Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1987
Abstract
Carlos Schwantes tells us in Coxey's Army that the 1894 "petition in boots" aroused greater fears of social disorder than any event since the disputed election of 1876, although he also makes clear that such fears were largely groundless. The march on Washington to demand federal jobs for the unemployed was the brain child of Jacob Coxey, a prosperous Ohio quarry-owner, and Carl Browne, an itinerant panorama-painter who joined marches of the unemployed in Chicago in 1893. Coxey hoped not only to eliminate unemployment and create good roads but also to inflate the currency bv paying workers in legal tender notes, an aspect only lightly developed by Schwantes in what is, overall, an excellent account of "Coxeyism."
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 7:1 (Winter 1987). Copyright © 1987 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.