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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.