SYMHC Classics: Coxey's Army

This 2020 episode covers the first protest march on Washington, D.C., led by Jacob Sechler Coxey in the 1890s. His plan was job creation for the nation's unemployed population with projects that would build the country's infrastructure.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, we got an email from listener Kiki, a
high school history teacher, who alerted us to an error
in our Great Episootic of eighteen seventy two episode. Now
this is my words, not Kiki's. Kiki was very kind,
but the paragraph about how the Epizootic might have contributed
to the Panic of eighteen seventy three is kind of
an incomprehensible mess. The Panic of eighteen seventy three happened

(00:27):
before historical things we talked about it possibly being connected
to like the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the failure
of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. Somewhere along the way,
I had muddled up the Panic of eighteen seventy three
with the Panic of eighteen ninety three. There were bank
failures railroad bankruptcies in eighteen seventy three, just not the

(00:49):
ones I specifically wrote into the episode. So my apologies
were that very embarrassing error. This does give us an
opportunity to bring back an episode about something related to
the Panic of eighteen ninety three, and that is Coxy's Army,
which was in eighteen ninety four protest march by unemployed
workers on Washington d C. This originally came out on

(01:11):
August twelfth, twenty twenty, So enjoy Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and
welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

(01:32):
So in the midst of today's very bananas world, which
I think we have both talked about a lot, has
been informing our choices of topics lately, and which is
involving this constant news cycle of economic instability and protests
and those things being hashed and rehashed and discussed for
their various merits and lack thereof in some cases. I

(01:55):
got to thinking about earlier protests and wanting to talk
more about those and specific the first protest march on Washington, DC,
and that is the story of Coxy's Army, and it
is one that's been requested a lot of times. It's
really easy when you look at the facts of it
to see why it is so compelling to people and
why people request it because in addition to parallels to

(02:16):
our current situation, there are also just a lot of
really fascinating details in the mix. So today's the day,
and we're covering Jacob Coxy and what came to be
known colloquially as Coxy's Army. Yes, I feel like this
one has been on both of our lists at points. Yeah,
because so many people have asked for it. So we've

(02:37):
talked on the show before about the Panic of eighteen
ninety three and the economic crash that came along with it.
Railroad overbuilding that was financed through just really unfound lending
practices had caused a lot of railroads to go under,
and then that coupled with a run on the gold supply,
the country was plunged into what amounted to a financial freefall.

(02:57):
Those are obviously broad strokes, but since we have covered
this many many times before, were just doing the light
touch version. But as a result of that panic, five
hundred banks closed across the country and fifteen thousand businesses
shut their doors for the last time, and seventy four railroads,
which had been a huge economic driver in a lot

(03:18):
of places, ceased operations. And this was of course all
happening before things like unemployment insurance. So workers that had
come into the labor market in a new industrial age
and were prepared to work in that industrial age suddenly
had no work, and they also had no safety net.
President Grover Cleveland continued his anti welfare stance that he

(03:41):
had held for a long time. We talked about this
earlier on in our episode about Grover Cleveland's secret surgery.
But in short, he thought that this rush to embrace
silver with the Sherman Silver Purchase Act had been a
woeful misstep economically. He thought there needed to be a
course correction, and he also felt really strongly that financial

(04:01):
assistance for the country's common man was just not the
business of the government. In eighteen eighty seven, during his
first term, he had vetoed a bailout for Texas farmers
who were trying to get through a drought, and he
wrote this as part of the veto. I can find
no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and
I do not believe that the power and duty of

(04:24):
the General Government ought to be extended to the relief
of individual suffering, which is in no manner properly related
to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to
disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should,
I think, be steadfastly resisted to the end that the
lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support

(04:46):
the government, the government should not support the people. That's
a whole bag of weasels to unpack. Chicago during this
time reported an uptick in crime, not because people turn
to crime as a way to make an illicit living
in desperation, but because they wanted desperately to get arrested.

(05:07):
Jail or prison, which offered shelter and regular meals, was
preferable to the streets in a Chicago winter. And other
cities also wrestled with similar problems and how to manage
a population that was losing its housing and ultimately completely
losing stability. Of course, everyone wanted things to improve, but
not many thought a way to get through this turbulent time.

(05:29):
And that is where we get to Jacob Coxy, who
came up with a novel plan. So at the center
of this story is this man, Jacob Seckler Coxy and
Coxy was the son of a sawmill engineer named Thomas Coxy.
Jacob was born in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania on April sixteenth, eighteen
fifty four, and the loghouse he was born in actually

(05:49):
now bears a historical marker When Jacob was six, the
family moved to Danville, Pennsylvania, where his father started working
in an iron mill. Jacob completed nine years of school
before going to work when he was sixteen, also at
a mill, serving as the water boy. He worked his
way up through various positions over the next eight years.
When he was twenty, he married a young woman named

(06:12):
Caroline Amherman, and the two of them had four children together.
Coxey voted for the first time during this stage of
his life in the eighteen seventy six election, at the
age of twenty two. Over the years, he would switch
political parties multiple times, and he was a member of
the Greenback Party at one point he even organized its Danville,
Pennsylvania chapter. He moved on to work with his uncle

(06:34):
in a scrap metal business in eighteen seventy eight, and
it was while on a business trip for this job
in eighteen eighty one that he first visited Maslin, Ohio.
He decided he would like to move there, and that
was really the end of his scrap metal career. He
sold his interest in the business and his next move
was to purchase a sandstone quarry in Maslin and convert
it into a crushing mill to process silica sand. He

(06:58):
also purchased a farm where he would even eventually start
breeding horses in the eighteen eighties when he became interested
in racing, and between the quarry and his fancy stock
horse breeding, he was able to build a really nice
living for himself. Coxey was also really interested in politics
and the economy, and even before the Panic of eighteen
ninety three, he was aware of the problems that were

(07:20):
facing laborers in the US. This was things that he
gave a great deal of thought to you, and allegedly
a moment of inspiration led to the reform idea that
would make him famous. Yeah, just for clarity, like, even
before the Panic, there were economic downturn effects happening, and
there were labor shortages already. But the story of his

(07:43):
inspiration goes that as he was traveling home one day,
he noticed that the road that he was on was
in really sorry shape. According to a write up in
The Chautauquin in eighteen ninety four, this was the result
of an especially problematic mud hole in the road that
hampered his progress. And after he got out of the
mud hole and started thinking about how they really needed

(08:05):
to fix that roadway and they needed better roadways in general.
He put together the idea that the many people who
were out of work could be given jobs fixing the
roads throughout the state. He started putting these ideas to
paper in eighteen ninety one, and he wrote the Coxi
Plan for Business and Unemployment Relief, How the State of
Ohio and its subdivisions can help themselves. Coxy's idea evolved

(08:30):
into what he called his Good Roads Bill. It called
for fair wages and an eight hour work day to
achieve both prosperity for the common man and better public works.
And the Good Roads Bill was no small potatoes in
terms of its ambition and its scope. This was a
five hundred million dollar plan. Yeah, it transitioned from being
just about Ohio over the years to being a national

(08:52):
effort on his part. And that five million dollars that
he was talking about was to come from the Treasury
in the form of non interest bareing bonds. He also
later on developed a second bill that ran alongside this one,
and in that one, state or city improvement projects could
deposit non interest bearing twenty five year bonds with the
Treasury and then get back the cash value of the

(09:15):
bond in paper currency minus one percent, and his thinking
was that that paper currency, then paid as wages to
the workers, was going to reinvigorate the economy. He saw
this as a benefit on a couple of different levels. One,
it would improve US infrastructure and ways that were just
desperately needed. Two, it would provide much needed relief to

(09:36):
laborers who had found themselves impoverished as the country went
through an economic depression. And his write up he noted, quote,
Congress takes two years to vote on anything. Twenty millions
of people are hungry and cannot wait two years to eat.
And he started pitching this plan in its earlier versions,
to his local politicians as well as basically anyone who

(09:57):
would stand still long enough. But he did did not
exactly get a warm reception. Initially. According to that same
rite up in the Chautauquin that I mentioned a moment
ago quote, his neighbors dubbed him crank, and his wife
secured a divorce, partly on the grounds of his craze.
A new wife was secured and the jeering neighbors ignored.
We should be very clear that this was not the

(10:19):
only reason he got a divorce. There was also a
gambling problem that was driving a wedge into his marriage
to Caroline. That gambling was part of Coxey's passionate interest
in horses. So sometimes people will use his interest in
his bills and his efforts at labor reform as the
reason his wife left him. But it's a little more

(10:39):
complicated than that. So Coxy wasn't entirely without interested listeners.
He presented his plan to the Saint Louis Populist Convention
in eighteen ninety two. It was adopted into the Ohio
Populist Party's platform that same year, but it really didn't
get much farther than that. It wasn't until eighteen ninety three, again,
while the nation was really hitting this panic, that Jacob

(11:02):
Coxy found like minded collaborators to really champion this plan
alongside him. That year, at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago,
he met a man named Carl Brown. Brown was on
assignment from San Francisco Business Weekly as an artist and
correspondent at the event. He was there to send back
reports with illustrations of what was happening. He was basically

(11:24):
like a contractor. He kind of was one of those
people that worked a lot of different jobs. He wasn't
a regular reporter for the San Francisco Business Weekly, and
Brown was also sent to the expo with a costume
suit intended to make him look like Buffalo Bill so
that he could be part of a living exhibit about
the wild West. So he was wearing a number of
different hats, both literally and figuratively. Here. Brown was a

(11:46):
big personality. He was a gifted speaker, he was a showman.
He was a jack of all trades, and he's been
described as a labor agitator. His ideas of reform, which
centered around ensuring that any able bodied person who sought
work could find it, really aligned with Coxy's. His orations
on labor reform had so irritated the leadership of Chicago

(12:06):
that the mayor kicked him out of the city. He
was not a quiet, subdued man in the least. But
Jacob Coxy saw Carl Brown's potential, and he saw that
he could be the megaphone for the Coxy plan. And
while they sort of are often described as an odd couple,
as partners, Brown and Coxy aligned on their shared vision
that something big and drastic had to be done to

(12:29):
get the country back on track. Carl came with some quirks,
though he believed and told anyone who would listen, that
Coxy was the reincarnation of Andrew Jackson. Brown had some
interesting views religiously speaking. He thought that he had absorbed
his wife's soul into his own as he sat at
her deathbed. He also thought that he and many others

(12:50):
that they eventually rallied to their cause, had absorbed the
soul of Jesus Christ, and that that was what was
driving their efforts, and that Jacob Coxy had absorbed a
significant amount of that soul. He also didn't stop wearing
that Buffalo Bill costume when the expo ended, and said
he just made it part of his personal brand. He
is really a fascinating character. As for Jacob Coxy's views

(13:14):
of all of this reincarnation talk, one reporter at the
time wrote, quote, Coxy's religious views did not prevent his
ready conversion to Brown's abortive theosophy. He does not claim
any supernatural wisdom as Brown does, but modestly poses as
the living representation of Christ because Brown says so. Though
he was an eccentric, Carl Brown was crucial to the

(13:36):
growth of Coxy's support base. He was really good at
communicating with people and gaining their trust. Carl's orations and
the desperation of the men that they were speaking to,
that was a powerful combination. Slowly they garnered a pretty
significant following, and at this point Coxy was more passionate
about his plan than ever. He was a wealthy man,

(13:57):
but his own businesses had struggled due to the pain.
He had to sell his horse farm and his crushing
mill was struggling. On December seventh, eighteen ninety three, Brown
and Coxy formed the JS Coxy Good Roads Association of
the US. Brown was the organization's secretary and Jacob Coxy was,
of course, it's president. And Coxy's eyes, one of the

(14:18):
villains that all this was the press. He felt that
all the reporting about a currency crisis had actually caused
some of the worst problems, as panicked readers that started
to hoard gold. His relationship with the press only became
more contentious as his activism became more high profile. That
something we'll get back to shortly. Yeah, it's interesting and

(14:39):
you'll you'll see it as we talk about it. But
even though Coxy has this sort of like dim view
of the press, and what they have done at various points.
It's really Carl Brown that kind of gets into it
with them. Just a few months after its founding, the
Good Roads Association was making very real progress. Senator William A. Peffer,
a populist from Kansas, was willing to introduce Coxy's to

(15:02):
bills in Congress. But this idea of getting the Federal
Reserve to print money to fix the economy didn't go
over all that well. But Coxy and Brown were just undeterred.
They attached a plan earlier in the year that was
intended to underscore their idea and make it clear to
elected officials just how much support Coxey's plan had among

(15:23):
the workingmen of the country, who were voters who were
unable to find jobs. Coxy and Brown, who was likely
the architect of this whole idea, organized a march on Washington.
This is an unemployment protest that would be too big
to be ignored. And before we dig into how that
all plays out, let's pause for a quick sponsor break.

(15:52):
So this march that we mentioned before the break was
conceived as what Coxy and Brown called a petition in boots.
They intended to gather supporters as they traveled with the
hopes of reaching Washington with a huge throng of men.
The men they had won over while still in Ohio
started their journey in Masalon on March twenty fifth, eighteen

(16:13):
ninety four, which was Easter Sunday. The residents were not
all that enthused about being a convergence point for this rally.
A lot of them believed that the participants in Coxy's
protest march were just itinerant troublemakers and they wanted them
to hurry up and get out of town quickly. This
perception would follow them throughout the whole trip. A lot
of write ups referred to Coxy's Men as just a

(16:35):
band of tramps. There were also always people who were
suspicious that they would bring lawlessness and violence as they
moved through the country. Yeah, they definitely got like a
duality reception in most places, where some people were really
genuinely enthusiastic about them and what they were trying to do,
and others were like, keep those troublemakers out of our town.

(16:56):
In the beginning, there were an estimated fifty to one
hundred participates in the march. That number varies depending on
your source and There were also forty three reporters that
marched with them, but they were of course not counted
among their numbers. These reporters were their unassignment because this
story was sensational, and in chasing that sensationalism, their coverage
was not always accurate. It also sometimes made fun of

(17:20):
the whole effort. But the important thing to Jacob Coxy
was that his march was getting national coverage. Yeah, as
I was looking for a picture to use on our
social media and stuff with this, I found a lot
of editorial cartoons satirizing Coxy in his march. Mm hmm.
The start of the march had been a show. Coxy's wife,
Henrietta Jones, Coxy, and their newborn son were at the

(17:42):
front of the parade. Coxy had named this baby Legal
Tender to show his commitment to legal tender currency as
a revitalizing force for the nation. Though there are some
accounts that Henrietta and the baby marched with the group,
that's actually a little misleading. They were part of the
procession as it was headed out of town, but they
didn't stay with the march. They arranged to meet back

(18:04):
up with Coxy at the destination of the nation's capital.
I'm still quite a trip with a five week old
baby though, Yeah, not an awesome thing to do with
the best modern conveniences in health standards, really unwise. In
the eighteen nineties, Brown had set up the structure of
this whole march. He's often really really cited as being

(18:25):
like the guy who is running the actual march, and
as we said, he was a showman. He dubbed the
march the common Wheel of Christ. He made banners and
fabric badges for the men to wear, all of which
read things like peace on Earth, goodwill toward men, but
death to interest on bonds. And these banners all had
a mix of religious symbolism and economic commentary in the

(18:47):
art I've often I've seen them described in a number
of sources as being really confusing because he was trying
to get a lot of different ideas and ideologies represented
in them, like his religious views as well as his
political views as well as issues of the economy, and
kind of blending them together, leaving some onlookers to kind
of scratch their heads. Brown continued to wear that buffalo

(19:10):
bill costume, and Coxy wore a Union Army uniform. Brown
also may have cost Coxy a lot of money. It
was reported that the bill for printing up recruitment flyers
had come to a whopping two thousand dollars that's twenty
eighteen ninety four dollars. On top of that, Coxy was
footing the bill for some of the camp supplies, although

(19:32):
they did take donations to cover most of their needs,
as particularly being food. Food turned out to be an
ongoing problem as the march played out, because in a
recession donations could be pretty sparse. The med really weren't
ever getting enough to eat. Yeah, there are lots of
descriptions of how like in some towns, you know, volunteers

(19:52):
and people that wanted to welcome them would come and
they would have brought food and prepared like these huge meals,
but like there was never enough to go around, and
so it was like, well, you might get soup one
day and only bred the next, or you might only
get two meals this day and one meal this day.
It just was not consistent. And when you think about
how much they were walking in any given day, you

(20:14):
realize that this was a very very difficult undertaking because
of all the press coverage. Though more groups had started
marching from all over the country, some as far as California,
in the hopes of joining what had at this point
colloquially come to be known as Coxy's Army. Some of
this coverage had actually started way back in January when
Coxy and Brown announced that they were planning this, And

(20:37):
to be very very clear, the reason people were so
willing to do this was because there was a lot
of desperation throughout the country at this time. This was
only the second year of what would be a four
year recession, and families were going hungry and there was
no relief on the horizon. So for a lot of men,
this seemed like the only way that they were ever

(20:57):
going to make their voices truly heard by peace people
with power, and hopefully catalyzed an improvement in their family's
quality of life. Some of them traveled in wagons, some
on horses, some were simply on foot, but all of
them had the intent that they were going to meet
up with Coxy and converge on Washington. So while there

(21:18):
were occasional deserters who probably joined up for the promise
of free meals along the way, maybe even just the
security of traveling with a group, the spots that they
left filled in behind them. As the army kept moving
through more towns, increasingly it was made up entirely of
men who were just tired of waiting for better times,
and they wanted to take some kind of action. And

(21:39):
as they traveled the press became more and more critical
of this whole operation. They started writing commentary about how
Brown's cowboy gear was an affectation, and then they started
talking about how dirty his suit and he was, and
they started calling him old greasy, which he enjoyed about
as much as you might expect. The press characterization of

(22:00):
the rest of the marchers similarly degraded over time. While
some of the accounts in the early days described the
participants as enthusiastic and idealistic, that shifted soon they were
referring to the protesters as an unwashed army. For example,
there's one early article at the start of the march
in Maslin where the New York Times reported quote, most

(22:21):
of those now here are hard looking people, but up
to the present time they have shown no disposition to
be unruly. Coxie and his lieutenants are elated and declared
that they will have ten thousand men in line when
the word forward is given. But in a story from
mid April, a few weeks into the march, the Times
first outlined how the Fife core of Coxey's army traded

(22:43):
their instruments for beer and then got arrested. The rite
up of the incident describes Coxy handling the situation well,
explaining that there would be no tolerance for that kind
of behavior and that the point of their march was
much more important than getting drunk. But then it completely
discredits him at the saying that he was made happy
when he met a fortune teller on their journey who

(23:04):
told him that he would live to be one hundred. Yeah,
when you read the flow of that particular brief article,
it's the weirdest thing because it really is like this
great portrait of like, Wow, he's really a good leader.
Like he explains to them like why they are doing
what they are doing and reminds them of the gravity
of this effort. And then they're like, oh, and then
he got all into a fortune teller for a little while.

(23:25):
It's like, oh, eventually Carl Brown got really tired of
all these jabs from reporters and he started calling them
argus eyed demons of Hell. This actually quite delighted the press.
They started a little club amongst themselves that they dubbed
the Arguside Demons, and this club even had elected officers.
But really it was mostly just about like finding a

(23:47):
good watering hole and drinking wherever they stopped for the night.
But even without the press commentary, the group was not
helping its own reputation because of the hard scrabbled nature
of their day to day survival. When Coxy in his
arrived in a town, they could basically watch the faces
of the people who greeted them fall as they saw
how ragged everyone looked. The movement sounded so robust on paper,

(24:10):
but in person it was often really disappointing, and men
who had planned to join Coxy sometimes opted out of
that plan once they saw how rough things had become.
When Coxy's army finally arrived in Washington, d C. On
May first, that was after thirty five days of walking,
it had quintupled in size, at least by some counts.
There are others that put it closer to being four

(24:32):
hundred men versus five hundred others listed as thousands, But
this gets a little bit unclear because there were multiple
groups that were starting to come together, so the numbers
shift really quickly and like in big chunks, depending on
how any given reporter defined Coxy's group, whether it was
only counting those that traveled with him and Brown specifically,

(24:54):
or whether other groups that joined up towards the end
should be part of that count. But it quickly we
got to be really pointless to try to count the
newcomers anyway, as thousands of thousands of locals had also
shown up for the march, some to support it and
some just to watch the spectacle of it. But they
were kind of all traveling in this huge throng together.
Coxy really hoped that he and his marchers would be

(25:16):
able to enact rapid change. After all, he had the
bill written and ready to go for Congress, and it read,
in part quote, be it enacted by the Senate and
House of Representatives in Congress assembled, that the Secretary of
the Treasury of the United States is hereby authorized and
instructed to have engraved and printed immediately after the passage

(25:38):
of this bill five hundred million dollars of Treasury notes,
a legal tender for all debts public and private. Said
notes to be in denominations of one dollar, two dollars,
five dollars, and ten dollars, and to be placed in
a fund to be known as the General County Road
Fund System of the United States, and to be expended
solely for said purpose. Amy Coxey, who was Jacob's seventeen

(26:02):
year old daughter from a previous marriage, joined this procession
at some point before it arrived in Washington, and when
they approached the Capitol Building, she was at the front
of the parade, dressed as the Goddess of Peace, all
in white, and she rode a white Arabian horse that
was one from Coxy's farm. Like she was intended to
be a visual harbinger of change, but maybe had a

(26:24):
primary admirer in Carl Brown, who said of the young
woman quote, I thought that she was the most beautiful
site I had ever beheld. So they had made it.
Coxy and Brown had led their band to Washington. They
were right there, ready to demand a jobs build that
they believed would help get the lives of so many
Americans back on track. But the end of Coxy's march

(26:46):
for reforms that would reinvigorate the working class and the
economy was a bit of a letdown. And we're going
to talk about their arrival at the Capitol building and
what happened there after. We first take a quick sponsor break. So,

(27:07):
when he and all of his followers had arrived in Washington,
d c. Jacob Coxy had applied for and received a
parade permit. He had also applied for a permit to
speak on the steps of the Capitol. That permit was denied.
And really, if Jacob Coxy had been paying attention and
actually accepting certain truths, he probably would have seen that coming.

(27:29):
As early as March twenty fourth, the day before the
march started, reports out of Washington had made clear that
this commonwheel or army was not going to be welcomed
by lawmakers. A report from Washington that ran in the
New York Times from March twenty fourth, thread quote, nothing
but ridicule is heard in regard to the Coxy movement
among well informed persons. Here there is not the remotest

(27:52):
prospect of any Congressional action to grant a permit for
any mob to assemble on the Capitol grounds and violate
of a specific Act of Congress. So as they got
up to the Capitol and Coxy and Brown moved through
the crowd of onlookers and police in DC. As the
parade got to their destination, the scene quickly turned frantic.

(28:14):
They had been headed for the steps that was off limits,
and the police were watching Brown, who, of course in
this nutty garbus and was very large man, stood out
in any crowd, so he was pursued by police. He
was tackled and beaten. A chant of Coxy Coxy started
among the thousands of spectators and supporters. The police, realizing

(28:37):
they had no control over the situation, panicked, and they
also turned on bystanders. They swung their clubs without regard
for who they were striking. After about fifteen minutes of mayhem,
it was over and no speeches had been given. The
headlines the next day read Coxy driven from the Capitol,
not allowed to deliver his harangue. That same story often

(28:59):
ran with another subheader that indicated that Coxy had not
even been arrested, but he and several of his associates
were in fact arrested, and they did face charges. Jacob Coxy,
Carl Brown, and Christopher Columbus Jones were all found guilty
of carrying illegal banners onto Capitol grounds. They were sentenced
to twenty days in jail a week after the rally.

(29:21):
They also had to pay a fine of five dollars
each for trespassing on the grass. Yeah, that was one
of those things. It was off limits. While the three
movement leaders Christopher Columbus Jones had come in later and
kind of served in a capacity of wrangling some of
the people on the march while they were serving out
their jail term. The men who had followed them to

(29:44):
Washington did not all disperse. They still wanted to advocate
for Coxy's plans, so they had made a camp at Bladensburg, Maryland,
and they waited the three weeks out. But most of
them at that point had moved on. And while there
really were some efforts to keep the protest in the
movement going, including a second smaller protest in which Carl

(30:04):
Brown allegedly appeared in drag as the Goddess of Liberty,
this whole thing was really over though. By mid July
even the most ardent supporters and stragglers had moved on.
After the march, Jacob Coxley had stayed heavily involved in politics.
He also expanded his business and bought a second quarry
in nineteen fourteen in Dundee, Ohio. He ran for public

(30:27):
office eleven times for various positions. He was elected mayor
of Masllon, Ohio in nineteen thirty one. This was his
only election win, and his time in office went pretty poorly.
He also spearheaded a second march on Washington in nineteen fourteen,
once again championing the cause of laborers, and he made

(30:47):
it to the Capitol and he addressed a small group
of protesters from the steps. He wasn't arrested that time,
but he also didn't have much press coverage and not
many people really seemed to care about what he was doing.
Though Coxy had been ridiculed for his ideas by a
lot of people, a lot of those same concepts were
part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, including the

(31:09):
make work projects of the nineteen thirties. On the fiftieth
anniversary of the original march on the Capitol, Jacob Coxy
was invited and finally able to give the speech on
the Capital steps that he had planned for eighteen ninety four.
Tracy and I are going to take turns reading it
because it's quite long, and this is an abridged version,
but it begins. The Constitution of the United States guarantees

(31:30):
to all citizens the right to peaceably assemble and petition
for redress of grievances, and furthermore declares that the right
of free speech shall not be abridged. We stand here
today to test these guarantees of our Constitution. Here, rather
than at any other spot on the continent, it is
fitting that we should come to mourn over our dead liberties,

(31:52):
and by our protest aroused the imperiled nation to such
action as shall rescue the Constitution and resurrect our liberty.
Upon these steps where we stand has been spread a
carpet for the royal feet of a foreign princess. Up
these steps, the lobbyists of trusts and corporations have passed
unchallenged on their way to committee rooms, access to which we,

(32:15):
the representatives of the toiling wealth producers, have been denied.
We stand here today on behalf of millions of toilers
whose petitions have been buried in committee rooms, and whose
opportunities for honest, remunerative, productive labor have been taken from
them by unjust legislation which protects idlers, speculators, and gamblers.

(32:36):
We come to remind the Congress here assembled of the
declaration of a United States senator quote that for a
quarter of a century, the rich have been growing richer,
the poor poorer, and that by the close of the
present century, the middle class will have disappeared, as the
struggle for existence becomes fierce and relentless. We are here
to petition for legislation which will furnish employment for every

(32:59):
man able and willing to work. We are engaged in
a bitter and cruel war with the enemies of all mankind,
a war with hunger, wretchedness, and despair, and we ask
Congress to heed our petitions an issue for the nation's good,
a sufficient volume of the same kind of money which
carried the country through one awful war and saved the

(33:19):
life of the nation. We have come here, through toil
and weary marches, through storms and tempests, over mountains, and
amid the trials of poverty and distress, to lay our
grievances at the doors of our national legislature, and ask them,
in the name of Him whose banners we bear, in
the name of him who plead for the poor and

(33:39):
the oppressed, that they should heed the voice of despair
and distress that is now coming up from every section
of our country, that they should consider the conditions of
the starving unemployed of our land and enact such laws
as will give them employment, bring happier conditions to the people,
and the smile of contentment to our citizens. In his
later years, Coxy continued to pursue new business endeavors as

(34:03):
well as politics. He sold a mild laxative called coxy Lax,
which he swore was the source of his longevity. He
also sold copper and zinc discs to wear inside of
shoes were supposed to help with aches and pains, and
he gave instructions out to people who wanted to make
their own. Incidentally, Carl Brown and Mame Coxy did become

(34:24):
a couple. They were married in eighteen ninety five. That
was much to Jacob Coxy's chagrin. The couple had a
son together, but that marriage did not last. Jacob's second wife, Henrietta,
died on January thirteenth, nineteen fifty one, after their child,
Legal Tender, who only lived to be seven. The couple
had three other children. They were Jacob Junior, David, and Ruth.

(34:48):
After Henrietta's death, Jacob Coxy's own health went downhill pretty quickly.
He had a stroke on May eighteenth, nineteen fifty one,
and he had lived only four months longer than his
wife did. It's some one of those eccentric and marvelous
characters in history that we don't really get all that
much information out about normally, but I both love his

(35:12):
idealism and shake my head and go, oh, ma'am, thanks
so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this
episode is out of the archive, if you heard an
email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over
the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.

(35:32):
Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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(35:54):
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