Coxey's Army at Brightwood Riding Park

The Panic of 1893 was the worst economic depression in the history of the United States until the Great Depression of 1929. The crisis began in February when panic hit the New York stock market as investors suddenly began selling shares of the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroad, forcing its bankruptcy. The panic continued as investors began selling other stocks and assets to purchase gold, which nearly eroded the U.S. Government’s gold reserves. Business investment dropped sharply, mines and factories closed, and banks stopped issuing loans. Unemployment soared from between 10 to 20 percent. The economic depression lasted several years and bankrupted over 15,000 firms, including 156 railroads and 500 banks. The panic hit middle class savers, workers, and farmers the hardest, leaving many homeless and hungry. The country’s leading businessmen, however, escaped the economic crisis practically unscathed and with their fortunes primarily intact. 

Jacob Coxey was a successful businessman himself, but his views on politics and economics, owing to his personal experiences, differed greatly from those of most other business leaders of his time. Coxey was born in 1854 in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, and after nine years of education, found his first job at age 16 in an iron mill in nearby Danville. In an earlier panic in 1873, Coxey lost his job and never forgot the suffering he endured. He left Danville in 1878 and joined his uncle as a partner in a scrap iron factory in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. His work eventually brought him to Massillon, Ohio where he stumbled upon a quarry that he thought showed bright prospects. His hunch proved correct and Coxey’s enterprise flourished, eventually expanding to include other quarries and horse farms in Ohio, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. By 1893, he was worth around $250,000, which marked him as a wealthy individual for those times. When the Panic of 1893 hit, Coxey tried to avoid laying off his workforce, recalling his own experiences with unemployment, but as the depression worsened and his business suffered, he had no choice but to idle his quarries. 

Coxey had long been interested in politics, especially movements proposing to expand the money supply as a way to spur economic growth. As the economic depression worsened, he decided to take action. He proposed his own plan to restore the country’s economic health, which he called the “Good Roads Plan,” but was uncertain how to garner national attention for his ideas. Coxey found himself in Chicago in July 1893 to attend a convention of the American Bimetallic League that opposed government plans to stop purchasing silver, which the convention attendees believed would constrict the money supply, leading to deflation and lower wages and crop prices. Also in Chicago speaking at the time, Carl Browne – a one-time rancher, actor, journalist, union activist, and artist who often donned cowboy attire – greatly impressed Coxey. Browne and Coxey began to strategize how to attract national attention to Coxey’s plan. They decided to launch a march on Washington to arrive on May 1, International Labor Day, to petition the government to adopt Coxey’s ideas. Influenced by Browne’s spiritual views known as Theosophy, which held that the souls of the departed could be mingled with those of the living, they called their organization the “Commonwealth of Christ.” Coxey and Browne began issuing press releases about their planned march and soon newspaper reporters began arriving in Massillon to write about “Coxey’s Army” of marchers and, as Coxey called it, his “petition in boots.”

Coxey and his band of marchers departed Massillon on Easter Day, March 25, 1894, and began their approximately 400-mile march on foot to Washington, D.C. Although Coxey and many newspaper accounts claimed that over 100,000 marchers would make the journey to the nation’s capital, only about 100 left with him from Massillon. The marchers headed east to Pittsburgh, then southeast toward Frostburg, Maryland and then on to Hagerstown, Frederick and Bethesda in Washington’s suburbs. Reporters joined the march and covered Coxey’s speeches, the antics of the marchers, and the thousands of spectators that turned out to cheer them along the way. Coxey and his followers, which had grown to over 600, arrived in Washington on April 29 and set up camp at the Brightwood Riding Park in the Brightwood neighborhood of the city. Coxey named the encampment Camp Thaddeus Stevens. Over the next few days, thousands of spectators representing a wide cross section of Washington society visited the camp to inspect the marchers and gawk, while Coxey and his leaders met with reporters and government officials to describe their plan to petition Congress. Coxey addressed the gathering crowds, saying he and his marchers were prepared to stay all summer in Washington to ensure Congress passed his ideas into law. On May 1, Coxey and his followers departed Camp Thaddeus Stevens and headed south on 14th Street toward the center of the city.

1.     Alexander, Benjamin. Coxey’s Army: Popular Protest in the Gilded Age. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 2015.

2.     Prout, Jeremey. Coxey’s Crusade for Jobs: Unemployment in the Gilded Age. Dekalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016.

3.     Knight, Timothy. Panic, Prosperity, and Progress: Five Centuries of History and the Markets. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2014.

4.     Josephson, Matthew. The Robber Barons. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 1934.

5.     Divine, Robert, George Fredrickson, T.H. Breen, and R. Hal Williams. America Past and Present. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1984.

6.     Schofield, Carl. “Historic Race Course Gone.” The Sunday Chronicle, December 19, 1909.

Images:

1.     http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/stereo.1s09209

2.     https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016693210/