On March 25, 1894, the eyes of the nation fixed on a small city in Ohio called Massillon. A growing corps of reporters had been gathered there for some weeks, equipped with a special telegraph room set up in a local hotel for them to send their stories. Curious spectators were there as well, waiting on that Easter Sunday to see whether a curious band of men called Coxey’s Army was going to materialize.
It was the second year of the country’s worst economic depression yet, and thousands of homeless and jobless men slept on the floors of city halls and walked from town to town looking for jobswork. But Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey, and his more colorful partner, a Californian named Carl Browne, planned to lead an army of unemployed men from Massillon to the nation’s capital to demand that the federal government provide jobs to the jobless, building and repairing the nation’s roads, and to expand the currency by paying the men in paper money. Coxey and Browne had told the press to expect a hundred thousand men. It was unclear whether they would muster even a hundred.
As it happened, they got somewhere around a hundred men to start out, and their numbers would grow in the weeks to come. Early in the morning, a bugle sounded in the camp by Ohio’s Tuscarawas River where the men had slept. By 8 am, they were in formation for a drill, led by a character from Chicago popularly referred to as “The Great Unknown.” After an hour of drills, Carl Browne—wearing cavalry boots, a buckskin coat with silver dollars down the front, and a white necktie—preached a sermon. He had a theology of his own, which included elements of Christianity, reincarnation, and the belief that he and Coxey had bits of the souls of Andrew Jackson and Jesus Christ in them. Indeed, Coxey and Browne preferred the name “Commonweal of Christ” to “Coxey’s Army.” After Browne finished preaching, the Great Unknown shouted, “Everybody march!”