Jacob Sechler Coxey

• Jacob Sechler Coxey
• Born: April 16, 1854
• Died: May 18, 1951

Widely known as General Coxey for his leadership of a demonstration by the unemployed—Coxey’s Army—who marched on Washington to call for government relief in the wake of the 1893 financial panic. The son of Thomas Coxey and Mary (Sechler) Coxey, he was born in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, where his father was a sawmill engineer. The family moved to Danville, Pennsylvania, when Jacob Coxey was five or six. Quitting school at the age of fifteen, he worked for ten years in the rolling mills before becoming a scrap-iron dealer. In 1881 Coxey bought a silica sandstone quarry in Massillon, Ohio, becoming a financial success and acquiring a stable of blooded racehorses with a national reputation.

Coxey was married twice: first to Caroline Ammerman in 1874 (they were divorced in 1888) and then in 1890 to Henrietta Sophia Jones. Each marriage produced four children.

When unemployment spread rapidly in 1893, Coxey himself suffered no large financial losses, but he had to lay off a number of men in one of his plants. He was a man with a taste for social and financial panaceas, and he had a deep interest in politics. Having belonged to the Greenback wing of the Democratic party (those who advocated that the government issue paper money without metal backing), he combined his monetary theories in 1893 with a demand that the government provide public works jobs and put money into circulation by hiring the unemployed to build a national road system.

Coxey’s ideas would probably not have attracted much attention if he had not met and recruited to his plan Carl Browne, an old radical cartoonist and sideshow medicine man who dressed in an outlandish cowboy costume with high boots, a sombrero, and a fur cape. Browne, with his natural talent for stump oratory, complemented the sedate, respectable-looking Coxey, who, one reporter said, resembled “a prosperous sunburned farmer.” After Browne told Coxey about marches of the unemployed in California, Coxey proposed to “send a petition to Washington with boots on.”

As preparations for the march proceeded, Browne influenced Coxey with his religious ideas. Browne’s theory of theosophy included the idea that all souls are reincarnations of portions of a great common soul that contained all the dead souls of the past—including that of Jesus Christ. But Browne proposed that he and Coxey had a larger share of Christ’s soul than normal. Their demonstration was therefore named the “Commonweal of Christ,” and large banners with portraits of Jesus Christ and the slogan “Peace on Earth Good Will to Men, He Hath Risen, but Death to Interest on Bonds,” were printed up. No one but Browne and Coxey took this very seriously.

The march left Masillon on March 25, 1894; it was Coxey’s intention to arrive in Washington by May 1. The scant hundred marchers included Henrietta Coxey, riding in a carriage and carrying the Coxeys’ infant child—Legal Tender Coxey—and Coxey’s sixteen-year-old son Jesse. In spite of the small numbers involved, the departure attracted nationwide publicity. The growing procession, singing “for we are marching with Coxey,” attracted curious crowds in the small towns that it passed through and frequently lived off; it was soon regarded by some as a menace, largely because of the simultaneous movement of more numerous groups of unemployed from California—Kelly’s Army and Fry’s Army in particular. Coxey’s troop (as well as the other armies) was supported by the Executive Council of the American Federation of Labor.

When Coxey reached Washington he was granted a parade permit—but warned not to try entering the Capitol grounds. The “industrial army” put on a lively show. Five hundred of the unemployed followed Coxey down Pennsylvania Avenue; a brass band set the pace, and Coxey’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Mamie, dressed as the goddess of freedom, aroused continuous cheers from the 15,000 to 30,000 spectators. When the procession reached the end of Pennsylvania Avenue, it encountered a phalanx of policemen, barring access to the Capitol. The parade turned aside; but Coxey, Browne, and another lieutenant bolted over a low wall and made a rush for the Capitol steps, with the mounted police in hot pursuit. Coxey was quickly captured, but a riot broke out in which the mounted officers attacked the crowd, injuring fifty or more people.

In the end, Coxey’s crusade ended in a whimper. He was sentenced to twenty days in jail for walking on the grass; subsequently he received a hearing before a House subcommittee presided over by William Jennings Bryan, but a bill embodying his plan was quickly buried. Remnants of the various armies—perhaps 1,200 men— camped around Washington during the summer and were finally dispersed in August.

An indomitable man, Coxey became a perpetual candidate for public office after the failure of his crusade. Between 1894 and 1943 he ran for the governorship of Ohio, for the House of Representatives, the Senate, and for the presidency —at various times as a Populist, Farmer-Laborite, Democrat, or Republican. In 1931 he finally won election as mayor of Massillon, on his old financial platform, but was defeated in his first bid for reelection in 1934. He also continued to lobby for his program and occasionally managed to have it introduced as a bill in Congress. He led a second small march to Washington in 1914— this time he succeeded in speaking from the steps of the Capitol—and threatened to regroup his industrial armies shortly after World War I and in 1928. On May Day 1944, at the age of ninety, he again spoke on Capitol Hill, drawing a small crowd of people to whom he boasted that he was finishing the address he had begun fifty years before. Coxey died of a stroke in Massilon at the age of ninety-seven.

Many historians consider Coxey a crank, but his movement was actually a spontaneous reaction to the depression of 1893-94, and his ideas drew from the populism of that era. His political style often subjected him to ridicule, however. In 1897 he toured the country, lecturing in a large tent that he transported on a red, white, and blue boxcar with his platform painted on the side. In 1935 he financed a political campaign by selling a patent medicine—Cox-E-Lax—from the back of a truck. His proposal that the government sponsor and finance public works no longer seems dangerously radical, but his monetary ideas were no more sound than most of the financial panaceas of his era. More than anything else, Coxey was a symbol of a recurrent problem inherent in industrial capitalism— unemployment—and of the striving of the worker to realize the American dream.

A sampling of Coxey’s publications can be found at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, the State Historical Society of Iowa, and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. The definitive work on Jacob Coxey is D. L. McMurry, Coxey’s Army: A Study of the Industrial Army Movement of 1894 (1929). Included in the large body of contemporary literature on the movement are S. Austen, “Coxey’s Commonweal Army,” Chautauquan, June 1894; A. Doty, “The Menace of Coxism,” North American Review, June 1898; and H. Frank, “The Crusade of the Unemployed,” Arena, July 1894. The novelist Jack London marched with Kelly’s army and left several memoirs of his experiences, including “A Jack London Diary: Tramping with Kelly Through Iowa,” Palimpsest, May 1926, and “The March of Kelly’s Army,” Cosmopolitan, October 1907. See also P. S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 2 (1955) and The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 5 (1977). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, May 19, 1951.