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 - AT THE GATES

 

I suppose, in the category of those seeing Coxey's Army as a relief from oppression,  we must include 14 year old Albert Hicks, of East 83rd street in Manhattan. According to the Brooklyn Eagle, Albert had a fight with his mother and ran away from home, saying he was going to join Coxey’s Army.  

According to the Eagle, Albert made it no farther than the ten year old Brooklyn Bridge, where a police officer took him into custody, and called his father to come to collect the boy. It was a common story, an angry fourteen year old running away from home, not worth repeating on the front page of a large newspaper, except for the dubious connection to “Coxey’s Army”. 

Which may explain why the hero of this story bore the same name as the last pirate hung in New York City, back on Friday, 13 July, 1861.

Pirates were self employed sailors,  committing robbery without government sanction.  And in that spring of 1892, the Congressmen, members of the cabinet and lobbyist for the wealthy, considered the Commonweal Army as pirates, practicing the dangerously romantic concept that government can be petitioned directly by its citizens. It had not really been tried in America since the civil war.  And consider what that experiment had cost. 

So working class Americans came out to have a look at Coxey’s Army, which was doing this odd thing. And the vast majority were not frightened by what they saw.   The mixing of whites and blacks did cause some unease, but not enough to deny the logic of joining people looking for work with work that ought to be done, such as building roads. 

But the stories of Coxey's Army did scare Congressmen and the President, and infuriated the wealthy and powerful who were not interested in sharing "their" money. 

"Once, indeed, the Tin Woodman stepped upon a beetle that was crawling along the road, and killed the poor little thing. This made the Tin Woodman very unhappy, for he was always careful not to hurt any living creature; and as he walked along he wept several tears of sorrow and regret."

1900  L. Frank Baum "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz"

On Sunday, 22 April, 1892 , the Philadelphia recruits, under the top hat wearing Christopher Columbus Jones, arrived in Hagerstown. They army had been waiting for them, but the reinforcements numbered  just 18 .  Similar reinforcements coming from Chicago, Kansas and Georgia were being cut off by local authorities and jailed or broken up. Clearly the wealthy in America were not going to surrender addiction without a fight. 

This day, too, William G. Moore, Chief of the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police , publicly announced that if the Commonweal Army entered the Federal City, he would enforce an 1830 regulation making it illegal for anyone to enter the District who would likely become a “public charge’.  It was an absurdly pompous threat on the face of it, since being arrested for violating the 60 year old ordinance would achieve the very object the ordinance was designed to discourage. Prisoners were by definition, in the public charge. There is a reason criminalizing poverty has been discarded. But, it seems, every generation must relearn that reason on their own.

But the commission that ran the District of Columbia went even further. Knowing that Coxey's soldiers sought donations of food and money, Moore announced that hence forth it would be illegal to solicit funds without a license, even though no licenses yet existed and no requirements had yet been written for such a license.

In addition it would now be illegal for there to be any assembly on public property without a license., despite no such license being in existence, and no procedure for obtaining such a nonexistent license was yet in existence.  And no obstruction of public roads would be permitted, either, said the commission, such as pedestrians walking down a public street.  If these regulations were meant to discourage Coxey’s Army, they failed.  In fact, the confrontational approach probably added to the Army’s numbers, as the unemployed, who before had just been desperate and rejected, now began to get angry.

Bright and early on 23 April the 300 plus members of Coxey’s Army marched (above) out of the Hagerstown camp, with flags and banners flying. They only made about six miles that day, stopping for the night at the little community of Hyattstown, where some of the men were provided with home cooked meals by locals, and the rest were welcomed to camp along Little Bennett Creek. Thousands of people turned out for speeches and general festivities in the Army’s camp that night.

One of the reasons Hyattstown was so welcoming was that for over a century, locals had been struggling with a “...deficient link of the Great National Western Road.”  The section between Rockville and Gaithersburg, Maryland, had heavy rain. Often it was nearly impassable, and its dismal condition was disparaged and deplored by the local press and public.”  

A generation before the American Revolution - in 1755 - , the English General Braddock had almost been defeated by this very stretch of road a year before he was killed on his way to Pittsburg (above). A generation after that war, Thomas Jefferson’s road improvements bill had failed to fix the problem. Now, four generations later, the problem persisted. In fact, this section would not be really fixed until 1925, when it was finally paved over, once the automobile became as powerful a lobby as the railroads.

The mayor of Frederick, Maryland (above), John E. Fleming,  lowered the old toll road barrier and boasted that Coxey's Army would never set foot in his town.  Forty additional deputies were sworn in to keep them out.  However, on 24 April , Coxey’s Army, now 340 strong, marched into town, escorted by the deputies. And the world did not end. That night the press reported a “drunken brawl”, but the details were never confirmed. And the next day, when the Army marched out, their numbers were now 400 strong. 

It was on Saturday, 28 April 1892  that Coxey’s Army reached the doorstep of their goal, Brightwood Riding Park – now the Brightwood Recreation Area - along Rock Creek, just outside the District of Columbia. Here they established what they called Camp Stevens. They were greeted by a crowd of 10,000 curious, friendly people. Also on hand were 1,500 federal troops (3 soldiers for every member of the Army), with more soldiers waiting in Baltimore, Annapolis, and Philadelphia, ready to rush to the capital to put down the first signs of any violence. There was none.

Instead, over Saturday and Sunday, an estimated 6,000 unarmed curious citizens visited the encampment in peace. Coxey was quoted in the papers as explaining the march this way; “Congress takes two years to vote on anything…Twenty-millions of people are hungry and cannot wait two years to eat.”

On Tuesday, May 1st, 1892  perhaps 15,000 people crowded around as the Army of 500 left camp (above) for their final seven mile march on the Capital. The Baltimore Herald said “Such a fantastic aggregation (had) never paraded itself in seriousness before the public.” 

First came Mrs. Annie L. Diggs, carrying the American flag. She was followed by Jacob Coxey’s 17 year old daughter on horseback, representing the goddess of Peace. Then came Carl Browne, dressed in his buckskin fringe (above).

Then came Jacob Coxey in his carriage (above, left), riding with his second wife and their infant child, “Legal Tender Coxey”.  They were followed by an actress on horseback, Ms. Virginia Le Valette.  She carried an umbrella (above, left center) and was draped in an American flag. And only behind this final exhibit of female pulchritude, did the public at last get a view of the object of the entire discussion, the army of the unemployed, totting banners and signs. It must have been the most bizarre procession that ever walked down Washington's 16th street, not excepting the parade formed by Dolly Madison as she fled the White House in 1813, with wagons piled high with silverware and paintings, just ahead of the British arsonists.

As they had formed up for the final march, Carl Browne told the men, “The greatest ordeal of the march is at hand. The eyes of the world are upon you, and you must conduct yourselves accordingly.” And they did.

Ahh, if they only knew the high drama and low comedy that was about to descend upon their heads.

"The Tin Woodman knew very well he had no heart, and therefore he took great care never to be cruel or unkind to anything. "You people with hearts," he said, "have something to guide you, and need never do wrong; but I have no heart, and so I must be very careful."
1900  L. Frank Baum  "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" 

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