er" concocted in their makeshift lab on the west side of Chicago. And just to make it easier for the newsmen traveling with Coxe's Army, The Great Unknown let it be known that he would also answer to the name of “Smith”. So the press dubbed him "The Great Unknown Smith". And like Fox News, Bazarro knew the value of mixing politics with the sales pitch.

In their previous existence, while Bazarro's wife passed through the crowds collecting cash for their "Purify-er", Browne (above) would make his appearance and pitch his political theology of abandoning the gold and silver standards and union organizing.

Browne was also the self elected “Great Wizardo” of the “American Patriots”, a self created political organization. And it was because of his success with selling politics and snake oil, that Browne had asked “The Great Unknown”, to join the march.

So, the newspaper men might be forgiven for treating these desperate men as if they were members of a sideshow confidence game. Some of their leaders had recently been just that. Some still were.

Except. of course, that required that the reporters also belittle and dismiss the millions of their desperate fellow citizens whose plight the march was trying to publicize. The crime was that the news media of 1894, like the media of today, were perfectly willing to portray the march as a joke. But at least the joke, such as it was, was on it's way. It was left to see if the desperate marchers on that Easter Sunday, 26 March, 1894, could turn this comedy into a national drama.