Industrial Armies

INDUSTRIAL ARMIES. During March and April 1894, the unemployed organized several “industrial armies” in response to the Great Depression, which had begun the previous June. By massing on Capitol Hill, they hoped to pressure Congress into enacting public-works measures designed to provide temporary jobs.

Jacob Coxey (1854–1951), a wealthy quarry owner from Massillon, Ohio, led the most publicized contingent and thereby gave his name to a movement that at its peak numbered a dozen major “armies” and twice as many smaller ones. Although only 300 marchers 6,000 thousand members and many times that number of sympathizers.

An estimated 30,000 people gathered to watch Coxey’s band march down Pennsylvania Avenue. Several sympathizers clashed with police when they prevented Coxey from speaking on the Capitol steps. Police later arrested Coxey, his associate Carl Browne, and Christopher Columbus Jones, leader of the Philadelphia contingent, and charged them with carrying banners on the Capitol grounds in violation of an act of Congress. They each spent twenty days in jail. The “petition in boots” failed to move Congress, but because of extensive press coverage the industrial army movement dramatized the plight of America’s jobless as nothing before had done.

In 1891 Coxey had conceived a program of hiring the unemployed to improve the nation’s roads. The American Federation of Labor endorsed the plan at its 1893 convention. The idea of marching the jobless to Capitol Hill to dramatize Coxey’s program originated with Carl Browne, a Californian who met Coxey at a reform congress in Chicago during the summer of 1893. Coxey and Browne spent the following winter in Massillon planning the march. During that time Coxey proposed that Congress issue non-interest-bearing bonds to finance his public-works program.

The novelty of the crusade attracted a phenomenal amount of press coverage. More reporters traveled to Massillon for the start of Coxey’s march than covered major party political conventions. Before the protesters reached Washington some major dailies devoted six of their seven front-page columns to the march. Some reporters called it the biggest story since the Civil War. Without question the press manipulated news of the march to create a maximum amount of entertainment and suspense. This was not yet yellow journalism, but in its tendency to sensationalize the march, press coverage revealed a distinct yellowish tinge.

News of Coxey’s crusade gave rise to numerous imitators among the jobless of the Midwest and Far West, where the largest contingents formed. Armies numbering from five hundred to a thousand men arose spontaneously in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Spokane, Salt Lake City, and Denver. Smaller contingents from places like Reno, Butte, and Omaha joined forces with West Coast armies as they made their way east.
Marchers from the Far West expected to obtain cheap or free rail transportation to Capitol Hill. Failing that, they simply took and operated the trains themselves. Some fifty major and minor incidents of train stealing took place. Sensational chases occurred in Montana, Oregon, Idaho, and California when federal marshals and the U.S. Army sought to recapture trains stolen by industrial armies. US attorney general Richard Olney worked closely with railroad and state officials to crush the movement throughout the West. In Idaho, for example, federal officials constructed a special prison camp to deter armies traveling east from Oregon and Washington. Such deterrents, together with declining press coverage after May Day and growing interest in the Pullman strike, ended the industrial army movement.
The press labeled the protesters “industrials,” “Coxeyites,” and “Commonwealers,” the latter name deriving from Carl Browne’s official title for the movement: “The Commonweal of Christ.” Reporters also portrayed the protest in military terms. They invariably described marchers as belonging to armies and regiments and bestowed on Coxey the rank of general, although he originally avoided martial terminology.

Almost all marchers were men, but in several places women formed auxiliary units and at least two women served as “generals.” These were Carlotta Cantwell, who led the combined Tacoma-Spokane army after her husband abandoned the men in Montana, and Anna Smith, who headed an army of California marchers.

One of those who joined the movement was Jack London, who accompanied a California contingent from Reno to the Mississippi River and recorded his experiences in a diary. Mother Jones encouraged marchers in the Kansas City area.

Upon his release from prison, Coxey returned to Ohio. He campaigned for public office often—distinguishing himself primarily as an indefatigable monetary reformer—and lost, with the exception of being elected mayor of Massillon in 1931. He repeated his march on Washington in 1914, and this time spoke legally from the Capitol steps. On 1 May 1944, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the great march, he again mounted the steps of the Capitol and with the permission of Speaker Sam Rayburn and Vice President Henry Wallace completed the protest speech he had attempted to give there in 1894. It was a measure of how times had changed that after the New Deal, his speech hardly seemed radical.

Alexander, Benjamin F. Coxey’s Army: Popular Protest in the Gilded Age. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.

Etulain, Richard W., ed. Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1979.

McMurry, Donald L. Coxey’s Army: A Study of the Industrial Army Movement of 1894. (1929). Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968.

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

Schwantes, Carlos. Coxey’s Army: An American Odyssey. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.