|
PRICE COMPETITION
COXEY'S ARMY
AND THE ARGUS-EYED DEMONS OF HELL:
SENSATIONALISM AND THE SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP
OF PRESS AND PUBLICITY SEEKERS
IN NEWS COVERAGE OF THE 1894 MARCH ON WASHINGTON
Submitted to the History Division of the Association for Education in
Journalism and Mass Communication, August 1996, Anaheim, California PRICE
COMPETITION
COXEY'S ARMY
AND THE ARGUS-EYED DEMONS OF HELL:
SENSATIONALISM AND THE SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP
OF PRESS AND PUBLICITY SEEKERS
IN NEWS COVERAGE OF THE 1894 MARCH ON WASHINGTON
Michael S. Sweeney
Ph.D. Student
E.W. Scripps School of Journalism
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701
(614) 593-2590 (office)
(614) 593-7737 (home)
[log in to unmask]
Submitted to the History Division of the Association for Education in
Journalism and Mass Communication, August 1996, Anaheim, California
COXEY'S ARMY
AND THE ARGUS-EYED DEMONS OF HELL
150-word abstract:
In 1894, Ohio sand merchant Jacob Coxey and his friend Carl Browne
marched a group of jobless men to Washington, D.C., to demand federal relief.
Their call for government payments to the unemployed to build roads was
considered foolish by both political parties. Nevertheless, in three months
Coxey's Army generated more newspaper coverage than any other event between the
Civil and Spanish-American wars, with the possible exception of the 1876
election. Documents recently made available in Ohio as well as previously
overlooked information in Coxey's hometown paper detail how Coxey and Browne
used showmanship and new mass media technology in a successful, national
publicity campaign. Browne called the reporters who covered the march the
"Argus-Eyed Demons of Hell." This paper produces new evidence that the Demons,
who included Ray Stannard Baker, sensationalized the news, but that such
sensationalism was mutually beneficial to the reporters and the leaders of
Coxey's Army. COXEY'S ARMY
AND THE ARGUS-EYED DEMONS OF HELL
75-word abstract:
In 1894, Jacob Coxey of Ohio and his friend Carl Browne marched a
group of jobless men to Washington, D.C., to demand federal relief. Documents
recently made available in Ohio as well as previously overlooked archival
information detail how Coxey and Browne used showmanship and new mass media
technology in a successful publicity campaign. This paper includes new evidence
that the journalists accompanying Coxey's Army sensationalized the news, but
such sensationalism benefited both the "Demon" reporters and their subjects.
COXEY"S ARMY AND THE ARGUS-EYED DEMONS
PRICE COMPETITION
When Chicago Record reporter Ray Stannard Baker arrived at a
farmhouse outside Massillon, Ohio, in March 1894, he thought the bizarre-looking
man who greeted him was "too good to be true."[1]
Carl Browne, seated beside a mountain of letters, telegrams
and newspapers piled on the home's dining room table, was strongly built and
heavy. His face resembled Buffalo Bill's, except Browne had fleshy cheeks and a
hint of jowl beneath the beard he combed into two spirals. His clothes were
those of a Wild West showman: a fringed, leather coat; tight, knee-length
cavalry boots; and breeches. Securing the coat were buttons fashioned from
Mexican silver coins stamped with the word "Free."[2] Browne considered himself
a gentleman, so out of respect for Baker he probably had removed his creased
sombrero to reveal his perpetually dirty hair. Browne bathed infrequently, and
the habit had earned him the nickname "Old Greasy."[3] Browne handed his guest a
card that said, "The pen is mightier than the sword."[4]
That day in the home of sand merchant Jacob Coxey, who with
Browne's help was planning a mass march of unemployed people to Washington,
D.C., Baker recognized the elements of a major story centered on the bizarre
Browne and the bookish Coxey. "Coxey's Army," as the demonstration came to be
called, was a sensational yet factual event, virtually guaranteed to draw
readership day after day during the highly competitive era of 1890s journalism.
In fact, over the next month and a half, the march generated more newspaper
coverage than any other event between the Civil War and the Spanish-American
War, with the possible exception of the disputed presidential election of
1876.[5]
This paper presents the newspaper coverage of Coxey's Army
as an early example of a national publicity campaign dependent on electronic,
coast-to-coast communication. It argues that Coxey and Browne obtained massive
press coverage -- despite widespread ridicule of their ideas -- by creating
pseudo-events,[6] encouraging sensationalism, and providing a steady source of
entertaining news during a time when most reporters were paid according to the
length and number of their stories. The paper draws mainly on a previously
ignored source of information about Browne's work as a publicist -- Coxey's
hometown newspaper, The Evening Independent of Massillon, Ohio -- in an
examination of the symbiotic relationship of Browne and the press in the
creation of Coxey's Army. The paper also uses a variety of primary and secondary
sources, including the recently unearthed scrapbook of Wilbur Miller, one of the
reporters who marched with Coxey, in analyzing the press coverage of Coxey's
Army. The paper presents the coverage as a case study of the influence of
economics, technology and reportorial conventions on newspaper journalism at the
end of the nineteenth century.
The Civil War and the necessity of gathering and writing the
news from its widely scattered battlefields helped broaden the role of reporters
relative to editors at American newspapers.[7] According to historian Hazel
Dicken-Garcia, by the 1880s writing and reporting had become recognized as the
most important parts of a newspaper, attracting readers with entertaining and
informative news stories.[8] Toward the end of the nineteenth century
journalists were "driven to get every detail that might satisfy curiosity,
heighten thrill and sell newspapers."[9] Dicken-Garcia says readers had grown
accustomed to dramatic writing during the war and continued to demand excitement
in their newspapers after the war's conclusion in 1865. Reporters attempted to
provide satisfaction by emphasizing plot and drama -- focusing on the story in
the news story.[10] Editors and publishers expected reporters to exhibit
enterprise, be aggressively resourceful in getting stories and be lively in
their writing.[11] The trend toward excitement and sensational writing,
especially as tools to gain readership in multiple-newspaper cities such as New
York, peaked in the "yellow journalism" of the 1890s, which historian Edwin
Emery characterized as "shrieking, gaudy . . . [and] devil-may-care."[12] Such
sensationalism had its limits, however. Despite the emphasis on lively writing,
most journalists tried to provide readers with truthful, inoffensive
stories.[13] Such was the case with the Argus-Eyed Demons of Hell, the roughly
two dozen reporters who marched with Coxey's Army from Ohio to Washington.
Although their writing was colorful, dramatic and sometimes shallow, it also was
mostly truthful.
Historian Ted Curtis Smythe argues that financial forces
pressured reporters toward inflating the length, if not the significance, of
their stories in the late nineteenth century. Reporters of the 1880s and 1890s
commonly were paid by the total number of inches of their stories that appeared
in print. Those whom editors assigned to track down a story but failed to do so
were paid a much lower hourly rate. The system "rewarded those who could gather
and present exciting news; the time rate was so minimal that reporters were
tempted to create stories when news was not generated in the normal course of
events," Smythe says.[14] Newspaper reports and other sources that are detailed
below include examples of reporters declining to identify a march organizer
known as "the Great Unknown" because the mystery of his identity made a good
story; reporters discussing the possibility of hiring circus performers to march
with Coxey and make his army appear larger that it actually was; an editor
ordering his reporter to focus on the drama and gossip of the march; and a
stringer receiving a pay-per-inch contract before filing his first story.
The end of the century also saw continuing debate on the
level of the press's professionalism, with some arguing that journalists were a
cornerstone of democracy while others, such as Harvard University President
Charles William Eliot, viewing reporters as drunks and rogues[15] -- a
characterization supported by the behavior of the Argus-Eyed Demons, who got
drunk while traveling with Coxey and called themselves "blooming reprobates."
Journalism's low pay and spotted reputation created an
incentive for late-nineteenth century reporters to view their jobs as
springboards to careers in politics, business and other professions, and the
reporters who covered Coxey's Army were no exception. They included Baker, who
became President Woodrow Wilson's aide and biographer, and Robert Peet Skinner,
who led the first diplomatic mission to Ethiopia and became Stalin-era diplomat
George Kennan's boss at the Baltic consulates in the 1930s.
The pressure on reporters to tell lively and accurate
stories day after day is evident in the way Browne and Coxey shaped the coverage
of their march. It also explains Browne's appeal to Baker and other reporters.
Besides possessing his eye-catching Buffalo Bill wardrobe,
Browne was a spellbinding orator, a seller of patent medicine ("Carl's
California Cure [made by] Carl Browne, man's mightiest microbe master"[16]), a
journalist in California and Nebraska, and a religious fanatic who told
reporters he had absorbed the soul of his dead wife and part of the soul of
Jesus.[17] Reporters found Browne more interesting than Coxey, whom Baker
described as a quiet man with "an oily face, a straw-colored moustache, and
gold-bowed spectacles. He did not impress me as a great leader of a
revolutionary movement."[18]
What Coxey lacked in charisma he made up for in compassion.
Coxey had made a fortune quarrying sand near Massillon and selling it to steel
and glass furnace operators, yet his heart went out to the millions of
less-fortunate people who had lost their jobs in the depression of 1893-94. He
met a kindred spirit in Browne at the 1893 Chicago convention of the Bimetallic
League, which advocated free and unlimited coinage of silver as the solution to
the country's economic woes. Browne impressed Coxey with his knowledge about
money, and Coxey invited him to be his guest for a few months in Massillon.
During the winter of 1893-94, they reached an agreement.[19] Coxey would
bankroll a march of jobless men nearly 400 miles from Massillon to Washington,
D.C., and Browne would publicize it and lead it.[20]
Coxey planned to stand on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on
May 1, 1894, and read a speech urging Congress to hire the unemployed to build
roads and public buildings -- an idea that Coxey said had come to him one night
when his buggy got stuck in the mud. He wanted to finance the work with $500
million in non-interest-bearing bonds. The bonds would lack the backing of gold
with which the Treasury essentially guaranteed the value of paper money in the
late nineteenth century. Thus, Coxey's plan, designed to put people to work, to
increase the amount of money in circulation and to get the economy moving again,
rested on the theory that money had value merely because the government said it
did. The Union had tested this idea successfully during the financial emergency
of the Civil War, but it had not been tried during the ensuing peace.[21]
Coxey and Browne's call for a march of unemployed men to
Washington had no precedent.[22] Its surprising appeal can be understood only in
light of the serious depression that gripped the country.
Before the 1930s, downturns in the economy were known as
"panics," and the biggest one by far occurred in 1894.[23] The federal
government did not keep unemployment statistics then, but eighty years later it
estimated that joblessness had risen from 3 percent in 1892 to more than 18
percent two years later.[24] The 1894 unemployment rate was the sixth-highest in
all of American history, topped only by five years in the 1930s.[25] People who
were thrown out of work in the 1890s were expected to seek private handouts, as
neither the Democratic nor the Republican party leaders embraced the idea of
federal assistance for the thousands of people who roamed the country in search
of work.
Adding to the nation's misery were long-term trends in
prices, interest rates and agriculture. From the Civil War to the early 1890s,
prices fell, the money supply stagnated, and farmers either suffered through
drought in bad years (such as in Kansas and Nebraska in 1893) or saturated their
markets through overproduction in good years.[26] In 1893 and 1894, a bushel of
wheat, which had cost a farmer fifty cents to raise, sold for thirty to forty
cents at a grain elevator.[27] The price of wholesale farm products declined
more than 50 percent from 1865 to 1890, and the consumer price index fell about
30 percent in the same period.[28] Farmers who borrowed after the Civil War to
begin farming in the territories and new Western states repaid their debts in
dollars that were steadily being deflated -- in other words, dollars that had
more purchasing power than the ones they borrowed. Thus, farmers in the late
nineteenth century were caught between falling prices and fixed interest rates,
and in some states it seemed as if whole counties passed through foreclosure in
the early 1890s.[29] Six hundred banks failed in 1893.[30]
The nation agonized over the problems. It split into two
camps: gold and silver.
Advocates of gold wanted a conservative management of the
economy, a continuation of a strong relationship between gold and the value of
money, and an end to the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. The act required the
government to buy 4.5 million ounces of silver per month and to issue notes
backed by the white metal.[31] Under this law, debtors could redeem their new
silver-backed notes in gold. And under a previous law, they could continue to
redeem in gold the emergency-issue, Civil War "greenbacks" that were still in
circulation. Gold flowed from the U.S. Treasury.[32] After April 22, 1893, when
the Treasury's gold supply fell below $100 million -- a round figure that
President Grover Cleveland said Americans regarded with sentiment and concern --
conservatives including Cleveland decided that the way to repair the overall
economy was to set the government's finances in order.[33] Conservatives feared
a depletion of gold reserves because they wanted every paper dollar in
circulation to represent a dollar's worth of precious metal in a bank. They
believed the economy would be stable as long as all, or nearly all, of that
metal continued to be gold.[34]
Advocates of silver primarily were agrarian reformers known
as Populists. They wanted to boost the amount of silver relative to gold in
circulation. They believed that "bimetallism," a two-metal standard of monetary
value, would inflate the economy and help the debt-bedeviled working classes.
Meanwhile, as the economy was sliding toward conditions that
would leave 4 million people jobless, the news media were using new technology
to expand their mass audience. Telephones, invented two decades earlier, had
become a newsgathering tool but remained far from universal in homes and
offices. The 1894 phone number of The Evening Independent, for example,
consisted of only two digits, six and zero.[35] Journalists relied heavily on
telegraph wires to carry messages from city to city -- much as they had in 1881,
when the telegraph allowed Eastern newspaper readers to follow every change in
President James Garfield's condition for eleven weeks as he lay dying of an
assassin's bullet. A major user of telegraph lines was the wire service that
became known as the Associated Press. Between 1892 and 1894 it won its battles
to absorb or cripple its major rivals.[36] On March 15, 1894, the day that Baker
arrived in Massillon, the AP announced that it had begun coast-to-coast
operations. An enlarged system of leased wires allowed the AP to move stories
beyond its previous Western outpost at Denver and have instant access to cities
in California and the Pacific Northwest.[37]
Individually, newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and
William Randolph Hearst combined these new technologies with the techniques of
yellow journalism to help build huge circulations in the 1890s. Theirs was a war
of supremacy. Small papers, on the other hand, battled over readership just to
survive the depression. They used sensationalism, too.[38]
So did Coxey and Browne. Their first sensation was their
call for a federal relief bill. On December 7, 1893, they published at Coxey's
expense a pamphlet called "Bulletin No. 1 of the Good Roads Association." It
encapsulated Coxey's vision of highway jobs for the unemployed.[39] The full
text of the bulletin was introduced to Congress by the representative from
Browne's district in California and by Senator William Peffer of Kansas, a
Populist.[40] The bill, and other Coxey bills in the next two months, produced
more ridicule than enthusiasm.
Nevertheless, the small and weak American Federation of
Labor voted to endorse Coxey's road improvement plan at its Chicago convention
on December 15, 1893. Coxey's hometown paper, The Evening Independent, noted the
endorsement three weeks later, on January 6, 1894, in a story about "Bulletin
No. 1" -- albeit one that ran on the fourth page of a Saturday paper under a
headline that included the words "Published by request."[41] The text listed
names of people endorsing Coxey's road plan or responding to his request to send
him petitions. The largest petition comprised "439 names from Gallipolis, Ohio .
. . mostly Federated Trades Union names."[42]
Browne apparently wrote the story and submitted it, for the
text referred to his hometown of Calistoga, California, as "the home of the
writer." That fact is significant, for at the bottom of the story, in italic
type, were two paragraphs that help clear up questions that have puzzled
historians: Who first proposed a mass march on Washington, and when was the idea
made public? Historian Carlos Schwantes wrote that Browne had sent a telegram to
Coxey from the AFL convention in December, urging a march, but that Coxey
rejected it and had to be coaxed into accepting the plan and then announcing it
on January 31.[43] Another historian, Donald McMurry, attributed the idea to
Coxey but gave no date.[44] Coxey almost certainly got his facts scrambled when
he tried to recall the origin of the march in an interview with The Evening
Independent when he was eighty-seven years old. The interview, first published
as part of Coxey's obituary in 1951 (he lived to be ninety-seven), said an
Independent reporter had urged him to march.[45]
However, Browne's article on January 6, 1894, clearly
concluded with a call for a demonstration in Washington, without mentioning
Massillon as a staging area:
Send for petitions and get everybody to sign. We
want to send to congress by May 1st, 1894, the biggest
petition ever
sent to a legislative body in the world. . . . A mass meeting
will be
held in Washington City at 10 a.m. May 1st, 1894, on the
steps of the
nation's capitol [sic], at which all the petitions received
up to that
time will be displayed, previous to being given to congress.
Speakers of
national repute will be invited to be present. Men without
work should
try to get there, as they have nothing else to do. ON TO
WASHINGTON IN
THE SPRING [emphasis in the original].[46]
For the next several weeks, Browne and Coxey demonstrated a
flair for getting their names and their ideas in the newspapers of Massillon and
nearby Canton, Akron and Cleveland. Initial stories in The Evening Independent
were favorable. On the evening of January 8, Browne and Coxey appeared before
the Massillon City Council. They asked the council to call a meeting of
Massillon citizens to hear details of a finance plan that Coxey said had
appeared to him in a dream the week before. He envisioned a half-billion dollars
of road improvement bonds being issued nationwide, and he proposed that the city
council and the U.S. Treasury work out an agreement to target $100,000 for roads
in Massillon. The council approved the meeting but withheld an endorsement of
Coxey's plan.[47] However, the paper's account of the council meeting said
Coxey's "great idea" had "the merit of novelty and originality."[48]
Two days after the council's vote but a week before the
meeting, a rambling letter to the editor appeared on the front page of the
Independent. In it, Browne summed up the Populist economic arguments for
endorsing Coxey's currency-inflating bond proposal. He also gave the first hint
that his stewardship of the Coxey movement would be marked by zealotry:
The principal objections come from those people . . .
who can never enter "Zion," even if they are professed
christians [sic],
according to the 1st and 5th verses of the fifteenth Psalm,
i.e.,
interest takers -- those who live not by the divine
injunction, "by the
sweat of thine own brow," but by sweating others. They reside
principally in Wall street [sic], New York.[49]
The following week's papers contained citizen and editorial
comments about Coxey's plan. Responding to them in a letter printed on January
16, Browne returned to his religious imagery. He said he believed that human
souls were formed by an assembling of the indestructible bits of the souls of
the dead, a concept he related to the mystic Theosophical movement.[50] His
letter likened Coxey to the biblical Jacob, saying, "Now, sir, here we have a
modern 'Jacob,' and if theosophy be really true, possibly [it is] the same soul
. . . having a similar dream [of] a 'ladder' that would enable . . . a people
to
ascend out of an interest paying bond hell into a non-interest paying bond
heaven."[51]
The news stories and editorials in the Independent began to
belittle Coxey and Browne. "Don Quixote," the editorial page called Coxey on
January 16, and soon it labeled his sidekick "Sancho Panza." Both were called
foolish.
The mass meeting packed the Massillon Music Hall on January
18. Coxey spoke first. He argued that the press ridiculed all great ideas.
Browne then answered his critics and demonstrated a flair for drawing cartoons
of politicians and downtrodden people while he talked.[52] When he was done,
nobody else asked to speak, so the council put the question to the people:
Should Massillon endorse Coxey's road-and-bond plan? Again, Browne demonstrated
his skill at handling the press and the public. The Independent reported:
Hands were raised in various parts of the hall,
and Mr. Browne, evidently not considering it necessary to
secure the
negative vote, announced that the plan had received the
endorsement of
the people. Whether it did or not is a matter of some doubt,
for many
persons were of the opinion that the number of hands raised
was not
large enough to constitute a majority.[53]
Nevertheless, the headline above the story cast a flattering
light on the night's events. "It Was a Joyous Occasion," it said. In smaller
type, it added, "Messrs. Coxey and Browne Have it Their Own Way."
Browne tried to organize a mass march to the City Council's
next meeting, on January 22, but the council got wind of the plan and adjourned
before Browne's group of men and boys, accompanied by a band playing Yankee
Doodle, arrived. Not one to waste an audience, Browne lectured to the crowd from
atop his wagon in the street outside City Hall. The Independent's melodramatic
report of Browne's antics -- it said he had tried to "storm the Tuileries," a
reference to a royal residence during the French Revolution -- marked the first
front-page report of the plan to march on Washington. It also was the first time
that either Browne or Coxey specified that the march would originate in
Massillon. Browne told a reporter that 100,000 men would walk and about 100
would ride Coxey's prize horses.[54] The reporter quoted himself in the story as
warning Browne that federal laws would prevent Coxey from speaking at the
Capitol.
Partly because of Browne's theatrics and partly because of
conservative fears that Coxey's bond plan would hurt the economy, Massillon's
city leaders distanced themselves from Browne and Coxey. The next time the
council met, it refused to consider their bond plan. Again Browne took his
arguments to the street. Outside City Hall, he drew cartoons of the councilmen
as ostriches with their heads in the sand.[55]
On January 27, the Independent printed a front-page story
that detailed Coxey's plan to march. It acknowledged that many citizens of
Massillon considered the plan "a flight of imagination," but the writer said
Coxey was dead earnest. By that time, Coxey had paid for another pamphlet,
"Bulletin No. 2," to further publicize the march.[56]
Soon the Independent's gossip column, "Salmagundi," began
carrying notices of Coxey and Browne addressing clubs and civic groups. The
Independent said it was getting so much mail about Coxey that it could not print
it all. Yet, as a likely indication of skepticism or boredom, the paper's
coverage of Coxey's plans decreased somewhat in February. (In the twenty-six
days of January 6 through January 31, the Independent printed thirteen stories
mentioning Coxey or Browne, plus twenty-one related editorials, letters or
Salmagundi items. During all of February, the Independent printed eleven such
stories, plus seventeen editorials, letters or Salmagundi items.)
Other papers, however, began to take notice. Schwantes
erroneously believed the nation's interest in Coxey's march was nearly
non-existent until early March. He said nationwide coverage began in March when
an enterprising Independent reporter started sending stories about Coxey to the
Associated Press. While it is true that wire service stories brought Coxey the
invaluable attention of Baker's Chicago Record that month, it is evident that
Coxey's name was well known in New York, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis and
Philadelphia a month before the date Schwantes acknowledged. Coxey and Browne
probably drummed up the attention by mailing copies of "Bulletin No. 2" to
newspapers in these cities, but the wire service almost certainly helped spread
the word. In any case, in early February, the New York Recorder reported that
Coxey was in the city for a horse sale. The paper reminded its readers, "He is
the gentleman who intends to start to Washington . . . with his great army to
advocate good roads."[57] The Pittsburgh Leader, in an article reprinted by the
Independent on February 10, said it had received a message from Coxey. It said
the message urged readers "to patronize Coxey's silica sand [Coxey had many
customers in the Pittsburgh mills] and thoroughbred stallions, and . . . to move
against Washington, D.C., for greenbacks or blood. . . . We have a sneaking idea
that Coxey is not so hot after blood as he is after a free ad."[58]
For the next month, the Independent reprinted jokes about
Coxey that appeared in the New York Sun. Stories about Coxey also appeared in
mid-February in the Philadelphia Item and Minneapolis Times.[59] In its February
10 edition, the Independent stated that the nation's newspapers had been "going
for Mr. Coxey hammer and tongs this week." As if to back up the claim, the paper
reprinted a satiric poem about Coxey that had appeared in the Pittsburgh
Leader.[60]
By mid-February, Browne and Coxey had made plans to give the
march a religious look. First, they decided that the marchers would leave
Massillon on Easter, March 25. Second, they officially named the group the
Commonweal of Christ. Third, Browne began preparing religious banners for the
trip. One was a large portrait of Christ, looking remarkably like Browne without
his cowboy hat, surrounded by the words "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men, but
Death to Interest on Bonds."[61] And fourth, Browne said the crowds he predicted
would descend on Massillon would mystically bring about Christ's return because
each person would contain one of the piece's of Christ's soul. Both Browne and
Coxey held strong religious beliefs, but it must have occurred to Browne that
linking Christ to their economic plan would have the added appeal of attracting
sensation-loving reporters.
The Independent printed an interview with Browne on February
21:
"Do you not see anything singular in the coming
together of Brother Coxey and myself?" said he. "I believe
that a part
of the soul of Christ happened to come into my being. I
believe also
that another part of Christ's soul is in Bro. Coxey. . . . I
also be
lieve that the remainder of the soul of Christ has been fully
re-incarnated in thousands of people throughout the United
States today,
and that accounts for the tremendous response to this call of
ours, to
try to bring about peace and plenty, to take the place of
panic and
poverty. To accomplish it means the second coming of Christ
and I
believe in the prophecy that He is to come, not [in] any one
single
form, but in the whole people. Now you have the reason for
the banner of
peace with His figure as a central painting, and that is why
we start
out on this mission on Easter Sunday -- for 'He hath risen.'
"[62]
It is no wonder that Coxey and Browne got publicity. The
late nineteenth century may have been what Schwantes called "the golden age of
the crank in America,"[63] but even by the standards of that era Coxey and
Browne were notable. The press treated them with disdain, yet seemed unable to
resist stories that must have caused readers to shake their heads and chuckle.
When a Columbus, Ohio, mystic said the spirit of Andrew Jackson had endorsed
Coxey, the story made the front page of the Independent.[64] A son was born to
Coxey's wife, Henrietta, on February 26, and when Coxey decided to name the boy
Legal Tender Coxey, that story made the front page, too.[65] Browne even got
front-page recognition in an especially macabre way after a Massillon tragedy on
February 27. Three children drowned near the Cherry Street canal bridge, and
three others were saved by four schoolboys. Citizens of Massillon began donating
nickels and dimes to reward the heroes, and the Independent kept a running list
of donors. In one story, amid the ten cents from W.R. Coleman and the
twenty-five cents from J.B. Bissonette, appeared the notation "Carl Browne, oil
painting."[66]
No one can say with certainty who wrote the Independent's
stories about Browne and Coxey while they were organizing their march. The
stories carried no bylines. However, it seems apparent that the editorials that
belittled Coxey's Army were written by the conservative, twenty-eight-year-old
editor, Robert Peet Skinner, and that he probably wrote for the front page, too.
Skinner is known to have marched out of Massillon with Coxey, and the initials
R.P.S. appear at the bottom of a handful of dispatches to the Independent that
reported on the progress of the Commonweal. A photograph of Skinner taken four
years after the march revealed an earnest, oval face, a receding hairline, a
pair of wire-rimmed pince-nez and a coat with long lapels. He almost certainly
would have ridiculed Coxey's economic ideas because he was fond of William
McKinley, the business-oriented governor of Ohio.[67] It seems likely that
Skinner was the "lively young reporter" whom Schwantes credited with spreading
the Independent's stories over the AP wire. That probably would give Skinner the
credit for bringing Coxey to the attention of Baker, whose managing editor at
the Chicago Record sent him to Massillon to see if there was any substance to
the wire stories he had received about Coxey. Baker's train arrived in
Massillon, a quiet town of 12,000 on the Tuscarawas River, on March 15,
1894.[68] He immediately had hired a buggy and drove "four or five miles of the
muddiest roads I think I ever saw" to the farmhouse on Coxey's estate northeast
of town, where he met Coxey and the outrageously dressed Browne.[69]
Baker had a special fondness for Coxey and Browne. Although
he wrote many memorable stories in Chicago, he chose to make Coxey's Army the
first substantial chapter in his memoirs, American Chronicle. In the book, Baker
recalled that when he met Coxey, the sand merchant said he expected to attract
20,000 people for the march to Washington, and that Browne promptly multiplied
that number by five. When Baker reminded them that the day of departure was less
than two weeks away and he had yet to see marchers in Massillon, Coxey pointed
to the letters on the table beside him.
"There were hundreds of them -- perhaps a thousand or more,"
Baker wrote in American Chronicle. "Most of them were poorly written, some were
on the letter paper of labor unions, clubs of the Knights of Labor, Populist
organizations and the like."[70] Browne told Baker that the problem was not one
of recruiting an army, but rather of avoiding too big a crowd.
Baker noticed that many of the letters contained large
checks. Coxey said they were common but usually bounced when he tried to cash
them. However, Coxey made it a point to show Baker an Iowa widow's letter that
contained a single dollar bill.[71] Baker thought Coxey's plan a bit crazy and
did not believe the Commonweal would leave Massillon. Nevertheless, he sent his
editor news of what he saw, composing one story while Browne and a choir
serenaded him from outside his window.[72]
A few days later, Coxey told Baker "We're beginning to hear
from your articles in Chicago." Papers in other cities, including many along the
West Coast that were served by the AP's newly leased wires, printed news about
Coxey. Copycat marches were organized in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland,
Seattle and the mining towns of Montana, although the unemployed men who filled
their ranks wanted federal money for irrigation projects instead of road
improvements.[73] Baker's reaction to Coxey's statement, as recorded in his
memoirs, was that he finally realized the power of the modern press. He felt
some responsibility for launching "this crazy enterprise," but he continued to
write. The story was too good to drop.[74]
Out-of-town journalists began to pour into Massillon. Among
the first to follow Baker was Honore Jaxon, whom the Independent described as a
"half-breed Indian" from Canada.[75] He carried only a blanket, a hatchet and a
few cooking utensils. Jaxon was under contract to the Chicago Times to stay a
half-day ahead of Coxey's Army and file regular reports.[76] Also arriving a few
days before Easter were Henry Vincent, editor of the Chicago Express; reporter
Charlie Seymour of the Chicago Herald; reporter Austin Beach of the Pittsburgh
Times; reporter Shirley Austin of The Chautauquan magazine; reporter N.P.
Babcock of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and reporter Hugh O'Donnell of the
New York Press.[77] O'Donnell was well-known as the leader of the bloody 1892
steel mill strike in Homestead, Pennsylvania, and probably needed work. He had
been blacklisted by the iron and steel industry, and many working-class people
hated O'Donnell for his unsuccessful effort to have New York Tribune publisher
Whitelaw Reid mediate a settlement to the Homestead strike. "I am now shunned by
labor and capital, a modern Ishmael," O'Donnell wrote in 1894.[78]
One other journalist was on hand. Wilbur Miller was a
reporter for the Repository in Canton, a few miles east of Massillon. On March
19, 1894, the Cincinnati Enquirer sent Miller a telegram that said, "Want you to
go with Coxey," and offered to pay his expenses and a fee based on the length of
his published stories. He also reported about Coxey for the AP and the
Pittsburgh Chronicle Telegraph.[79]
Massillon reacted to the flock of reporters with amusement,
skepticism and trepidation. The mayor collected the autographs of each reporter,
and the Independent began a contest to guess the number of marchers who would
leave Massillon with Coxey on Easter.[80] The Independent and The (Cleveland)
Plain Dealer printed excerpts from letters, produced by Browne, that indicated
thousands of unemployed men would be on hand for the departure. Yet the papers
continued to express doubts.
Typical of the letters was one in The Plain Dealer: "James
A. Harrington of Piqua, O[hio], is glad to announce that 700 will be on deck
from that place," it said. "That may be true, but what a hole that would make in
Piqua," a town of 9,000.[81] Newspapers also played up colorful and unusual
facts. For example, the Independent noted that "Prof. C.B. Freeman, who claims
to be the loudest singer in the world," had arrived on March 21 from Youngstown,
Ohio, to march with Coxey, and The Plain Dealer printed Browne's statement that
"colored folks" would be welcomed into the Commonweal.[82] Coxey and Browne's
decision to integrate the army raised eyebrows. They demonstrated their openness
to the equality of men and their news media savvy by choosing a black man to
lead the procession and carry the American flag.[83]
The most intriguing news item, however, involved the man
whom Browne picked to drill the marchers. He was Browne's master stroke of
publicity:
In the center of the dark public square, beside
the flaring light of a gasoline torchlight, Lieut. Carl
Browne stood up
and introduced the "great unknown" to the crowd below him.
The members
of the commonweal [sic] sent up a shout of joy, and the
stranger bowed
and began his address. He spoke in a clear, loud voice, with
a slight
German accent, and the words recalled the days of excitement
before the
Haymarket riot, when Chicago was pulsing with the bitter
invective of
anarchist orators. One of the spectators, in a pause of the
speech,
shouted: "It is Fielden of Chicago [a man convicted in the
Haymarket
Riot and later pardoned[84]]." At that the crowd burst into
wild shouts of
applause, and the speaker, raising his arms, said, "I am the
great
unknown, and the great unknown I must remain."[85]
Reporters wrote thousands of words speculating about the
identity of the Great Unknown, a name that Browne insisted the man use. Later,
after Browne and the Unknown quarreled, some Chicago reporters revealed they
always had known the mysterious man's name but had kept quiet for the sake of a
good story.[86] The Unknown turned out to be A.P.B. Bozarro (sometimes spelled
"Pizarro"), a patent medicine seller.[87]
Baker's editors became alarmed when his stories suggested
that thousands of jobless men were expected in Massillon. They warned the
authorities of Ohio to prevent the march and uphold order,[88] but reporters in
Ohio wondered if anyone would answer Coxey's call to arms. At sunrise on the day
before Easter, Coxey's Army consisted of less than a dozen men.[89] Baker wrote
in his memoirs that Seymour of the Chicago Herald suggested that the reporters
could guarantee a big turnout on Easter if they hired workers from a nearby
circus to pretend to join Coxey's Army and march out of town. He was not sure if
Seymour was serious, but he need not have worried.[90] Freight trains rumbling
into town Saturday night and Sunday morning dropped loads of hungry-looking men
in ragged overcoats. Hundreds assembled at the Massillon Gun Club, and they
breakfasted on coffee and ham supplied by Coxey.[91] At 11 o'clock Easter
morning, Browne, wearing his buckskin jacket, creased sombrero and a white lace
necktie, pranced about on Coxey's white stallion, Currier. At noon, the Great
Unknown yelled "Everybody march!" and a small brass band, forty-two reporters
and about 100 men carrying banners and flags stumbled eastward. More men
probably would have joined the procession if not for the bitter cold and a
strong wind.[92] Thousands watched as the march left town; that night the
seventeen telegraph operators that Western Union had dispatched to Massillon
handled nearly 40,000 words from the press corps.[93]
When Coxey's Army tramped into Alliance, Ohio, Baker sent
his editors a short letter, dated March 28, along with his stories. The Record
printed the note, which was as close as Baker came to analysis. "I am beginning
to feel that the movement . . . is a manifestation of the prevailing unrest and
dissatisfaction among the laboring classes," Baker said. "I don't like to think
about the army with a sober face, but it seems to me that such a movement must
be looked on as something more than a huge joke."[94] The Record later
telegraphed Baker to treat Coxey as "the hero of the plot . . . though he seems
to be a puppet in Browne's hands," and to send gossip and hard-luck stories.[95]
The marchers developed a complex relationship with the press
corps, whose ranks rose and fell between ten and forty during the march.
Reporters tended to laugh at Coxey's Army, yet they acknowledged Coxey's and
Browne's publicity skills. Journalist W.T. Stead wrote in 1894 that Coxey
displayed genius in the way he "compelled all the newspapers of the Continent to
devote from a column to six columns a day to reporting Coxeyism. . . . No
millionaire could, without ruining himself, have secured as much space for
advertising his wares."[96]
Coxey grew a bit distrustful of reporters, who made much of
the fact that he usually slept in hotels on the way to Washington while his army
slept outdoors. Some reporters sneered at him, calling him everything from
"Silica Sand" to "a dangerous lunatic." Newspapers sometimes described his army,
which grew as large as 500 men as it marched through the Pennsylvania steel
towns, as consisting of tramps and vagabonds, although many marchers were
skilled laborers who had lost their jobs.[97]
The marchers did not take kindly to the way they were
portrayed. An astrologer who marched with the army predicted that the reporters
would be punished for their wickedness by falling victim to a fatal epidemic in
July.[98] Other marchers turned to violence, and Browne had to intervene. On
March 26, he ordered the marchers to treat reporters with courtesy.[99] The
order did not stop W.H. McLain of the Pittsburgh Leader from getting into a
fistfight with a Coxeyite.[100] On another occasion, marchers tried to drag an
unidentified Pittsburgh reporter from his horse and were overpowered by other
reporters. And in an unidentified newspaper clipping in Miller's scrapbook,
dated a year after the march, Browne revealed the deep hatred some marchers felt
for reporters. One day, Browne said,
I had just finished my lunch of hardtack and cold
blocks of boiled pork, when a faithful friend came to me and
said,
"Marshal, there is going to be trouble with the reporters
here; you had
better see. . . . They [the marchers] are going to stop their
[the
reporters'] teams and take off their clothes and dress them
up in some
of their rags and take the stock of whiskey and cigars, and
some even
advocate the hanging of Hugh O'Donnell."[101]
The clipping said Browne talked the marchers out of an
attack by warning that it would end the Coxey movement. Since Browne gave the
only version of a story that portrays him favorably, his reliability must be
questioned. However, the story seems plausible. Browne knew the attention of
reporters was crucial to the impact of Coxey's Army, yet he had a history of
speaking his mind to reporters. For example, the Independent quoted Browne as
raging against "the minions of the subsidized press" when he felt they were
unsympathetic.[102] Another outburst haunted him. On March 30, at Columbiana,
Ohio, Browne invoked the name of a mythological creature with a hundred eyes and
gave the press corps a name it proudly adopted: The Argus-Eyed Demons of
Hell.[103]
The reporters who marched with Coxey's Army decided to form
a "Demon" organization based on images of the Antichrist that would mock the
Christian organization Browne and Coxey had tried to create. The reporters
created Demon uniforms out of corduroy, issued Demon badges like the badges
Browne had issued to marchers (Miller was Demon No. 15), and privately wrote
satires of the marching orders that Browne regularly distributed when the
marchers camped.[104]
Pressed for stories in the remote parts of Ohio,
Pennsylvania and Maryland, the Demons sometimes wrote about themselves. "No
livelier crowd ever crossed a continent than the historians associated with
Coxey's revolution, and while entre nous [just between us] the bird and the
bottle play their part, the pleasure is innocent and moderate," the Independent
reported April 7. A newspaper clipping in Miller's scrapbook stressed that many
Demons were teetotalers and that those who did drink were "remarkably
temperate."[105]
Original documents now available in Miller's scrapbook paint
a far different picture. In the Demons' marching orders, as issued by "Chief
Demon" Beach, whiskey and beer got prominent attention. "Bugle will blow at
8:30, whisky [sic] at 8:32, pancakes at 8:45, whisky [sic] at 9:01, and at the
usual intervals thereafter. Lunch at Pabst crossing," one marching order said.
Another reported, "Whisky [sic] at 9:01, and camp salutations at 9:15."[106] And
in a third order, Beach admonished five reporters -- including Baker and Miller
-- for letting the Demons run out of liquor.[107]
After filing their stories with the telegraph operator who
accompanied them on the march, the Demons sometimes invited the mayor of a
nearby town to join them in an evening of drinking and conversation. The mayor
of Hagerstown, Maryland, held a banquet for the Demons, and the Demons treated
him to a song composed by Babcock of the New York World:
Forty Demons marching on,
Every Demon has a horn,
Drunk at night and drunk at morn,
Now we're here and now we're gone.
Demons come from all the states,
Brought together by the Fates,
Yet they are the best of mates,
For all are blooming reprobates.[108]
The Demons' reputation as "reprobates" rested largely on
their antics on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, where their conduct strayed from
that of impartial observers. After the Commonweal arrived at Cumberland,
Maryland, a few days before the Hagerstown banquet, Coxey hired two boats to
carry the marchers ninety miles down the canal. Historians differ on why Coxey
put his army afloat. One historian's centennial account of Coxey's march
suggested he wanted to escape from reporters because he was fed up with their
jeers, but it seems unlikely that Coxey would abandon his link to
publicity.[109] Baker said Coxey hired boats because the roads below Cumberland
were impassable.[110] A third opinion was offered by the Independent, which said
Coxey merely wanted to give his army a rest. That seems most credible; the steep
climbs and icy weather in the Appalachian Mountains had taken a toll on the
marchers. In any event, Coxey's Army became a navy on April 17, shipped at the
rate the boatmen charged to transport livestock -- fifty-two cents a ton.[111]
Coxey told the reporters that he could not delay his boats while they went
ashore to file their stories, so about a dozen reporters decided to hire a boat
of their own. The best they could find was a coal barge, which they scrubbed and
christened The Flying Demon. At Cumberland, the reporters loaded the barge with
six cases of bottled beer, two kegs of beer and four gallons of whiskey in stone
jars -- for a two-day trip. In addition to the skipper of the barge, the Demons
had elected an admiral, and after the Flying Demon cast off, the admiral blew a
tin horn every fifteen minutes to call the Demons below for a drink.[112] They
quickly got drunk and flew a red flag until Browne and Coxey made them haul it
down, fearing that it might be misconstrued as socialist. That night, a group of
practical jokers ignited a package of "Greek fire," a flammable compound, on
deck to scare their comrades sleeping below. Luckily the impressive flames
caused no damage or injury.[113]
Despite their flirtation with fire and conflict with the
marchers, as well as their enormous consumption of alcohol, the Demons did an
amazing amount of work. They filed up to 100,000 words per night, sometimes in
the wilderness. On the other hand, they were paid by the column inch, so it was
in their interest to seek and write long stories. The greatest amount of press
coverage en route to Washington was generated by the Commonweal's triumphal
march through the labor-loving neighborhoods of Pittsburgh; the dispute between
Browne and the Great Unknown that led to the latter's banishment on April 15 and
Browne's revealing of his identity; and the journey down the canal. Reporters
often had to finish writing by 6 p.m., the deadline set by E.P. Bishop, the
Western Union telegraph operator who accompanied the Demons. Bishop sometimes
hired horses to take the Demons' stories to the nearest telegraph line. There,
one of Bishop's linemen would climb a pole, cut the wire and splice in a
portable telegraph key. Reporters took late stories to the telegraph office
themselves.[114]
The high-water mark of news coverage occurred when the march
neared Washington, D.C. As it began to seem certain that Coxey's Army would
reach the Capitol, Baker and the other Demons began to wonder what the U.S.
government would do. Reporters asked Coxey how he would react if law enforcement
officers tried to keep their promise to prevent him from speaking at the
Capitol. The sand merchant gave a typically upbeat answer -- it was nonsense to
think such thoughts.[115] He considered the Capitol grounds partly his property
as an American citizen. When Coxey learned that an 1882 act of Congress
prohibited demonstrations on the Capitol grounds, he said, "We will keep off the
grass around the Capitol. Of course, I appreciate that . . . the preservation of
the grass around the Capitol is of more importance than saving thousands from
starvation."[116]
Coxey's Army camped in Washington's Brightwood Riding Park.
A wall of canvas that bore the words "He is Alive!" surrounded the marchers, who
numbered about 300 at the time. On Sunday, April 29, Browne preached from
Revelation, and Coxey spoke for a half-hour on the effect his march would have
on Congress within the next two weeks.[117] Monday was spent in final
preparations.
On Tuesday, May 1, Coxey's Army walked toward the Capitol to
fulfill the vows made in January. With Coxey's Army and the Demons were Coxey's
daughter, Mamie, dressed as the goddess of peace; Coxey's wife, Henrietta; and
his infant son, Legal Tender. Watching along Pennsylvania Avenue were 10,000 to
20,000 spectators -- public officials, ordinary citizens and police officers, on
foot or on horseback. Browne dismounted and Coxey stepped down from his carriage
to approach the Capitol grounds' B Street entrance, which was blocked by 300 to
400 police officers. A mounted officer told Browne and Coxey that they could not
pass. An onlooker yelled, "Jump over the wall!" and Coxey and Browne leaped over
a low stone divider and disappeared into a crowd. In the pandemonium of the next
few seconds, officers zeroed in on Browne's outrageous buckskin clothes and
nearly missed the mild-looking Coxey. It took several officers to wrestle the
bellowing Browne to the ground as he attempted to divert attention from Coxey --
reporters describing Browne's capture used words of admiration unlike anything
the press ever had written about him. During the struggle, Browne's beloved
amber beads, a necklace he wore in memory of his dead wife, were broken and
scattered on the ground. Coxey was arrested before he could begin his speech,
although he threw a copy of it to a reporter before being taken to jail.[118] On
May 8, Coxey and Browne were convicted of carrying banners on the Capitol
grounds and of walking on the grass. They received twenty-day jail terms.
Coxey's Army changed from farce to tragedy in the press.
Skinner of The (Massillon) Evening Independent somehow filed three short reports
during the half-hour march up Pennsylvania Avenue in time for the May 1 evening
edition of his paper. His breathless prose described a stampede and reported
that police officers used clubs to restore order. Browne was clubbed severely,
and a white-faced Coxey was hauled away by a large group of officers, Skinner
wrote.[119]
An editorial that accompanied Skinner's reports encapsulated
a shift in the Independent's attitude. "We cannot afford to lose Mr. Coxey," it
said. "With all his faults we love him still. . . . Now that the danger point is
passed we realize that we have had a great deal of fun on account of Mr. Coxey
and his movement, and we forgive him for all the anxiety he has created."[120]
After his arrest and sentencing, Coxey disappeared from the nation's papers,
although not without some editorials commenting on the pettiness of the charges.
Little of the news coverage of Coxey's Army, either upon
Coxey's arrival in Washington or during his march, focused on the political
ideas he professed. In this regard, Coxey and Browne failed to publicize the
details of their economic plan and obtain a fair hearing in the nation's press.
Instead, news stories tended to focus on the drama, excitement and conflict
inherent in the march. Coxey's Army was a source of amusement until its tragic
ending shocked some newspapers into recognizing its serious intentions. Serious
or not, however, Coxey and Browne were unable or unwilling to continue
orchestrating a publicity campaign while in jail, leaving their followers and
the Argus-Eyed Demons to disperse and seek new diversions.
The Chicago Record ordered Baker home on May 2. The reporter
had written about 75,000 words about Coxey's Army. Before he left Washington, he
visited Browne. The big man had dried blood on his head and neck; his elbows
rested on his knees in a picture of pure dejection.
The turnkey let me into the cell and I sat down by
his side. When he turned to look at me I placed in his hand
the amber
beads I had picked up during the melee. When he saw them his
shoulders
began to heave and he sobbed like the child he really was.
"You're the
only friend I've got left in the world," he blubbered.[121]
For several years, Browne wrote letters to Baker and signed
them, "The pen is mightier than the sword." That message, the first that Browne
had presented to Baker, came true. Baker's pen made him famous first as a
muckraker and later as head of the American Press Bureau at the Paris peace
conference of 1919. As for Browne, he and Coxey were defeated by brute force,
but echoes of the ideas they spread through the nation's newspapers could be
heard in the public works and currency reforms of the New Deal. Franklin
Roosevelt's administration, in fact, allowed Coxey to deliver his speech on the
Capitol steps exactly fifty years after his arrest.[122] By that time, the
public had grown more accustomed both to liberal economics and to pseudo-events.
The anniversary speech was reported with little fanfare.
History has been kind to Coxey. His economic ideas became
conventional wisdom in less than half a century. Specifically, his attempt to
stimulate the economy through federal spending programs hinted at the ideas of
twentieth-century economist John Maynard Keynes.[123] Although one should not
draw too many parallels between Coxey and Keynes, Coxey's support for running a
budget deficit during hard times would have fit nicely in the 1930s.
Conclusions about the press coverage of Coxey are not so
neatly drawn. On one hand, the Argus-Eyed Demons of Hell and the leaders of the
Commonweal had a mutually beneficial relationship. Browne did outrageous things
because he and Coxey needed attention. Reporters felt justified in accommodating
them because outrageous stories were well-read stories, and the Demons were paid
by the inch. On the other hand, by the standards of twentieth-century
objectivity, the Demons were unfairly sensational. But according to
Dicken-Garcia, sensationalism was accepted or even encouraged in the journalism
of a century ago,[124] and Browne was willing to accept the excesses of his
press campaign in exchange for its benefits. Like Pulitzer, Browne and Coxey
condoned a little sensationalism for what they saw as a good cause.
A year after Coxey's Army had left Massillon, Browne said
the march would not have been possible without the modern newspaper, the
telegraph and "the desire for the sensational . . . catered to by a local
representative of the press."[125]
It was a good summation, but not the best. That came from
Garet Garrett's "The Driver," a short story in which the narrator recalls his
days among the Argus-Eyed Demons of Hell. "News is stranger than fiction," the
narrator says. "[N]ot in what it tells but in how it happens."[126] NOTES
[1] Ray Stannard Baker, American Chronicle (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945), 7.
[2] Baker, American Chronicle, 7.
[3] Sources vary on whether the silver coins on Browne's
jacket were dollars or half-dollars. For another description of Browne's suit
and other details, including his "Old Greasy" nickname, see Donald McMurry,
Coxey's Army: A Study of the Industrial Army Movement of 1894 (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1929). A photograph of Browne in his Buffalo
Bill suit appears in Carlos A. Schwantes, Coxey's Army: An American Odyssey
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985). Both books provide general
accounts of Coxey's Army, mainly after the beginning of the march on 25 March
1894.
[4] Baker, American Chronicle, 7.
[5] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 2. In the 1876 election,
Democrat Samuel Tilden apparently outpolled Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in
both the popular vote and in the Electoral College. However, Hayes' campaign
managers challenged the validity of returns from three Southern states. The
commission set up to solve the problem split its vote along party lines and
awarded all disputed electoral votes to Hayes, giving him a victory that
historians have viewed as tainted.
[6] According to mass media theorist Daniel Boorstin, a
pseudo-event is a happening that is carefully planned (instead of spontaneous)
and occurs primarily for the purpose of being reported. See Daniel Boorstin,
"From News-Gathering to News-Making: A Flood of Pseudo-Events," in Wilbur
Schramm and Donald F. Roberts, eds., The Process and Effects of Mass
Communication (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 120.
[7] For an account of editors' reliance on reporters and
the telegraph during the Civil War and the increasing demands of readers for
fresh news, see Jean Folkerts and Dwight L. Teeter Jr., Voices of a Nation: A
History of Mass Media in the United States (New York: Macmillian College
Publishing Company, 1994) and Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in
Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
[8] Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards, 61.
[9] Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards, 64.
[10] Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards, 89-91.
[11] Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards, 98, 185, 198.
[12] Michael and Edwin Emery, The Press and America: An
Interpretive History of the Mass Media (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1988),
227.
[13] Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York:
Basic Books, 1978), quoted in Pamela Shoemaker and Stephen D. Reese, Mediating
the Message: Theories of Influences on Mass Media Content (New York: Longman,
1991), 92.
[14] Ted Curtis Smythe, "The Reporter, 1880-1900: Working
Conditions and Their Influence on the News," Journalism History 7 (Spring 1980):
8.
[15] David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, The
American Journalist: A Portrait of U.S. News People and Their Work (Bloomington,
Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1986), 6. Also see Dicken-Garcia, Journalism
Standards, passim.
[16] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 38.
[17] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 6; and Joseph Gustaitis,
"Coxey's Army," American History Illustrated, March/April 1994, 41. For Browne's
description of how his wife died on Christmas Day, 1892, and how he felt "from
that moment, I commenced, as was my wife's wish, to absorb her soul . . . and .
. . that all that was good of her entered into me," see "The Old and New
Theosophy," an editorial in The (Massillon) Evening Independent, March 17, 1894.
[18] Baker, American Chronicle, 7.
[19] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 25.
[20] Gustaitis, "Coxey's Army," 41.
[21] Coxey said the idea of financing his plan with
non-interest-bearing bonds came to him in a dream during the night of December
31, 1893-January 1, 1894.
[22] Schwantes pointed out that Bacon's Rebellion marched
on the Virginia government in 1676 and Shays' Rebellion marched on Boston in
1786-87. The first was a colonial government, the second a state government.
Neither was the nation's capital.
[23] Gustaitis, "Coxey's Army," 39.
[24] U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics
of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Bureau of the Census: Washington,
D.C., 1975), 135.
[25] U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics
of the United States, 135.
[26] Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage
(New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1933), 593.
[27] Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 592.
[28] Historical Statistics of the United States, 212,
201. The Warren-Pearson scale uses wholesale farm product prices from the years
1910 to 1914 to figure a base line of 100 for an index to prices in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Measured by this scale, wholesale farm
prices fell from 148 in 1865 to 71 in 1890, the last year for which the
Warren-Pearson scale is available. The scale of measurement for the decline in
the consumer price index comes from the Federal Reserve Bank, which uses 1913 to
set a base line of 100. Measured by this scale, consumer prices fell from 102 in
1865 to 73 in 1894.
[29] Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 592.
[30] Gustaitis, "Coxey's Army, " 39.
[31] Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 466.
[32] Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 525.
[33] Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 525.
[34] Richard Vedder, distinguished professor of
economics, Ohio University, interviewed by the author in Athens, Ohio, 19 April
1994. Transcript in the possession of the author.
[35] Massillon Official City Directory 1895-96
(Massillon: Burch Directory Co., 1894), 126.
[36] Oliver Gramling, AP: The Story of News (New York:
Farrar and Rinehart Inc., 1940), 109-135.
[37] "Journalistic Progress: All Great Cities of the
Country Connected by Associated Press Wires," The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, 16
March 1894.
[38] Emery, The Press and America, 226. Emery said
Hearst's New York Journal had reached a daily circulation of 437,000 by 1896 and
approached the Sunday circulation figure of 600,000 set by Pulitzer's New York
World.
[39] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 32.
[40] Coxey sympathized with the Populists, and vice
versa, but Coxey tended to avoid the Populist label. Coxey ran as the People's
Party candidate for Ohio governor in 1895. He finished third, with 6 percent of
the vote, behind a Republican and a Democrat.
[41] "Bulletin No. 1 -- Published by request, GOOD
ROADS," The (Massillon) Evening Independent, hereafter identified as The Evening
Independent, 6 January 1894.
[42] "Bulletin No. 1," The Evening Independent, 6 January
1894. Also supporting Coxey's road plan were the attorney general of California
and the director of an art school in Detroit.
[43] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 33.
[44] McMurry, Coxey's Army: A Study of the Industrial
Army Movement of 1894, 33.
[45] "Late Editor's Article Tells of Coxey's Life," The
Evening Independent, 19 May 1951. Doubt was cast on the article's veracity by
simple chronology. The paper said that in January 1894, news came from the West
Coast that armies of unemployed men were seizing trains to travel to Washington
and demand relief from Congress. However, Schwantes documented that groups of
unemployed first organized in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and other West
Coast cities in March and April 1894, and the newspapers he cited called these
men "Coxeyites." The most famous theft of a train occurred 24 April 1894, in
Butte, Montana. Thus these movements occurred well after Coxey and Browne's
plans had been announced in January by the Massillon press and on March 15 by
the Chicago Record. Coxey was known for eccentricity but not for senility, so it
appears likely he was trying to be ingratiating in his interview with the
Massillon paper in 1941.
[46] "Bulletin No. 1," The Evening Independent, 6 January
1894.
[47] "Bulletin No. 1," The Evening Indepedent, 6 January
1894.
[48] "Coxey and the Council: A Great Idea for Breaking Up
Hard Times," The Evening Independent, 9 January 1894.
[49] "The Latest Bond Scheme: Now Up for Consideration by
the Council," The Evening Independent, 10 January 1894.
[50] Helena Blavatsky began the Theosophical movement in
Russia in 1858. She and H.S. Olcott formed the Theosophical Society in New York
in 1875. Blavatsky fused elements of Hindu, Tibetan and Egyptian beliefs in a
pantheistic system integrating the divine, the cosmos and the self. The Evening
Independent analyzed Carl Browne's spiritual claims and concluded that his
doctrines differed from true Theosophy.
[51] "Mr. Browne Replies," The Evening Independent, 16
January 1894.
[52] "It Was a Joyous Occasion," The Evening Independent,
19 January 1894.
[53] "It Was a Joyous Occasion," The Evening Independent,
19 January 1894.
[54] "A Story of Real Life," The Evening Independent, 23
January 1894. Coxey raised thoroughbred horses in Ohio and on ranch land he
owned in Oklahoma. His favorite horse, Acolyte, was reported to be worth
$40,000.
[55] "After the Council Meeting," The Evening
Independent, 24 January 1894.
[56] "A Magnificent Faith," The Evening Independent, 27
January 1894.
[57] "Salmagundi," The Evening Independent, 9 February
1894.
[58] "A Sneaking Idea," The Evening Independent, 10
February 1894.
[59] The Evening Independent reprinted items from these
two newspapers. An editorial February 22 said, "The Minneapolis Times does not
know Mr. Coxey, for it says that 'Mr. J.S. Coxey, the man who proposes to lead
100,000 men to Washington to protest against [sic] the issue of bonds, is
probably a railroad ticket agent in disguise as a crank.'" On February 24, the
Independent said the Commonweal had received its "biggest boost" in the form of
a rather supportive editorial in the 185,000-circulation Philadelphia Item.
[60] "Cullings From Coxiana," The Evening Independent, 24
February 1894. The Leader's poem included these lines:
When Coxey saw that times grew bad,
It made his honest heart feel sad
And then he grew confounded mad
And ramped and raged and tore.
To congress he wrote on and said,
"The people must and shall be fed,
If not your blood be on his head,"
You see he's after gore.
When congress failed to toe the mark,
Then Coxey said, with meaning dark,
"That I can bite as well as bark,
You'll very quickly see."
Forthwith he took his fertile pen
And issued from his private den
A call for fifty thousand men
To march against D.C.
The poem concludes by speculating that Coxey's name will
be "Mud" upon arrival in Washington.
[61] "Reformers and Theosophists," The Evening
Independent, 21 February 1894.
[62] "Reformers and Theosophists," The Evening
Independent, 21 February 1894.
[63] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 47.
[64] "Old Hickory Heard From," The Evening Independent, 3
March 1894.
[65] "A Christening at Coxey's," The Evening Independent,
7 March 1894.
[66] "Echoes of the Accident," The Evening Independent,
28 February 1894.
[67] William McKinley "smiled very amiably" but declined
to answer an Independent reporter's question about his opinion of Coxey in a
story March 12. After McKinley became president in 1897, he appointed Skinner to
be consul to Marseilles, France, moving Skinner into a diplomatic career that
eventually took him to consular posts in Berlin, London and Turkey. In 1932
Skinner was envoy to the Baltic countries and encouraged the career of George
Kennan, a young expert on the Soviet Union. Kennan later became the chief
architect of U.S. Cold War diplomacy. Kennan's Memoirs 1925-1950 praised his
boss for his "effective service as consul general in London in World War I." For
a photograph of Skinner, see Edward Thornton Heald, The Stark County Story,
Vol. II (Canton, Ohio: Stark County Historical Society, 1950), 128.
[68] Population figures were taken from the appendix of
the Ohio Census for 1890 and the U.S. Bureau of the Census.
[69] Baker, American Chronicle, 7.
[70] Baker, American Chronicle, 8.
[71] Baker, American Chronicle, 8.
[72] Baker, American Chronicle, 11.
[73] Most of the men in these West Coast marches never
made it to Washington. Many ran out of money or were stranded in Texas, the
Rocky Mountains or central Iowa by railroads that refused to let them ride
inside the boxcars for free. For an account of these movements, which the 1894
press described as "Coxeyite," see Schwantes, Coxey's Army.
[74] Baker, American Chronicle, 11.
[75] "Perfectly Ridiculous," The Evening Independent, 17
March 1894.
[76] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 42-43, and McMurry, Coxey's
Army: A Study of the Industrial Army Movement of 1894, 43. The Times put Jaxon
on an expense account of seventy cents a day. Jaxon ate a lot of oatmeal on the
trip.
[77] These names and newspapers are pieced together from
"Coxey Nervous," The Plain Dealer, 25 March 1894; American Chronicle; The
Evening Independent, passim; and the personal scrapbook of Associated Press
correspondent Wilbur Miller, microfilm edition No. 162, Ohio Historical Society,
Columbus, Ohio, hereafter listed as Miller Scrapbook.
[78] William Serrin, Homestead (New York: Vintage Books,
1992), 92.
[79] Telegram from W.C. Connelly Jr. of the Associated
Press to Wilbur Miller, letter from Henry J. Ford of the Pittsburgh Chronicle
Telegraph to Miller, and telegram from John T. (J?) McCarthy to Miller, 22, 31
in Miller Scrapbook. The extent of Miller's role in covering Coxey's Army was
revealed for the first time by the acquisition of the Miller Scrapbook in 1987
by the Ohio Historical Society.
[80] "Coxey Nervous," The Plain Dealer, 25 March 1894,
and "A Chance to Guess," The Evening Independent, 22 March 1894. The winner of
the contest was James Waggoner of Massillon, who guessed eighty-four. The
Independent awarded him a free sitting at a photographer's studio and twelve
"cabinet photographs."
[81] "Coxey Nervous," The Plain Dealer, 25 March 1894.
[82] "Letters by the Bushel," The Evening Independent, 21
March 1894, and "Coxey Nervous," The Plain Dealer, 25 March 1894.
[83] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 43. Schwantes reported the
flag-bearer's name as Jasper Johnson, but Baker identified him as Jasper Johnson
Buchanan. Coxey declined to allow women into the Commonweal. He feared the
mixing of sexes could create tensions and bring undue attention to the moral
qualities of his marchers.
[84] The Haymarket Riot occurred 4 May 1886, in Chicago
when police tried to break up a mass meeting of workers striking against the
McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. A dynamite bomb thrown by a striker or a
strike sympathizer killed seven policemen and injured sixty others. Four people
were hanged in connection with the violence, one committed suicide, and three
were given prison sentences but pardoned in 1893 by the Illinois governor. The
Great Unknown was rumored to be Samuel Fielden, one of these three.
[85] "The J.S. Coxey Crusade," The Evening Independent,
20 March 1894. The Independent attributed the description of the Great Unknown
to a story by "the Chicago Record man," i.e., Ray Stannard Baker.
[86] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 81.
[87] "The 'Great Unknown' Is a Chicago Fakir, Prophet,
Astrologer & c.," clipping identified as "Special dispatch to The Enquirer," 17
April 1894, in the Miller Scrapbook.
[88] John E. Semonche, Ray Stannard Baker: A Quest for
Democracy in Modern America, 1870-1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1969), 62.
[89] "News from the Front," The Evening Independent, 24
March 1894.
[90] Baker, American Chronicle, 14-15.
[91] Baker, American Chronicle, 15.
[92] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 44-45.
[93] "Moving from Massillon," The Evening Independent, 26
March 1894.
[94] Semonche, Ray Stannard Baker, 63.
[95] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 80.
[96] W.T. Stead, "Coxeyism: A Character Sketch," The
Review of Reviews, Vol. X, 48.
[97] See for example, "Brains Out of Tune," The Evening
Independent, 7 April 1894, and "Coxey's Army on the Move," The New York Times,
26 March 1894.
[98] Editorial, The Evening Independent, 9 April 1894.
[99] "At Camp Bunker Hill," The Evening Independent, 27
March 1894.
[100] Miller Scrapbook, 3.
[101] Miller Scrapbook, 74.
[102] "Notes on the Commonweal," excerpts from The Plain
Dealer in The Evening Independent, 20 March 1894, and "The Army Behaving Well,"
The Evening Independent, 30 March 1894.
[103] "Coxey in Command," The Evening Independent, 30
March 1894.
[104] Baker, American Chronicle, 22, and Miller
Scrapbook, 74-75.
[105] Miller Scrapbook, 3.
[106] "General Order No. 3" and "General Order No. 6,"
Miller Scrapbook, 97-98.
[107] "Special Order No. 1," Miller Scrapbook, 96.
[108] Untitled clipping, possibly Baltimore American,
n.d., Miller Scrapbook, 3.
[109] Gustaitis, "Coxey's Army," 43.
[110] Baker, American Chronicle, 22.
[111] "Shipped as Live Stock," The Evening Independent,
17 April 1894.
[112] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 79.
[113] Miller, "Fire at Sea," Canton Repository, clipping
dated "1895" in Miller Scrapbook, 75. The Oxford English Dictionary defines
Greek fire as "a combustible composition for setting fire to an enemy's ships,
works, etc."
[114] Miller Scrapbook, 2, and Schwantes, Coxey's Army,
81.
[115] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 168.
[116] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 168.
[117] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 168.
[118] Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 178-85. The New York Times
printed Coxey's speech on 2 May 1894, faithfully reproducing the 1,000-word text
but managing a parting shot at Coxey in the headline: "The Protest Coxey Didn't
Read: Wail Over Fancied Oppression and a Plea for Unstable Currency." Copies of
the speech also appeared in other newspapers, and, on May 9, in Congressional
Record. Senator William Allen of Nebraska introduced a resolution calling for a
congressional investigation of Coxey's arrest, but it never came to a vote. See
Congressional Record, 53rd Congress, 2nd Session, 4511-4518, 4564-4571, 4591.
[119] "Army at the Capitol" and "Coxey and Browne
Arrested," The Evening Independent, 1 May 1894.
[120] "Coxey at the Capitol," The Evening Independent, 1
May 1894.
[121] Baker, American Chronicle, 25.
[122] Gustaitis, "Coxey's Army," 44.
[123] I am indebted to Richard Vedder, Ohio University
distinguised professor of economics, for suggesting this comparison.
[124] Dicken-Garcia said the word "objectivity" did not
come into common use until the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Nineteenth-century journalists used the word "impartiality" when describing a
lack of political bias in their news columns. Furthermore, she said there was
little analysis of "truth" among nineteenth-century journalists and press
critics. See Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards, 98.
[125] Miller Scrapbook, 74.
[126] Garet Garrett, "The Driver," Saturday Evening Post,
24 December 1921, 41.
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