May 1, 1894: A grassroots procession of labor demonstrators known as Coxey’s Army arrived in Washington, D.C. from their initial starting point in Ohio, reaching the endpoint of the first large protest march in the history of the United States. The unemployment rate was over twenty percent and the marchers demanded government action. Specifically, they urged the creation of a national public works program to put under and unemployed Americans to work in government jobs. Their demands were not met, but a strikingly similar program was enacted four decades later in response to another national economic depression. It was called the New Deal. As historian Benjamin F. Alexander writes, “While Coxey’s Army in 1894 did not succeed in prodding Congress to pass the specific bills they desired in that particular year, they were part of a larger groundswell of angry producers who, in the larger picture spanning multiple decades, put the issues of their own struggles on the table and forced lawmakers and others to take notice and deal with them.”
Citations: Benjamin F. Alexander, Coxey’s Army: Popular Protest in the Gilded Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 2-3, 124-125, https://archive.org/details/coxeysarmypopula0000alex; J.F. Jarvis, “‘More money! Less misery! Good Roads!’ Coxey’s Army approaching Washington,” stereograph (location unknown, c. 1894), https://lccn.loc.gov/2002718487.
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