1 jan 1894 ano - Coxey's Army Marches on D.C.

Descrição:

During the severe depression of the 1890s, Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey organized unemployed men for a peaceful march to the U.S. Capitol to plead for an emergency jobs program. They called themselves the Commonweal of Christ but won the nickname “Coxey’s Army.” Though it failed to win sympathy from Congress, the army’s march on Washington — one of the nation’s first — inspired similar groups to set out from many cities. Here, Coxey’s group nears Washington, D.C. The man on horseback is Carl Browne, one of the group’s leaders and a flamboyant publicist. As the marchers entered Washington, Coxey’s seventeen-year-old daughter Mamie, dressed as the “Goddess of Peace,” led the procession on a white Arabian horse.

For Americans who had lived through the terrible 1870s, conditions looked grimly familiar. Even fresher in the public mind were recent labor uprisings, including the 1886 Haymarket violence and the 1892 showdown at Homestead — followed, during the depression’s first year, by a massive Pennsylvania coal strike and a Pullman railroad boycott that ended with bloody clashes between angry crowds and the U.S. Army. Prosperous Americans, fearful of Populism, were even more terrified that workers would embrace socialism or Marxism. Reminding Americans of upheavals such as the revolutionary Paris Commune government of 1871 and its bloody suppression, conservative commentators of the 1890s launched America’s first “Red Scare” — a precursor to similar episodes of hysteria in the 1920s and 1950s.

In the summer of 1894, a further protest jolted affluent Americans. Radical businessman Jacob Coxey of Ohio proposed that the U.S. government hire the unemployed to fix America’s roads. In 1894, he organized hundreds of jobless men — nicknamed Coxey’s Army — to march peacefully to Washington and appeal for the program. Though public employment of the kind Coxey proposed would become central to the New Deal in the 1930s, many Americans in the 1890s viewed Coxey as a dangerous extremist. Public alarm grew when more protesters, inspired by Coxey, started out from Los Angeles, Seattle, and other cities. As they marched east, these men found support and offers of aid in Populist-leaning cities and towns. In other places, police and property owners drove marchers away at gunpoint. Coxey was stunned by what happened when he reached Capitol Hill: police jailed him for trespassing on the grass. Some of his men, arrested for vagrancy, ended up in Maryland chain gangs. The rest went home hungry.

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