The “Coxey armies” of reformers and unemployed who descended on Washington, D.C. in 1894 are remembered today as something of a sideshow to the agrarian and monetary populist movements that influenced two presidential elections in the 1890s and a host of major political and economic reforms over the next half of the century. Benjamin F. Alexander's slender new book takes the Coxey marches seriously, while still presenting them as a thrilling tale.
Alexander's book is part of the “Witness to History” series of short books covering pivotal events in a manner suitable for undergraduates. Accordingly, the book's main task is to provide a vivid narrative of the Coxey marches, not necessarily to make new scholarly contributions. The book succeeds in this regard. Although this book offers helpful perspective on Gilded Age politics and protest, Carlos A. Schwantes's Coxey's Army: An American Odyssey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985) remains the scholarly standard-bearer for this particular episode.
The book begins with background chapters on the Gilded Age and the devastating depression of the 1890s. Jacob S. Coxey, a successful quarry owner and horse breeder in Massillon, Ohio, who broke with his class by allying himself with Populism and fiat-money-funded public works programs, appears intermittently in these chapters. The next chapter traces the five-week-long march from Massillon to Washington, where Coxey intended to deliver his “Petition in Boots” as a speech from the steps of the United States Capitol. Another chapter describes the other “Coxey armies” that journeyed from all over the country to Washington. A final narrative chapter describes the events of 1 May 1894, when Capitol police prevented Coxey's gathering from assembling at the Capitol, and the following months. The epilogue relates Coxey's demands to subsequent reforms in the Progressive Era and the New Deal.
The book's central chapters convey the spectacle of these marches, which were true media sensations. Coxey's was the original march on Washington, and people seemed to sense its historic nature. In cities and towns along the route, people lined the streets to watch; some teachers even took their students out of school for that purpose. Coxey, with oddball slogans like “Death to interest on bonds” and a son named Legal Tender, was eccentric enough, but he was out-weirded by his right-hand man Carl Browne, a former carnival barker and patent medicine salesman who wore buckskins and led church services with a “blend of Christianity, reincarnation, and monetary theory” (p. 57). Stranger still was a rival for the leadership who identified himself only as “The Great Unknown.” The chapter on the other Coxey armies who started out from other cities and generally did not make it to Washington by 1 May, if at all, is fascinating. These marches had their own leaders and agendas. “Kelley's army,” led by a labor organizer from San Francisco, was the largest of any of the groups, including Coxey's. Some of the western outfits seized trains, in one case sparking a great train chase through several hundred miles of Montana.
The book highlights the controversies that these marches created. The train heists led to arrests and cries of anarchy, but many locals were sympathetic, much like in violent labor confrontations as the Homestead and Pullman strikes, to which Alexander draws illuminating parallels. One railroad even chose to carry Kelley's army in empty freight cars all the way from Utah to Iowa rather than deal with the political fallout of obstructing them. The marchers were often derided as “tramps” who would burden the local communities if they stayed; this concern came to a head after 1 May, when Coxey's and other armies remained encamped in the Washington area for the rest of the summer.
One issue I wish this book had pursued further is that of the elusive farmer-labor political coalition. This was the holy grail of many reformers in the late nineteenth century, and it would later be a vital part of the New Deal coalition. Economic historians have noted that wage workers might have rationally rejected the soft-money policies espoused by Populists and bimetallists like William Jennings Bryan, since the resulting inflation could have meant real wage cuts. Like Bryan, Coxey eagerly courted both farmers and urban workingmen, and his ties to workingmen were seemingly stronger than Bryan's. Yet political success eluded him, and to a much greater degree than it did Bryan. From 1894 on, Coxey was constantly running for one office or another, and losing. Could working-class suspicion of his inflationary fiat-money proposals have done him in?
Coxey's ideas could use some more discussion. What was in his planned 1 May speech? It is in the Congressional Record. At one point Alexander mentions Coxey's “harebrained currency and welfare proposal” but does not explain its demerits. Coxey's standard proposal was for the government to put the unemployed to work building roads and to finance it by issuing fiat money, with the odd extra step of having the states finance the public works by selling interest-free bonds to the federal government, which would pay for the bonds with fiat money. As bizarre as that last part is, countercyclical road-building and fiat money are by now commonplace. The book mentions that Coxey opposed the creation of the Federal Reserve, and it would be interesting to find out why.
Eccentricities and all, Alexander's Coxey is an inspiring figure. Coxey's overriding point, and the one consistent thread in the various armies' pleas, was that people who wanted to work should be able to. Then as now, the American public seems to have been divided but mostly unsympathetic to the idea of the government as employer of last resort. Critics said such large-scale jobs programs would breed dependency. Yet many Americans found inspiration in the way the marchers “were willing to endure rain and hunger to let their elected representatives know that they expected more from them” (p. 93).
