American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

by H. W. Brands

  The justices were unmoved. All nine found for the government in favor of injunctions. Associate Justice David Brewer, writing for the court, cited the commerce clause as granting the federal government jurisdiction over rail transport, and he asserted that to deny the federal courts the authority to issue injunctions would impair this jurisdiction. Should the government be required to wait until criminal obstruction of commerce had been committed before taking action, the interests of the entire nation would be at the mercy of small groups. “There is no such impotency in the national government,” Brewer declared. “The entire strength of the nation may be used to enforce in any part of the land the full and free exercise of all national powers and the security of all rights intrusted by the constitution to its care. The strong arm of the national government may be put forth to brush away all obstructions to the freedom of interstate commerce or the transportation of the mails. If the emergency arises, the army of the nation, and all its militia, are at the service of the nation, to compel obedience to its laws.”25

  This carte blanche to federal strike-breaking sealed the doom of the Pullman strike, and indeed of the ARU. From jail and the various courtrooms, Debs found it impossible to coordinate the activities of the strikers, who were already overmatched by the federal and state troops. The boycott of the Pullman cars disintegrated, and the trains began running again. The workers at Pullman, deprived of the leverage the ARU boycott had provided, had no choice but to capitulate. The railroad managers’ victory became complete when the ARU, having staked its credibility on the Pullman strike, disintegrated in the wake of the strike’s failure. Not for two more generations would the industrial principle of labor organization take hold in the United States. In the interim the injunction would be used again and again to handcuff labor leaders as the courts continued to side with capital.

  Yet Debs refused to be discouraged. The failure of the Pullman strike simply made him more radical; he entered jail a moderate unionist and emerged a socialist. The courts had been corrupted by capital, he declared after serving six months on the contempt charge. “If not this, I challenge the world to assign a reason why a judge, under the solemn obligation of an oath to obey the Constitution, should, in a temple dedicated to justice, stab the Magna Carta of American liberty to death in the interest of corporations, that labor might be disrobed of its inalienable rights and those who advocated its claim to justice imprisoned as if they were felons.” But the support of the many ordinary people who had expressed their confidence in him—including the hundred thousand who cheered his release from jail—gave him hope, for it suggested that change was coming. “It means that American lovers of liberty are setting in operation forces to rescue their constitutional liberties from the grasp of monopoly and its mercenary hirelings. It means that the people are aroused in view of impending perils and that agitation, organization, and unification are to be the future battle cries of men who will not part with their birthrights.”26

  IT WAS DOUBTLESS small comfort to the defeated rail workers, as they straggled back to their jobs, to know that others were worse off than they. Millions of Americans had no jobs at all during the depression of the 1890s, and until the economy revived they had little hope of finding any. Government officials lamented the high unemployment but lacked the knowledge of economic theory and the tools of monetary policy to do much about it. The Populists thought they had the answer, in the form of free silver. They may have been right; eventually the government would learn to loosen the money supply to prevent recessions from deepening into depressions. But theirs was a minority view for the time being; conventional wisdom dictated that the economy would have to find its own way to recovery.

  If Jacob Coxey had known either more or less about economics he might have agreed. Coxey had operated businesses in Pennsylvania and Ohio; a quarry in the latter state earned him a modest fortune. In 1893 he traveled to Chicago for the Columbian Exposition, where he marveled at the sights and especially the sound of the voice of a Californian named Carl Browne, an accomplished huckster and agitator who currently flogged free silver and reincarnation, not necessarily in that order. Coxey’s material success had failed to fill his soul. “I felt within a craving and a longing on the subject of religion which the churches seemed entirely unable to satisfy,” Coxey recalled. “There were many undefined beliefs in my mind which I was unable to concentrate into any concrete form, and when Carl Browne explained to me his theories of reincarnation, I knew in a flash that it was what I had been searching for.”27

  Browne’s promise of future lives didn’t prevent Coxey from focusing on his current existence and a pet enthusiasm of his own. His travels across the Ohio Valley had convinced him that the nation desperately needed better roads. Railroads sufficed for big cargoes and long journeys, but for the farm-to-market coming and going that occupied the daily and weekly lives of most Americans, the dirt surfaces they traveled on were an anachronistic disgrace. In spring the roads’ mud swallowed wagons to the hubs and horses to the flanks; in summer their dust made hacking, gasping ghosts of travelers; in winter their icy ruts broke axles and bones. Coxey had long believed the country couldn’t prosper without better roads, and the depression of the 1890s reinforced this conviction. Viewed properly, the depression was a godsend, for—by Coxey’s thinking, publicized in Bulletin Number 1 of his Good Roads Association—it provided just the excuse the government needed to get to work on the roads. Among the millions of able-bodied unemployed were men who would eagerly take shovel and mule team to the nation’s roads. All that was required was for Congress to appropriate $500 million.

  Carl Browne’s contribution to the scheme was the idea of a march to Washington. The lawmakers could ignore petitions and circulars; they’d be harder pressed to ignore a caravan of voters. Coxey’s Bulletin Number 3 announced a starting date of Easter Sunday, March 25, 1894, and the starting point of Massillon, Ohio, Coxey’s home. The marchers would arrive at Washington by May 1. The movement needed a name; Browne supplied the “Commonweal of Christ.” It needed a banner; he commissioned an oil painting of the Savior, for which he personally sat.

  The gloom of the depression had been darker than ever that winter, and Massillon’s merchants were eager for anything that would bring business to town. The local paper set a young reporter on the Coxey-Browne story; his dispatches went out over the Associated Press wires and provided light relief from the prevailing misery. Browne made good copy, and Coxey chimed in with extravagant promises. “The success of my undertaking is assured,” he said. “I shall camp on the Capitol steps at Washington with 500,000 men.” Letters brought promises of reinforcement. Pittsburgh pledged 1,500 recruits to what the papers began calling “Coxey’s Army,” to the chagrin of Browne. Wabash, Indiana, volunteered 1,000. One H. B. Clark of Illinois offered to field 150 baseball players, who would scrimmage townsfolk along the way to raise money. A convicted murderer in Chicago said he wanted to come but unfortunately had a date with the hangman.28

  On the morning of departure the army numbered somewhat more than a hundred, including undercover agents sent by the nervous chief of Pittsburgh’s police to reconnoiter the radical column headed his way. The press corps was smaller, but only by about half; editors throughout the region decided the Coxey story was the best one going. Carl Browne kept the reporters entertained. He gave interviews by the dozen, revealing such secrets as that he was a partial reincarnation (whatever that meant) of Jesus Christ. He lectured on the currency question, in favor of silver. And he introduced, so to speak, the journalists to “the Great Unknown,” a mysterious fellow who appeared one day preaching class warfare of the poor against the rich. The reporters naturally inquired into his background. He silenced them with a ferocious glower. “I am the Great Unknown,” he said, “and the Great Unknown I must remain.”29

  All the coverage of Coxey’s army inspired imitators. In San Francisco jobless men gathered by the hundreds, pledging to join Coxey in Washington if they could find rail passage
. By the time their number topped a thousand, local elected officials and police were pleading with the Southern Pacific to carry the men east, simply to get them out of town. The company tried to charge full fares; when the men refused to pay, it knocked the price down and the journey began. All went smoothly to Utah, where the Southern Pacific lines linked up with those of the Union Pacific. The latter company hadn’t been consulted about the discount for the protesters and declined to match it. The men insisted, the railroad resisted, and now the Utah authorities began to sweat. The depression was punishing the mining industry; the last thing the state needed was another thousand angry drifters. The men started walking toward Wyoming before the official pressure and the bad publicity prompted the Union Pacific management to hitch some empty boxcars to an eastbound train and let the men climb aboard.

  A similar problem developed at Council Bluffs, Iowa, where the Union Pacific tracks terminated. The plight of the California Coxeyites attracted the interest of some locals who didn’t like the railroad and determined to help out by hijacking a train and offering it to the travelers. Some of the protesters would have happily accepted the favor, but others, preferring not to lend credence to allegations that they were bums and hooligans, declined for the group.

  A separate western wing of the Coxey movement suffered no such scruples. Two hundred unemployed Montana miners asked the Northern Pacific for cheap passage to Washington; when the company refused, the miners and some sympathetic railmen simply stole a train and headed east. The company found a federal marshal and deputies and dispatched a second train in pursuit. Across the mountains and plains of Montana the Coxeyites flew, with the law on their tail. A rockslide had closed a tunnel near Bozeman; the runaway train stopped, and the men got out to move the debris aside. But the chase train was closing in, and to thwart capture the engineer of the Coxey train called the diggers back on board, summoned a full head of steam, and crashed into the blockage. Rocks flew, sparks shot into the air, metal shrieked, but the train got through and continued east. The Northern Pacific management arranged another roadblock, this one deliberately contrived by dynamite. But the artificial landslide only partly crossed the track, and it scarcely slowed the fugitives. The company, which had the signal advantage of controlling the telegraph lines, then ordered its station managers to drain the water tanks all the way to Dakota. Without water, the fugitive train would quite literally run out of steam.

  Yet the company didn’t count on the sympathy for the hijackers among the Montana populace. The Northern Pacific was as hated as many railroads in that era, and townsmen along the route offered assistance to the Coxeyites. At Billings they threw a feast for the hungry miners; when the chase train rolled into town and the deputies tried to seize the fugitives—shooting several, one fatally—the townsfolk rallied to the Coxeyites’ defense. They threw rocks, swung sticks and metal pipes, and gave every appearance of wanting to massacre the Pinkertons, as they called the deputies. The Coxeyites, their stomachs full and their ranks now swollen to five hundred, tore off east again.

  By this time the chase had made headlines across the country. “Blood Flows from Coxeyism,” the New York Times blared. “Battle between Law and Anarchy.” Grover Cleveland and Richard Olney grew alarmed. The attorney general persuaded the president to mobilize federal troops; the Northern Pacific obliged by sending a special train to fetch them. The troop train intercepted the miners at Forsyth, Montana, where they had to stop for spare parts. In the dark the troops surrounded them with leveled bayonets; the Coxeyites had no choice but to yield.30

  The dramatic escapades in the West made the progress of the main column of Coxey’s army appear mundane by comparison. Coxey and Browne led their men through the mud of Pennsylvania’s spring, reminding themselves of the need for better roads. They crossed into Maryland wet, footsore, and famished; Browne and the Great Unknown began bickering. The animosity grew until the Unknown attempted a mutiny. Coxey called for a vote of the marchers; they sided with the Unknown by 158 to 4, whereupon Coxey declared, “I cast 154 votes for Brother Browne.” While the rank and file puzzled over how Coxey rated so many votes, the Unknown conceded defeat and left, almost as mysteriously as he had arrived. (Reporters eventually revealed that they had discovered the Unknown’s identity—he was one A. P. B. Bozarro, a purveyor of patent medicine whom Browne had met at the Columbian Exposition—but had kept his secret to improve their stories.)31

  The army trailed into Washington at the end of April, just hours before Coxey’s May Day deadline. The capital police turned out in force, augmented by federal soldiers from the Washington Barracks and Fort Myer. The police refused Coxey’s request for a parade permit and threatened to arrest him if he proceeded. He answered that he and his men had marched four hundred miles and didn’t intend to be stopped four miles short of their goal. The police hovered but didn’t descend upon the column as it proceeded down Fourteenth Street and then turned up Pennsylvania Avenue toward Capitol Hill. Curious crowds thronged the sidewalks, wondering whether there would be a riot.

  The column halted at the east entrance to the Capitol grounds. Coxey and Browne conferred, then approached the Capitol steps. A policeman on horseback blocked the way and told them to turn back. Coxey, now within just yards of his goal, refused. He darted past the officer, hurdled a stone wall, and ran through the crowd toward the building. Browne, apparently by plan, tore off in another direction. The police gave chase.

  They caught Browne, who resisted with surprising vigor. Dozens of onlookers joined him, making a melee of the affair. Batons cracked heads and broke arms till Browne was manhandled into a police wagon.

  The diversion allowed Coxey to reach the Capitol steps. He began to speak but was cut short by two policemen who dragged him away and threw him bodily back into his carriage. The crowd started chanting his name and seemed ready for a set-to. Had Coxey been a little more belligerent, a full-scale riot might have erupted. But he merely acknowledged the crowd, said a few words no one could hear above the shouting, and led his army back down Capitol Hill to a campsite a short distance away.

  The protest fizzled to an end in the following days. Coxey was arrested the next morning and charged, along with Browne, with breaking an 1882 law governing the use of the Capitol grounds. The trial and the guilty verdict elicited derision among persons with any sympathy for Coxey’s cause. “Every detail of the proceedings was stamped with the effort on the part of the prosecutor to make a mountain out of a mole hill,” the Omaha World-Herald hooted. “The crime: Carrying banners on the Capitol grounds! Trespassing on the grass! Great Caesar! If the several kinds of fools who are managing the anti-Coxey crusade at the national capital were in the employ of Coxey, they could not do him better service than they are doing today.”32

  Coxey spent twenty days in jail. The army dissolved; those who had homes to return to headed there; those who didn’t simply wandered off.

  The Western Coxeyites never got anywhere near Washington. The Californians stranded without rail transport in Iowa eventually took to the Des Moines River in homemade boats. They drifted down to the Mississippi, where friendly tugboat captains pushed them upstream into the Ohio. They reached Cincinnati before fatigue, boredom, and the knowledge that they had long missed Coxey and the main branch of the army caused them to give up the quest. The Montana contingent sat in jail in Helena till the citizens of that state decided they didn’t want to feed and house the miners any longer. The city funded a flotilla of riverboats and sent the Coxeyites down the spring-swollen Missouri. They got as far as St. Louis before their enthusiasm gave out, almost three months after Coxey’s arrest in Washington.33

  Chapter 19

  TARIFF BILL AND DOLLAR MARK

  The workings of democracy during the 1890s were less bloody than those of capitalism but hardly more genteel. The inauguration of Grover Cleveland in 1885 had broken the Republican stranglehold on the White House but not materially deflected the course of American politics. Cleveland delivered hi
s inaugural address from memory—the only president to attempt the feat—yet in other respects he proved a disappointment. Democrats hungered for the spoils of office after their decades in the wilderness, but the fastidious Cleveland insisted on honesty and efficiency in administration. “Why, Mr. President, I should like to see you move more expeditiously in advancing the principles of the Democracy,” a party loyalist admonished; Cleveland replied sourly, “I suppose you mean that I should appoint two horse thieves a day instead of one.” A Nebraska Democrat complained of the president, “We are New Yorked to disgrace and death, and mugwumped to a state of idiocy.” Although the Democrats held a majority in the House, the Republicans controlled the Senate and largely stifled Cleveland’s efforts at positive action. He was left to wield his veto—against the Texas seed bill and, most controversially, against measures to expand pension payments to Civil War veterans and their dependents. Pensions had become a major expense of the federal government, and while Cleveland was willing to support veterans crippled by war injuries, he rejected the use of pensions for simple income replacement or—heaven forbid!—political purposes. Veterans and their kin naturally found him less than irresistible. When, in addition, Cleveland in 1887 responded unthinkingly and affirmatively to a request to return captured Confederate battle flags to their Southern regiments, the Republicans waved the bloody shirt one last time. They nominated Benjamin Harrison, a Civil War general and the grandson of William Henry Harrison, and sent him to battle Cleveland on the pensions, on the honor of the Union, and on the protective tariff, which they endorsed and Cleveland opposed. Cleveland carried the 1888 popular vote by 100,000 (of 11 million votes cast) but lost in the Electoral College by 233 to 168.1