Coxey's Army and the 1894 March of the Unemployed on Washington

On May 1, 1894, a prosperous businessman from Massillon, Ohio, who owned a sandstone quarry and bred trotting horses, climbed over a low wall at the edge of the United States Capitol grounds and tried to make his way to the steps. Jacob Coxey was forty years old, wore a business suit and carried a speech in his pocket. Behind him, outside the grounds, stood a few hundred ragged men who had followed him on foot from Ohio, and a crowd of thousands of Washingtonians who had come to watch. Coxey had a demand to put before Congress: that the federal government hire the unemployed to build roads and public works during the worst depression the country had yet known. He never got to read it. Capitol police stopped him on the steps, pushed him back through the crowd and arrested him. Mounted officers waded into the onlookers with clubs. A few days later a court convicted Coxey and two of his lieutenants of walking on the Capitol lawn and carrying banners on the grounds, and sentenced them to twenty days in jail. The speech he had meant to read was printed in newspapers instead. For a while, that seemed to be the end of it.

In short: Coxey's Army was the first national march on Washington, a protest by the unemployed during the Depression of 1893 to demand federal public works jobs. It was mocked, its leader was jailed on a technicality, and it won nothing at the time. But its central idea, that the national government should put people to work when the private economy will not, became policy in the New Deal and is still being argued over.

A depression without a safety net

To see why anyone would walk from Ohio to Washington, you have to picture the country in 1894. The Panic of 1893 had begun with railroad failures and a run on gold, and it cascaded into thousands of business and bank failures. Unemployment soared. There were no official national statistics then, and historians' later estimates differ, but all of them put joblessness well into double digits, the worst the industrial economy had seen.

What did an out-of-work American have to fall back on in 1894? Almost nothing that was public. There was no unemployment insurance, no Social Security, no federal relief of any kind. Cities and private charities ran soup kitchens and woodyards where men could chop wood for a meal. Some towns put up the homeless in police station lobbies. Most thinking in Washington held that the federal government had neither the duty nor the constitutional power to help, and that depressions were natural events that had to run their course.

President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, was a firm believer in the gold standard and in limited government. His administration's main response to the panic was to protect the Treasury's gold reserve, which included a deal with a syndicate of bankers led by J. P. Morgan in 1895. That deal, whatever its merits for the currency, became a symbol of a government that would rescue bankers and not the jobless.

The idea behind the march

Coxey was an unlikely radical. He was a businessman who had done well, and his program was more about money than about revolution. He had become convinced that the depression was caused by a shortage of currency, a view shared by many Populists and by the "greenback" movement that wanted the government to issue paper money not backed by gold. He even named one of his sons Legal Tender.

From that theory he built two proposals. The first, which he called the Good Roads Bill, would have the Treasury issue a large sum in new paper money to pay unemployed men to build and improve the country's roads, which were often terrible, at a set daily wage for an eight-hour day. The second would allow towns and counties to issue bonds, without interest, that the federal government would buy with new currency, to pay for local public works like schools, courthouses and markets.

Set aside the monetary theory for a moment, which economists would argue about for generations. The core of the plan was this: when private employers will not hire, the public should, and the work should leave behind something the community needs. That idea was heresy in 1894.

Coxey had a partner who supplied the theater. Carl Browne was a California agitator, a former cartoonist and a showman, who dressed in a buckskin coat and favored a mystical vocabulary. He named the march the Commonweal of Christ and talked about a reincarnated collective soul of the marchers. Newspapers loved it, in the sense that they found it hilarious. The press called the group Coxey's Army, and the name stuck.

The march and the "armies"

The Commonweal left Massillon on Easter Sunday, March 25, 1894, with about a hundred men and a scattering of reporters, some of whom outnumbered the marchers on certain days. It crossed Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland, gathering recruits and losing them, camping in fields and sometimes being fed by towns along the way. Some local officials treated the marchers as a menace; others, especially in mining and mill towns hit hard by the depression, welcomed them with food and lodging.

Coxey's was not the only army. Across the West that spring, groups of unemployed men organized "industrial armies" and set out for Washington. They were often stranded far from home, many of them miners and railroad workers who had been laid off. Some, in their desperation, commandeered freight trains. Federal marshals and, in some cases, soldiers chased them across the plains. Most of the western armies never reached the capital.

One of the young men who rode along with an army that spring was an eighteen-year-old from Oakland named Jack London. He joined a contingent from California under a printer named Charles Kelley, which traveled east by freight car and, after the railroads stopped cooperating, by homemade boats down the rivers of the Midwest. London drifted away from the army before it got anywhere near Washington, rode the rails on his own, and was jailed for vagrancy in upstate New York. He later wrote about the experience, and about the men he met, in a book of road sketches. The writer who would become one of the most famous socialists in America got part of his education as a jobless kid in an army of the jobless.

The ones who did reach Washington found a city braced for trouble. Police were reinforced. Newspapers warned of an invasion of tramps. Congress was not interested in hearing from them. The march arrived at the end of April and set up camp, and on May 1 Coxey made his attempt on the Capitol steps.

Arrested for the lawn

The charge was the kind of detail that tells you a great deal. Coxey was not prosecuted for any act of violence or threat; there had been none on his side. He was convicted under a law that forbade parading or displaying banners on the Capitol grounds and walking on the grass. Browne was arrested too, after a scuffle with police.

Many Americans who did not support Coxey's ideas noticed the irony. Lobbyists for railroads, banks and tariff-protected industries walked the Capitol's halls every day. The unemployed could not walk on its lawn. Some newspapers said so plainly.

Here it is worth giving the other side its due. The authorities of the time believed, with some reason, that a mass of hungry, organized men in the capital was dangerous, and the western armies' seizure of trains gave them evidence. Some feared that if Congress yielded to a crowd, it would be governed by crowds. That is not a foolish concern; it is a version of an argument that every government makes about every protest. The answer that later generations settled on, in law and in practice, is that peaceful assembly and petition are rights rather than favors, and that the response to a crowd should be to hear it and protect it rather than to club it. That answer took decades to win.

The camp stayed in the Washington area for some weeks and slowly dissolved. Some marchers went home; some were arrested for vagrancy; the remainder were sent away by Maryland and Virginia authorities over the summer.

The same year, a bigger strike

The march was soon overshadowed. In the spring and summer of 1894, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company outside Chicago struck after wage cuts that were not matched by cuts in the rents they paid in the company town. The American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, called a boycott of Pullman cars that spread across much of the national rail network. The Cleveland administration obtained a sweeping federal injunction against the strikers and sent federal troops to Chicago over the objections of Illinois's governor, John Peter Altgeld. The strike was broken. Debs went to jail, where he read socialist literature and came out a socialist.

The two events of 1894 taught the same lesson from different directions. The federal government had powerful tools and was willing to use them, against workers and against the unemployed. It was not yet willing to use them for those groups.

How the idea came back

Coxey kept at it. He ran for office repeatedly, under different party labels, and was elected mayor of Massillon during the Great Depression. In 1932 he ran for president as a minor-party candidate. On May 1, 1944, fifty years to the day after his arrest, he was finally allowed to deliver his speech from the Capitol steps, at the age of ninety. Few people were listening, and it no longer mattered, because by then much of the country had already done what he had asked.

The New Deal built public works on a scale Coxey could hardly have imagined. The Civilian Conservation Corps, created in 1933, put young men to work on forests, parks and erosion control. The Public Works Administration financed large projects like dams and bridges. The Works Progress Administration, launched in 1935, employed millions of people over its lifetime building roads, schools, airports, sewers and parks, and also paid artists, writers and actors. Many of those roads and buildings are still in use. The idea that the national government should hire the jobless to build the country, which had been treated as lunacy in 1894, had become federal policy within forty years.

Historians debate how much credit to give Coxey himself. The New Deal had many fathers, and the depth of the 1930s collapse, far beyond what came before, did more to change minds than any march. But it is fair to say that Coxey and his followers kept alive an argument that respectable opinion had dismissed, and that the march on Washington, as a form of politics, began with them. Every later march, of veterans in 1932, of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, owes something to the precedent of a few hundred men who walked from Ohio.

The argument has not ended

Here is the case the critics make today, stated fairly. Government jobs programs can be slow to start, prone to political favoritism and expensive per job created. Some economists argue that cash support or tax credits reach people faster than public works, and that building projects take years to plan and approve. Those are serious points. Anyone who has watched a highway or transit project take a decade to get through permitting knows that the capacity to build quickly has eroded, and progressives have sometimes made it worse by layering review on review.

The case for public works, though, has also been tested repeatedly. During recessions, public spending that hires people directly puts money in workers' hands and leaves behind roads, broadband and water systems. The bipartisan infrastructure law signed in 2021 was in part an argument in Coxey's spirit, though built for a full-employment economy rather than a depression. Our page on the safety net follows the current fights over jobs, benefits and the programs that cushion a downturn, and the page on protest and resistance follows the marches of our own time.

I think the deepest point of the Coxey story is not economic. It is about who gets heard. In 1894 the unemployed could not get through the door of the Capitol, while the interests that had a stake in keeping things as they were walked in every day. That gap has never fully closed. The tools for narrowing it are more powerful now than they were for a quarry owner from Massillon.

What you can do

• Tell Congress what you think about jobs and public investment. Type your address into our representatives page and it returns your U.S. representative, your two senators and your state legislators, how to phone or write to each, and how they voted most recently.
• Comment on federal rules that shape the safety net. Agencies must read public comments before finalizing a rule. Our public comment page shows which federal rules are open right now, sorted so the ones closing first come first and grouped by issue, along with advice on writing a comment that counts.
• See where wages stand today. Our inequality page charts the wealth shares of the top 1% and bottom 50%, real wages and the minimum wage over time.
• Help the people out of work near you. Food banks and legal aid groups are listed by state in the organizations directory. Volunteer a shift or give.