COXEY'S ARMY - BEING HEARD

 

I imagine that every step of the seven miles - about a 3 hour march - from Brightwood Park to the nation's capital,  were tense for Coxey’s men. The now 500 man Army was swollen by the convergence of marches from New York and even Texas, and supporters, to perhaps 4,000.  And leading the army, at least in the political cartoons (above) was Democratic Presidential contender William Jennings Bryan. 

But in truth, Bryan was with the army in lukewarm spirit only. His grand solution to the national depression was to switch from the gold standard to silver, thus creating enough new wealth to pay for the improvements Coxey's men wanted.  But the problem wasn't lack of money, but lack of will.

The 12,000 witnesses who now marched alongside the army intended, I suspect,  to use their bodies to protect the unemployed.  

Among those thousands was was Mr. L. Frank Baum (above), then a reporter for the Chicago Evening Post.  The following year he would begin writing a children’s book “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” about four friends - Dorothy (wearing silver slippers - currency based on the price of silver ), along with The Scarecrow (the American Farmer), the Tin Woodsman (Industrial Workers), and the Cowardly Lion (timid Populist politicians like Bryant ), who follow the Yellow Brick Road (the gold standard) to the Emerald City (Washington D.C,) demanding the Wizard's assistance.  The Wizard being, of course, the American government "...of the people, for the people...", at least in theory.

The crowds lined the route of the Army down 16th Street to Massachusetts Avenue, then across to Mount Vernon Square and then turning south west on 9th Street to New York Avenue, which they followed directly to the capital building. 

"Why do you wish to see Oz?" he asked. 
"I want him to send me back to Kansas, and the Scarecrow wants him to put a few brains into his head," she replied. 
The Tin Woodman appeared to think deeply for a moment. Then he said: "Do you suppose Oz could give me a heart?" 
"Why, I guess so," Dorothy answered. "It would be as easy as to give the Scarecrow brains." 
"True," the Tin Woodman returned. "So, if you will allow me to join your party, I will also go to the Emerald City and ask Oz to help me."
1900  L. Frank Baum  "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" 

By this time the crowd of witnesses was so large, it was being led by 25 mounted Metropolitan Policemen, intent upon keeping the Army moving. They, of course, had no intention of stopping, but the government wanted to feel they were making the decisions. 

Ray Standard Baker, covering the march for the Chicago Record, noted that “Coxey’s carriage (stopped) near the “B” street entrance to the (capital) grounds…Rising from his seat, he stooped over and kissed his wife, as if realizing something of the terrible ordeal to follow”.

Jacob Coxey then “leaped nimbly to the ground, and in a moment he and Browne were swallowed up in a wild surging mob of men which lifted them from their feet and bore them bodily...to the Capital(steps)...More than four hundred mounted policemen…rode into the crowd with the intention of capturing the two…but they might as well have attempted to arrest a cyclone. The mob forced one of them against a stone wall…and threw his horse violently to the ground.” 

“The mounted policemen lost their heads…and began striking everyone within reach. Women and children were ruthlessly ridden down…All this time Coxey had been struggling through the crowd toward the central steps of the capital….Before anyone knew it Coxey was bounding up the East front…He was up to the tenth step before he was recognized. Then the officers closed in on him.”

Holding Coxey’s arm, Captain Garden of the Capital Police, demanded, “What do you want here?” Coxey replied, “I want to make an address.” Gardner told him he would not be allowed to do that. “Then can I read a protest?” asked Coxey. The answer again was no. After that, it was all over in less than five confused minutes.

Jacob Coxey was not arrested on The Capital's  steps, no matter what the history books say.  That would have set off a riot. Jacob Coxey was instead ushered back to his carriage .

By then Carl Browne (above, left) and Christopher Columbus Jones were under arrest, the Army was thus left under the command of Jesse Coxey (above, right), He marched  the men, “like a funeral procession” toward their new camp, at the site of an old city dump on M street, They dubbed the new site, “Camp Tyranny”.   

On Wednesday, May second, Jacob Coxey was in court to show support and pay the fines for his two friends. That was when he was arrested. The charges laid against all three men were "carrying banners illegally" and "walking on the grass" and "injuring the shrubbery". They were immediately thrown in jail. 

One week later, on Tuesday, 9 May, 1892  all three men were tried in District Court, where it was revealed that the illegal banners they were charged with displaying were the three by two inch cloth lapel pins worn by every member of the Army.  Coxey always maintained that he never stepped on the grass. It did not matter. All three men were found guilty, fined five dollars each and sentenced to an additional 20 days in jail.

Coxey’s Army stayed in Camp Tyranny for two weeks, playing baseball, drilling and attending rallies, until the D.C. Board of Health ordered them to move. They then returned to their camp at Hyattsville, Maryland for another week. 

A hotel in Bladensburg, Maryland provided free rooms for the newly released Coxey and Browne, and the Army cramped in the  back yard. Heavy rains in June drove the marchers to higher ground and this time they moved to Roslyn, Virginia.  

Finally, on 11 August,  the Army's numbers had dwindled to 80 men. At that  point the Governor of Maryland dispatched Baltimore Police Officers into Virginia to sweep in and arrest the remnants on charges of vagrancy. That whimper was the end of Coxey's Army of 1894.

The speech Coxey had wanted to deliver from the steps of the capital, was a desperate plea. He had wanted to say, “We choose this place of assemblage because it is the property of the people.” Clearly the Senators and Congressmen thought of it as private property. Theirs.  Coxey had also wanted to say. “We come to remind the Congress...that for a quarter 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.” That was what all he had wanted to say; just a statement of reality.

In the wake of Coxey’s Army, ex-President William Howard Taft was asked what a man with a family was to do when there were no jobs. The President replied “Lord knows. I do not.” And he didn’t. Neither did he have any idea how to revive the national economy, or how to match men who wanted to work with work which needed to be done. 

Two years later, the Denver News would still note, “There are millions of heads of families partially or wholly out of employment…In the agricultural districts wages have fallen one-half.  In manufacturing…the aggregate of all wages paid is at the starvation point.” 

The depression would continue for another two long years, and during that lost decade, those with little imagination fiercely contended that there was nothing that could be done to mitigate the disaster; so nothing was tried. To the surprise of the wealthy and ruling class, that did not help anybody. The railroads did not want money spent to improve roads, so no money was spent.

Then, in 1898 the nation raised an army and invaded Cuba and the Philippines. And at that, the six year long depression began to come to an end. Still, conservative economists argued that such a short war could not have revived the economy. Nor would, they insisted, increasing taxes and government investment in infrastructure.  And that may be so. But if it is so, then the war spending and the end of the depression was one heck of a coincidence in 1898, and again in 1942. 

I think the most accurate if unkind memorial the nation offered for those heroes of the spring of 1892 was provided by a bar fly in New York City,  who was name was recorded only as "Feeb". He composed and performed songs for his supper.  His mocking composition that spring of 1892  was, “Come, boys, turn around the beer keg. And listen to my song, Great Coxey is among us, to right each grievous wrong. No more shall sorrow grip us, We're on the way to wealth…With a glass in every hand; Sing to Coxey and his army, And free lunch all in the land.”

"…and (Glinda) said to the Scarecrow, "What will you do when Dorothy has left us?"

"I will return to the Emerald City," he replied, "for Oz has made me its ruler and the people like me. The only thing that worries me is how to cross the hill of the Hammer-Heads." 
"...I shall command the Winged Monkeys to carry you to the gates of the Emerald City," said Glinda, "for it would be a shame to deprive the people of so wonderful a ruler." 
"Am I really wonderful?" asked the Scarecrow. 
"You are unusual," replied Glinda." 
1900  L. Frank Baum  "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz"

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COXEY'S ARMY - PLAYING DEFENSE

I would say the last thing America needed in 1894 were more millionaires. Over the previous half century, unfettered capitalism had produced a ten fold increase in their number, growing to 10,000 by the centuries end.  But in a nation of 70 million the advantages of wealth were increasingly hoarded by the few. 

The accumulation of wealth is just another form of addiction. Like an alcoholic, those addicted to money are never sated. To feed their addiction, millions were starving and the American dream was increasingly a fairy tale.

The real alternative to the bankruptcy of supply side economics was demand side economics. In thirty years Roosevelt called it the "New Deal"  And Coxey's Army was one of it's birth pangs.

"Before them stood a little man...He was clothed all in green, from his head to his feet, and even his skin was of a greenish tint. At his side was a large green box. When he saw Dorothy and her companions the man asked, "What do you wish in the Emerald City?" "We came here to see the Great Oz," said Dorothy. The man was so surprised at this answer that he sat down to think it over.  "It has been many years since anyone asked me to see Oz," he said, shaking his head in perplexity. "He is powerful and terrible, and if you come on an idle or foolish errand to bother the wise reflections of the Great Wizard, he might be angry and destroy you all in an instant." 
1900  L. Frank Baum  "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" 

On Tuesday, 17 April , 1894, Coxey’s Army arrived in Cumberland, Maryland, just a hundred air miles short of the nation’s capital. And for the first time Congress began to take public notice of the marchers, and their first reaction was, of course, panic. Congress stayed in session until 6:30 that evening, debating the impending doomsday of people actually petitioning their government for redress of grievances. 

Ohio conservative Democrat, 51 year old Representative Joseph Hodson Outwaite (above), called for Mr. Coxey to consider that if “...10,000 to 50,000 men can intimidate Congress to do one thing, then another 10,000 to 50,000 men can intimidate them to do another thing—which leads to anarchy.” Of course some might say that what Mr. Outwaite described was actually democracy. I might say that, for instance. And I just did.

In fact there had been government meetings behind the scenes before the march had even begun, on how to receive the Commonweal Army should it make as far as Washington. But after some hyperventilating, congress voted down appropriations for a military reception. And some of the people’s representatives found comfort in the genius of Charles L’Enfant, who had designed the capital as a series of angled broad avenues, each of which terminated in huge traffic circles - a plan guaranteed to reduce tourists to tears, be they barbarian invaders or rebelling peasants. And anyway, noted the Washington Post at the time, each of those broad avenues could be controlled with a single Gatling gun.

Meanwhile, back in Cumberland, Coxey’s Army camped out on a baseball field, and the businessman from Massillon, Ohio even managed to show a little profit, charging ten cents for people to observe his footsore unemployed. It was an absurd idea, since Cumberland was already overflowing with its own unemployed. But still, the process put $145 in the army’s coffers.

Cumberland (above) had once been Maryland’s second largest city, its surrounding mountains containing deposits of coal and iron ore.   It was also the junction of the National Road, the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, the Potomac River and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. 

The canal, also called the Grand Old Ditch, had not reached Cumberland until 1850, eight years after the railroad. And in the forty-four years since the canal had seen little profit. That was why Jacob Coxey was able to make a such good deal on hiring two canal boats, normally used to carry coal, to transport his Army down stream.

On Tuesday, 17 April 1892, the men marched through Cumberland to the loading wharf (above) at the Western Terminus of the canal. 

The boats cut a hundred plus road miles off Jacob Coxey's Army’s march, saving perhaps four days of shoe leather. As an added plus, Coxey and Carl Browne were also hoping to put their bad press behind them. Browne had begun to refer to the reporters as “argus-eyed demons of hell.”

The cadre of reporters  were not going to be left behind.  The self described "40 thieves" banded together, hired themselves a “press boat”, stocked it with food, a cook and alcohol, and named it “The Flying Demon”. It looked, recorded one of its denizens, “like a floating picture by Victor Hugo.” 

The "Argus-eyed demons of hell" (above) had never felt favorable toward Coxey’s Army, but with the loss of copy from The Great Unknown Smith, they turned even more hostile. 

Samuel Williams, accompanying the march for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, described the hundred and fifty unemployed men as “the nucleus of a band of marauders, whose object is to despoil their fellow citizens” and called them “a species of terrorism.”   “These bands,” he wrote,  “naturally inspire terror and clashes with the authorities or citizens must come.”  They had not yet, but they must. So insisted Mr. Williams. 

Babcock, writing for the Chicago papers, warned that the pair of boat loads of unemployed, “...can scarcely fail to cause bloodshed in Christian Communities”.  

But it did fail.  The terror was inspired only by those who believed the reporter’s inventions. Those who actually saw the Army were generally favorably impressed with its discipline and decorum.  

On Thursday, 19 April, Coxey’s Army disembarked at Williamsport, Maryland, and marched the six miles to Hagerstown. 

Here they camped for two days. The community, having been fed for weeks on the press reports of tramps, thieves and anarchists, were not happy to see them. The Associated Press reported on the 21st, that, “The people of Hagerstown are preparing to make the best of the…Army for another day, or perhaps two days. Browne has determined on revenge for the rather cold reception of yesterday”. 

In truth, the Army was awaiting the arrival of additional unemployed marchers from Philadelphia, which the A.P. described in the most alarming terms. “…A party of thirty tramps is reported moving down the valley from Carlisle.” In the village of Middletown, said the press, “deputies are being sworn in to protect the town.” Still, even the alarmist local press was forced to admit that “the conduct of the Coxey men In Hagerstown has so far been exemplary.”

More than that, it was evident that the Army had learned a thing or two about marketing. 

They erected a canvas screen around their camp, and again charged admission to stare at the unemployed men cooking their meals and tending to their daily needs, even selling their hard-tack biscuits as souvenirs to the gawkers. “The badges the men wear (above) have also acquired a market value, and sets of the several varieties bring good prices, some of them commanding a dollar each.”

They even published and sold their own pamphlets, to explain their objectives. It remained to be seen what profit the nation would make from the Army, now that it was so close to its goal.

"... I found myself in the midst of a strange people, who, seeing me come from the clouds, thought I was a great Wizard. Of course I let them think so, because they were afraid of me, and promised to do anything I wished them to. Just to amuse myself, and keep the good people busy, I ordered them to build this City, and my Palace; and they did it all willingly and well. Then I thought, as the country was so green and beautiful, I would call it the Emerald City; and to make the name fit better I put green spectacles on all the people, so that everything they saw was green." 
"But isn't everything here green?" asked Dorothy. 
"No more than in any other city," replied Oz; "but when you wear green spectacles, why of course everything you see looks green to you." 
1900  L. Frank Baum  "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz"

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