Jacob S. Coxey Sr.

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BiographyEdit

Early yearsEdit

Jacob Sechler Coxey was born on April 16, 1854, in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, the son of the former Mary Ann Sechler and Thomas Coxey.<ref>"Jacob Sechler Coxey", www.ancestry.com</ref> His father worked in a sawmill at the time Jacob was born, but the family pulled up stakes to move to industrially thriving Danville, Pennsylvania, in 1860, with Jacob's father taking a job working in an iron mill.<ref name=Alexander5>Benjamin F. Alexander, Coxey's Army: Popular Protest in the Gilded Age. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015; p. 5.</ref>

Known as Jake, Coxey excelled in school, attending local public schools and at least one additional year in a private academy<ref name=Alexander5 /> before leaving to take his first job at the age of 16 as a water boy in the mill where his father worked.<ref name="Odyssey">Schwantes, Carlos A. Coxey's army: an American odyssey. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.</ref>

Coxey spent eight years at the iron mill, advancing through the ranks from water boy to machine oiler, boiler tender, and finally to stationary engineer.<ref name=Alexander5 /> Coxey left the mill in 1878 to establish a business partnership with an uncle in a Harrisburg scrap-iron business.<ref name=Alexander5 /> In this capacity, Coxey went on a scrap iron buying trip to the town of Massillon, located 325 miles to the west, in 1881.<ref name=Alexander8>Alexander, Coxey's Army, p. 8.</ref> Coxey liked the town so much that he decided to stay, cashing out of the scrap iron business and using the proceeds to purchase a large farm and establish a quarry producing silica sand for the manufacture of glass and iron.<ref name=Alexander8 />

Coxey was a passionate equestrian, who bred blooded horses and raced or sold them across the nation.<ref name=Study>Donald L. McMurry, Coxey's Army: A Study of the Industrial Army Movement of 1894. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1968; p. ???</ref> Horse racing was among the most popular spectator sports in the United States and Coxey's horse-breeding enterprise was prosperous, but he fell into gambling on racing, which contributed to the end of his first marriage in 1888, after 14 years and four children.<ref name=Alexander8 />

Coxey would remarry in 1891, siring two more children, including a son named "Legal Tender" in honor of his father's quirky monetary obsessions.<ref>Alexander, Coxey's Army, p. 1.</ref>

First political interestsEdit

Coxey was born to parents who supported the Democratic Party and he entered politics under this banner. With the coming of the economic crisis of 1877, Coxey became a partisan of the United States Greenback Party, which ascribed the nations economic woes to faulty economic principles which led to a severe contraction of the money supply in the years after the American Civil War. Prosperity could be restored, Greenbackers believed, by the issuance of sufficient quantities of paper money.<ref>Lyman Tower Sargent, Extremism in America. New York: University of New York Press, 1995; p. ???</ref>

When the People's Party emerged at the start of the 1890s, it earned the support of Coxey and most other Greenbackers and he shifted his allegiance to that political organization.

Coxey had experience as a laborer and an employer; he was also aware of the agricultural situation. He was a reformer who was willing to spend time and money to promote his plans for the betterment of the social order.<ref name=Study/> Coxey was regarded by many contemporary observers as convincingly earnest. One reporter wrote, "He seems to be profoundly impressed with the suffering of mankind and with a belief that there is a deep-laid plan of monopolist to crush the poor to the earth."<ref name=Study/>

He was often branded as a crank for challenging the economic system that made him so prosperous.<ref name=Odyssey/>

Coxey's ArmyEdit

In 1893, a severe economic depression swept the United States – a crisis remembered as the Panic of 1893. Unemployment skyrocketed,<ref>Although statistics of the day are incomplete, some estimates peg the unemployment rate at nearly 20%. See, for instance, Alexander, Coxey's Army, p. 2.</ref> bank runs paralyzed the local financial system, and credit dried up, while a protracted period of deflation put negative pressure on wages, prompting widespread lockouts and strikes.

Never one to be short of either self-confidence or political ambition, Coxey believed that he had a cure for the nation's economic woes and began espousing a plan of public works, specifically road improvement, to be financed through the issuance of $500 million in paper money, backed by government bonds.<ref name=Alexander3>Alexander, Coxey's Army, p. 3.</ref> This expenditure would in one swoop improve infrastructure, put unemployed workers to work, and loosen the strangled credit situation, Coxey believed.<ref name=Alexander3 />

To accompany his novel and controversial economic program, organized around the slogan "Good Roads",<ref>Alexander, Coxey's Army, p. 45.</ref> Coxey and his close political associate Carl Browne devised a novel political strategy designed to force the United States government into action.<ref>Donald L. McMurry, Coxey's Army: A Study in Industrial Unrest, 1893–1898. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1929; pp. 32–36.</ref> Rather than attempt to form a conventional political organization to capture decision-making offices, Coxey decided upon a course of what would later be known as direct action — the assembly of a mass of unemployed workers who would boldly march on Washington, D.C., to demand immediate satisfaction of their needs by Congress. This plan began to take shape early in the spring of 1894, to the point that by March the managing editor of the Chicago Record would assign young reporter Ray Stannard Baker to cover the "queer chap down there in Massillon" who was "getting up an army of the unemployed to march on Washington."<ref>quoted in Alexander, Coxey's Army, p. 44.</ref>

Many members of Coxey's family were opposed to his involvement in Coxey's Army. His father refused to talk to reporters and called his son "stiff necked", "cranky", and "pig-headed".<ref name=Odyssey/> One of Coxey's sisters called him an embarrassment.

He was a member of the Socialist Party circa 1912.<ref>Johnson, Oakley C. Marxism In United States History Before the Russian Revolution (1876–1917). New York: Humanities Press. 1974. p. 175.</ref>

Death and legacyEdit

Coxey died on May 18, 1951, aged 97, in Massillon, Ohio. When asked his secret to longevity, he told reporters an array of reasons from elixirs to not resisting temptation.<ref name=Odyssey/>

FootnotesEdit

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