Background
Jacob Sechler Coxey was born on April 16, 1854 in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of Thomas Coxey, a sawmill engineer, and Mary Sechler Coxey.
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Jacob Sechler Coxey was born on April 16, 1854 in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of Thomas Coxey, a sawmill engineer, and Mary Sechler Coxey.
He received his schooling, which included one year in a private academy, in Danville, Pennsylvania, where the family moved in 1860.
At sixteen he went to work in a local iron mill and advanced to stationary engineer. He left in 1878 to go into the scrap-iron business and three years later settled in Massillon, Ohio, where he bought a sandstone quarry and founded a company providing silica sand to iron and steel mills; it remained for half a century the prospering mainstay of his business enterprises. A Democrat by heritage, Coxey had turned in 1877 to the Greenback party, the start of a lifelong devotion to the goal of a non-metal-based legal-tender currency. His active pursuit of that goal began in the depressed 1890's. Taking his cue from adherents of the new sport of bicycling, who had called attention to the wretched condition of the nation's country roads, Coxey proposed a federal road-building program, financed by $500 million in new greenbacks, to give work to the unemployed. A second and longer-lived proposal, formulated early in 1894, sought to aid the urban jobless and prevent future depressions by authorizing state and local governments to borrow federal funds (in greenbacks) to finance public works, giving as security non-interest-bearing bonds. Coxey's initial efforts to publicize his plans met with scant success.
He met his ally at a free-silver meeting in Chicago in 1893--Carl Browne, a Californian who had been at various times a rancher, carnival barker, cartoonist, labor editor, and Greenbacker and who affected the dress and style of Buffalo Bill. It was Browne who conceived the idea of a "petition in boots, " a march of jobless men to Washington to seek enactment of Coxey's two proposals. At Coxey's insistence, Massillon was chosen as the starting point. The march had been well publicized, and Coxey hoped for a turnout of thousands, but only about a hundred workers and farmers set forth on a cold Easter Sunday, accompanied by some forty newspaper reporters. Carl Browne as marshal led the line of march on horseback, followed by Coxey in a carriage. Officially the "Commonweal of Christ, " the group was dubbed by the newspapers "Coxey's army, " with Coxey as "General, " a title he carried for the rest of his life. The marchers covered about fifteen miles a day and slept at night on straw under a small circus tent (Coxey and Browne put up at hotels). Although supply wagons carried some provisions, the men relied mainly on donated food, sometimes from nervous local authorities eager to speed them on their way, more often from welcoming committees of trade unionists and Populists. Making its way across Ohio to Pittsburgh and thence over the Alleghenies into Maryland, the orderly "army, " by then numbering nearly 500, reached the outskirts of Washington at the end of April. Other "industrial armies, " inspired by Coxey's, were also heading for Washington, particularly from California and the West. To traverse the vast expanses of mountains and plains they sometimes commandeered whole trains. Their militancy, combined with contemporary fears of the tramp, contributed to the tense reaction in Washington when Coxey and his followers marched toward the Capitol on May 1. Leaving his men peaceably in rank outside the grounds, Coxey and two of his lieutenants made their way to the Capitol steps, where Coxey sought to speak. The three were arrested, sentenced to twenty days in jail for carrying "banners" (Coxey's a mere badge on his lapel), and fined for walking on the grass. Although Coxey's and other arriving armies remained encamped near Washington until August, Congress, true to the nation's dominant laissez-faire philosophy, made no move to aid the unemployed. Coxey's good-roads bill, introduced by Populist Senator William A. Peffer, progressed no farther than an adverse committee report. Yet Coxey had uniquely publicized the plight of the jobless. He probably contributed, as well, to the surge of labor support that carried the national Populist vote to its highest level in 1894.
He himself ran for Congress on the party's ticket that fall, drawing a respectable 21 percent of the vote. For the rest of his long life Coxey combined business affairs with periodic new attempts to promote currency expansion through non-interest-bearing bonds. The high point of his influence came in the recession of 1927-1928, when his proposal fell only one vote short of a favorable report from a House committee; but the New Deal years found him only a minor figure in the neo-Populist left. To help publicize his aims, Coxey repeatedly ran for office, on a variety of tickets.
His only success came in 1931, when at seventy-seven--two years after retiring from business--he won election as mayor of Massillon as a Republican. Deadlock with a more orthodox city council blocked his goals of a municipal water system and a non-interest bond issue to finance public works, and he failed to be renominated in 1933. He had meanwhile persuaded a splinter Farmer-Labor convention in 1932 to endorse his bond plan and had become its candidate for president. He was renominated in 1936 but withdrew in favor of the Union party's William Lemke.
Coxey's health weakened only a few months before his death in Massillon at the age of ninety-seven. At his death he was a historical survival, an apostle of simple, homespun reform in an era of economic complexity.
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A mild-mannered man of sober mien, Coxey lacked eloquence or charisma. Although stubbornly persistent in his reform vision, Coxey was not rigid or puritanical.
He married Caroline Ammerman in October 1874. On September 8, 1890, he married Henrietta Sophia Jones, who had worked as a maid in his home. He had three sons and one daughter--who eloped with Carl Browne in 1895--by his first marriage and four children, one named Legal Tender, by his second.
