The march on Washington for civil rights led in 1963 by Martin Luther King and the famous phrase «I have a dream” that he gave in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial, are well known. What not so many people know is that almost seventy years earlier there was another march on Washington demanding social rights:it is known as the "Coxey's Army March."
The march was named after the man who had the idea and led it, Jacob Sechler Coxey. In 1893 Coxey, a resident of Massillon (Ohio), had to visit a quarry just eight kilometers from his city. The United States was at that time in the midst of an economic crisis and with a number of unemployed that was around three million people. Coxey's short journey to the quarry was made very rough by the sorry state of the roads. The one known as General Coxey He thought about how atrocious it was that the country had three million unemployed when the efforts of these people could be devoted to tasks of public utility such as the construction of roads to improve the sorry state they were in.
Back home, Coxey began to write a program to promote public works (roads, employment plans, housing construction) with state financing and through community banks. At the Universal Exhibition in Chicago in 1893 he met Carl Brown, to whom he presented his idea and who joined the project. They thought that to carry it out it was necessary to attract the attention of the public and they came up with the idea of holding a march of the unemployed on Washington; They decided that the ideal would be to arrive in the capital on May 1 and give a speech from the steps of the Capitol.
When they made their idea public, several marches were organized by unemployed groups from different parts of the country. The main party left Masillon (Coxey's residence) on March 25 and arrived in Washington on April 13. It is estimated that it was made up of around 400 people, who were joined in the capital by another approximately 2,000 unemployed (not all the marches called could arrive on time).
They requested permission for Coxey to speak May 1 at noon from the Capitol; his request was not granted but it was not denied either, so "Coxey's Army" advanced on the Capitol building and waited on a nearby street while Coxey headed up the steps of it. There, a police detachment blocked his way and expelled him without even allowing him to read a protest document. Coxey, Brown and another activist were arrested, tried for stepping on grass and damaging bushes, and sentenced to a fine of five dollars a head and twenty days in jail.
However, they managed to present a bill in which for the first time the unemployed asked the legislators to launch a public works plan to provide work in situations of high unemployment; the proposition was discussed in the House of Representatives on January 8, 1895, but was not approved.
As a culmination to this story, it should be added that in 1914 Coxey organized another march on Washington, in which he was allowed to pass through the Capitol esplanade and speak in the Senate and Congress to defend the same bill, which came to be presented without success up to eleven times in eleven different legislatures.
I became aware of the story of "Coxey's Army March" through reading the book Boxcar Bertha, Autobiography of a Sister of the Road by Ben Reitman, dedicated to the curious social movement known as hobohemia, which I discussed in the blog post dedicated to the «hobo college«. I recommend reading this work to anyone who wants to know more about these marginal and countercultural movements in the United States at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.
Image| Coxey's Army March