After an economic panic left many Americans out of work in 1894, a ragtag group of protesters set out on a quixotic journey to Washington.
Considered the first significant protest march on the nation’s capital, the group of hundreds of unemployed men ended up camping out in several places along the Route 1 corridor including Bladensburg, Hyattsville and Colmar Manor.
The protests were the brainchild of Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey, who argued that Congress should pass a massive infrastructure bill in order to create jobs for people left unemployed after the Panic of 1893.
The march started in Massillon, Ohio, just south of Akron, on Easter Sunday, with a little over a hundred unemployed men and dozens of bemused newspaper reporters, who filed colorful daily dispatches.
As they made their way more than 400 miles to D.C., Coxey’s Army, as it became known, swelled to around 600 men, including, in a separate “army,” the novelist Jack London.
After being denied a permit to speak on the Capitol grounds on May 1, Coxey attempted to give a prepared speech anyway and was swiftly arrested.
The march ended, and Coxey’s infrastructure proposal stalled, but the marchers themselves stuck around, camping out in Rosslyn and on the 260-acre Shreve farm in Colmar Manor. In mid-May, Coxey, his wife and his son Legal Tender (named for Coxey’s support of fiat money), stayed for free at the historic George Washington House Hotel in Bladensburg, while other marchers camped nearby.
The Anacostia River soon flooded, and the remnants of Coxey’s Army left Bladensburg. The protesters also stayed at a spot in Hyattsville they called “Camp Liberty.”
Coxey’s Army didn’t achieve its goals, but its idea of a “petition in boots” became the inspiration for protests led by World War I veterans to the March on Washington in 1963 and some of the flavor of Coxey’s ideas ended up in the New Deal.
Today, you can see a historical marker at the Bladensburg Waterfront Park featuring a map which shows where the protesters camped out.
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