Jacob Coxey was the most unlikely man to be branded a revolutionary. In 1894, Coxey, a farmer and small businessman, led an “army,” the “Commonweal of Christ,” to Washington, DC. Part of his message to Congress asserted that, “Up these steps the lobbyists of trusts and corporations have passed unchallenged on their way to committee rooms, access to which we, the representatives of the toiling wealth-producers have been denied.” Coxey’s “Address of Protest,” though reflecting the economic depression of the early 1890s, might well have been written for other similar times in American history.
Coxey’s Army Marches from Ohio to Washington’s Capitol Building
In 1894 the American nation was suffering from massive unemployment. John Hay, the future Secretary of State, estimated that as many as two million Americans were jobless although other estimates were as high as three million. The 1890 federal census counted over 62 million Americans. Many of those unemployed roamed the countryside as tramps and beggars.
When Coxey first proposed his march, observers predicted that his army would be comprised of these same beggars, but that would not be the case. Many of those that joined his cause were farmers and jobless workingmen. Coxey himself was a mild-mannered family man, a devout Christian, and, as historian Page Smith characterized him, the “classic American type.”
