General Coxey fights on

WAYNE GARD

A once colourful American figure stages a comeback in the public news after a thirty-eight year lapse

The jobless and tattered veterans who have been trailing home from Washington after their futile bonus raid of last June have added another romantic line to the chronicles of America. At the barbecues and in the speakeasies, old-timers are comparing the bonus march to that of General Coxey, more than a generation back. On both occasions, marchers commandeered freight trains and other means of transport, and in each case the purpose was to camp about the Capital with the hope of scaring Congress into enacting unsound legislation.

Not all of those who recall Coxey's march are aware, however, that "the General" of thirty-eight years ago is still alive and active. Yet at seventy-eight he is almost as vigorous as ever. As the presidential candidate of the Farmer-Labor Party, he is stumping the country again and is seeking to take advantage of economic conditions to gain support for his moth-eaten plan for "money at cost."

Indeed, no depression would be complete without General Coxey. In the Populist days of the early'nineties, when his name became a by-word, thousands faced hunger without even the unctuous consolations of a Walt Gifford, farmers were being told to "quit raising corn and begin raising Hell," and orators from the silver states of the West were preparing the populace for Bryan's vision of humanity crucified on a cross of gold.

Today, when even more men are looking for work and when farmers, ruined by two-bit wheat, are threatening to tear up the railroad tracks, Coxey is finding a new audience. After failing to capture the Republican nomination for the presidency, the veteran Greenbacker is now campaigning vigorously as the head of a minor ticket, and there are many to listen. In a day when the monetary system is being blamed for all the nation's economic ills, people give ear to any promise of remedy, no matter how fantastic.

Calling upon the name of Abraham Lincoln—also invoked by such diverse politicians as Hoover, Brookhart, and Alfalfa Bill —he is still a consistent, if misguided, advocate of the money inflation he sought in that fargone day when he named an infant son Legal lender Coxey. His "money at cost" plan would have the federal government issue irredeemable paper money to be secured by non-interest bearing bonds deposited by states and cities and towns. The communities which received the paper money in exchange for their bonds would be expected to use it upon public improvements. Thus, Coxey believes, unemployment would be relieved and prosperity restored.

This plan, which gained its sponsor the name of "Greenback" Coxey, may appear more plausible now than in 1928, when Andy Mellon condemned it as "a fiat-money scheme" which would upset the entire economic adjustment of the country, "beginning with inflated prices, followed by a period of falling prices, with attendant business depression and other economic ills," What a perfect alibi Andy would have had for the last two and a half years if Congress had enacted the Coxey bill, which was approved by a sub-committee of the House in the year in which his statement was made!

The Coxey plan is as much a wildcat scheme now as it ever was, but in a period in which even many of the Gilt Edge boys are calling for a mild and carefully guarded inflation to relieve the credit strain that results from hoarding, it may draw new followers to the general's banner. At any rate, Coxey is determined to make the most of the chance which business depression and financial tension have given him. Despite his seventy-eight years and his duties as mayor of Massillon, Ohio, he has started out on a rousing campaign.

Scarcely an iota of the "money at cost" plan has been altered since Coxey began advocating it in the year in which he became "the General." At that time, Coxey, whose front name is Jacob Sechler, was a prosperous sand merchant in Massillon and the owner of a Kentucky stock farm on which he raised horses worth up to forty thousand dollars each. But he sympathized with the underdog and, like many people today, he was convinced that he had found a cure-all for business ills.

That colorful episode which has helped to enliven school histories for more than a generation, Coxey's march to Washington, came in the spring of 1894, after a winter of extreme financial depression, accompanied by general unemployment and desperate privation. In Chicago, five thousand people had been given relief during the cold weather; in New York, the World had distributed more than a million loaves of bread, and the Herald had handed out thousands of dollars worth of clothing. In hundreds of cities, public buildings and churches had been used for relief purposes; and in some communities, paving and sewer construction had been undertaken to give temporary work to hungry men. Conservative citizens were terrified by fear of a revolution.

When he decided to take to Congress a "petition in boots," Coxey was forty years old and well heeled. He had been born in a log cabin in Pennsylvania, but in the business of preparing sand for steel and glass works he had accumulated $200,000. a fair fortune for that day. A congenital reformer, he had abandoned the Democratic party for Populism and the Episcopal faith for that of Theosophy. Nine years earlier, he had made a futile race for the state senate.

The purpose of Coxey's Army of the Commonweal, sometimes referred to as the Army of Peace or the Industrial Army, w-as to march to Washington and. by its presence in the city, to impress Congress with the urgency of immediate relief from unemployment. Coxey claimed that he represented sixty-six million people and that he would lead to the capital an army of 100.000 men.

In the crusade to which his name has become attached, Coxey was only one of various leaders. Divisions of the Commonweal army were organized in many sections of the country. Although probably not more than five thousand men were on the march at any given time, the total membership of the many groups amounted to several times this number. Coxey's, though one of the smaller divisions, was the only one to reach Washington.

On a chilly Easter morning, the Coxey contingent marched bravely out of Massillon, with a scant hundred "soldiers," augmented by almost half as many newspapermen. At the head of the procession, a Negro colorbearer carried an American flag; and behind him, on one of Coxey's stallions, rode Marshal Carl Browne in boots and buckskins. Then followed several mounted aides and a trumpeter, General Coxey in his phaeton, and the tattered marchers, few of whom had overcoats or gloves to protect them from the piercing wind. Last came the commissary wagons, the band wagon and the newspaper reporters.

For five weeks the footsore marchers tramped eastward, passing through Pittsburgh and clambering over icy mountains. The leaders maintained good order. The army "borrowed" no freight trains, as did some of the northwestern contingents, and farmers' henroosts generally were safe. For food, the commissary depended upon the charity of towns along the way. Many people were sympathetic with Coxey's aims, and others were anxious to speed his men on their way to prevent their becoming a permanent encumbrance. Recruits were found at many places, and by the time the army reached the District of Columbia, its membership had grown to five hundred.

As the Coxeyites neared Washington, with forty other divisions hastening toward the same goal, citizens of the Capital became apprehensive. Although Representative John R. Davis of Kansas moved to provide work for the men at government expense and William V. Allen, Populist Senator from Nebraska, introduced a resolution welcoming them to Washington, the general attitude was one of dread.

Watched by ten thousand people, Coxey and his men marched into Brightwood Park. On ihe next day—the last day of April— Coxey let his followers rest in Camp Ceorge Washington and made arrangements for a May Day parade. He also called on the vice-president and on the speaker of the House, requesting permission to hold a meeting on the Capitol steps, but failed to get a definite consent from either.

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The Coxey parade drew more speclators than even the presidential inaugurations of that era. There were two bands, two goddesses of peace, and Commonwealers carrying, on four-foot staves, banners bearing the motto: "Peace on earth, good will to men, but death to interest on bonds." At the Capitol, however, the paraders were blocked by a solid phalanx of policemen, and Coxey was forbidden to speak. Mounted policemen with clubs charged on the marchers, and fifty people were beaten or trampled.

Coxey and two other leaders were arrested for walking on the grass and for carrying banners and were fined five dollars each and jailed for twenty days. With the leaders thus disposed of, the demoralization of the privates was easy. Fifty armed policemen from Baltimore raided the Commonweal camp at night, arresting as many men as they could find and placing them in the Maryland workhouse.

Such was the inglorious end of Coxey's first crusade. The fate of his followers naturally deterred the other armies from proceeding to Washington. The largest of these was Kelley's army, which had started from San Francisco and was then resting in DesMoines, with a nineteen-year-old youth named Jack London enlisted among its two thousand members. Only a few scattered remnants of these Western contingents ever reached Washington.

But Coxey himself wasn't discouraged. He emerged from jail a martyr and a Populist hero. He had crashed not only the newspaper headlines but the history books as well. He went hack to his sand quarry, still whooping for greenbacks, and for the thirty-eight years since then, he has been campaigning almost steadily for his original plan for "money at cost."

Back in Massillon again, Coxey immediately ran for Congress, and, although defeated, he received five times as many votes as the Populist candidate of the previous campaign. In 1897 he ran for governor, and in 1913 he appeared before a Senate committee to advocate his monetary reform. In the following year he made a second march to Washington, but without the fanfare of the first. He sought a Senate seat in 1916 and 1928, and one in the House in 1924 and 1926, with the usual result.

On several occasions he has been diverted to causes other than that of easy money. In 1919 he threatened to lead an army to Washington to protest against national prohibition, and two years later he was trying to get Eugene V. Dehs out of prison. Then, a decade ago, he wanted Uncle Sam to let him reclaim and motorize 112 of the idle ships left over from the World War. But the Greenback cause was his first love, and he returns to it after every peccadillo.

Three years ago, Coxey sold his sand business and became a professional politician. He began touring the country with an automobile caravan which carried a big tent, a portable electric plant, a troupe of entertainers and a crew of workmen. Under the canvas top, he put on his monetary sideshow in many places, particularly in the districts of members of the House committee on banking and currency.

Coxey's first victory at the polls came last November, when he was elected mayor of Massillon, a city of 25.000. Soon afterwards, he began an effort to put in force at home a modification of his battered "money at cost" scheme. Despite the frowns of hankers, he wants the city to issue $200,000 worth of bonds in the size and denominations of paper money.

These bonds would hear practically no interest—one tenth of one per cent—and. he hopes, they would circulate as currency. They would he put in circulation as wages to city employees and in payment of the city's local hills, and would he acceptable in payment of city taxes and fines. The banks might refuse them, but Coxey believes they would be accepted and kept in circulation by local merchants. He would have the city retire these bonds from tax money at the rate of four per cent a year. But whether this plan works or not, the general's faith in inflation isn't likely to he much disturbed.

Coxey has plenty of fight in him yet, though his hair is grey and his face wrinkled. The handle-bar mustache of 1894 is missing now, but the stand-up collar, the silver-rimmed spectacles and the high shoes are still in evidence. His standard speech differs but little from the one he used thirty-eight years ago, when he first set out to unhorse the coupon-clippers and to make money less elusive. He is a ghost of the Greenback era, the last of the Populists. And now that Dehs is gone, he might almost he called the last of the Utopians.

In October: How to treat Reporters, by Frederick Hazlitt Brennan