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[00:00:00]

Hey, I'm Carlos Watson. I'm hosting a primetime talk show, and guess what, I'm not a white guy named Jimmy. Hey, with a global pandemic, historic recession, racial justice, protests, 20 20 is not a joke. We need something more than late night comedians help make sense of this craziness. Welcome to the Carlos Watson Show. Look, it's going to be brand new deep conversations with everyone from Malcolm Gladwell to Paris Hilton. And back again, join me, Carlos Watson on the Aussie YouTube channel or listen to the podcast version on the I Heart radio Apple podcast or wherever else you listen.

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Blood on the Tracks is a new podcast about legendary music producer Phil Spector and the murder of Lana Clarkson. This podcast is hosted by me. Jake Brenan, creator and host of the award winning Music and True Crime podcast is Graceland. Season one features 10 episodes told from the perspective of those who knew Phil Spector best, his so-called friends. Just like Phil Spector. This podcast sounds like nothing you've heard before. Blood on the Tracks contains adult content and explicit language.

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Listen to Blood on the Tracks and the I Heart Radio Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to stuff you missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast, I'm Holly Fry, and I'm Tracy Wilson. So in the midst of today's very bananas world, which I think we have both talked about a lot has been informing our choices of topics lately and which is involving this constant news cycle of economic instability and protests and those things being hashed and rehashed and discussed for their various merits and lack thereof.

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In some cases, I got to thinking about earlier protests and wanting to talk more about those and specifically the first protest march on Washington, D.C. And that is the story of Cox's army, and it is one that's been requested a lot of times. It's really easy when you look at the facts of it to see why it is so compelling to people and why people request it, because in addition to parallels to our current situation, there are also just a lot of really fascinating details in the mix.

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So today is the day and we're covering Jacob Coxy and what came to be known colloquially as Cox's Army. Yes, I feel like this one has been on both of our lists at points. Yeah. So many people have asked for it. So we've talked on the show before about the panic of 1893 and the economic crash that came along with it. Railroad overbuilding that was financed through just really unsound lending practices had caused a lot of railroads to go under.

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And then that, coupled with a run on the gold supply, the country was plunged into what amounted to a financial freefall. Those are obviously broad strokes. But since we have covered this many, many times before, we're just doing the the light touch version. But as a result of that panic, 500 banks closed across the country and 15000 businesses shut their doors to the last time. And 74 railroads, which had been a huge economic driver in a lot of places, ceased operations.

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And this was, of course, all happening before things like unemployment insurance. So workers that had come into the labor market in a new industrial age and were prepared to work in that industrial age, suddenly had no work and they also had no safety net. President Grover Cleveland continued his anti welfare stance that he had held for a long time. We talked about this earlier on in our episode about Grover Cleveland secret surgery. But in short, he thought that this rush to embrace silver with the Sherman Silver Purchase Act had been a woeful misstep economically.

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He thought there needed to be a course correction. And he also felt really strongly that financial assistance for the country's common man was just not the business of the government. In 1887, during his first term, he had vetoed a bailout for Texas farmers who were trying to get through a drought. And he wrote this as part of the veto. I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering, which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit a prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced, that though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.

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That's a whole bag of weasels to unpack. Chicago during this time reported an uptick in crime not because people turned to crime as a way to make an illicit living in desperation, but because they wanted desperately to get arrested. Jail or prison, which offered shelter and regular meals, was preferable to the streets in a Chicago winter. And other cities also wrestled with similar problems and how to manage a population that was losing its housing and ultimately completely losing stability.

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And of course, everyone wanted things to improve. But not many saw a way to get through this turbulent time. And that is where we get to Jacob Coxie, who came up with a novel plan. So at the center of this story is this man, Jacob Sechler. Coxie and Coxie was the son of a sawmill engineer named Thomas Coxy. Jacob was born in Silens Grove, Pa., on April 16th, 1854, the log house he was born and actually now bears a historical marker.

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When Jacob was six, the family moved to Danville, Pennsylvania, where his father started working in an iron mill.

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Jacob completed nine years of school before going to work when he was sixteen, also at a mill serving as the water boy. He worked his way up through various positions over the next eight years. When he was twenty, he married a young woman named Caroline Ammerman, and the two of them had four children together.

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Coxie voted for the first time during this stage of his life in the 1876 election at the age of 22. Over the years, he would switch political parties multiple. Times, and he was a member of the Greenback Party at one point. He even organized its Danville, Pennsylvania, chapter. He moved on to work with his uncle in a scrap metal business in 1878. And it was while on a business trip for this job in 1881 that he first visited Massillon, Ohio.

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He decided he would like to move there, and that was really the end of his scrap metal career. He sold his interest in the business and his next move was to purchase a sandstone quarry in Massillon and convert it into a crushing mill to process silica sand. He also purchased a farm where he would eventually start breeding horses in the late 80s, when he became interested in racing in between the quarry and his fancy stock horse breeding, he was able to build a really nice living for himself.

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Coxie was also really interested in politics and the economy, and even before the panic of 1893, he was aware of the problems that were facing laborers in the U.S. was this was things that he gave a great deal of thought to. And allegedly a moment of inspiration led to the reform idea that would make him famous. Yeah, just for clarity. Like even before the panic, there were economic downturn effects happening in there. There were labor shortages already.

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But the story of his inspiration goes that as he was traveling home one day, he noticed that the road that he was on was in really sorry shape. According to a write up in the Chautauquan in 1894, this was the result of an especially problematic mud hole in the road that hampered his progress. And after he got out of the mud hole and started thinking about how they really needed to fix that roadway and they needed better roadways in general, he put together the idea that the many people who were out of work could be given jobs fixing the roads throughout the state.

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He started putting these ideas to paper in 1891 and he wrote the Coxie Plan for Business and Unemployment Relief How the State of Ohio and its Subdivisions Can Help Themselves. Cox's idea evolved into what he called his good roads bill that called for fair wages and an eight hour work day to achieve both prosperity for the common man and better public works and the good roads. Bill was no small potatoes in terms of its ambition and its scope. This was a 500 million dollar plan.

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Yeah, it transitioned from being just about Ohio over the years to being a national effort on his part. And that five million dollars that he was talking about was to come from the Treasury in the form of non-interest-bearing bonds. He also later on developed a second bill that ran alongside this one. And in that one state or city, improvement projects could deposit non-interest-bearing 25 year bonds with the Treasury and then get back the cash value of the bond in paper currency minus one percent.

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And his thinking was that that paper currency then paid as wages to the workers was going to reinvigorate the economy.

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He saw this as a benefit on a couple of different levels. One, it would improve U.S. infrastructure in ways that were just desperately needed to. It would provide much needed relief to laborers who had found themselves impoverished as the country went through an economic depression and is right up. He noted, quote, Congress takes two years to vote on anything. 20 millions of people are hungry and cannot wait two years to eat.

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And he started pitching this plan in its earlier versions to his local politicians, as well as basically anyone who would stand still long enough. But he did not exactly get a warm reception initially, according to that same right up in the Chautauquan that I mentioned a moment ago. Quote, His neighbors dubbed him Crank and his wife secured a divorce, partly on the grounds of his cray's. A new wife was secured and the Geering neighbors ignored. We should be very clear that this was not the only reason he got a divorce.

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There was also a gambling problem that was driving a wedge into his marriage to Caroline. That gambling was part of Cox's passionate interest in horses. So sometimes people will use his interest in his bills and his efforts at labor reform as the reason his wife left him. But it's a little more complicated than that. So Coxie wasn't entirely without interested listeners. He presented his plan to the St. Louis Populist Convention in 1892. It was adopted into the Ohio Populist's Party's platform that same year, but it really didn't get much farther than that.

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It wasn't until 1893, again, while the nation was really hitting this panic that Jacob Coxie found like minded collaborators to really champion this plan alongside him. That year at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he met a man named Carl Brown. Brown was on assignment from San Francisco Business Weekly as an artist and correspondent at the event. He was there to send back reports with illustrations of what was happening. He was basically like a contractor. He kind of was one of.

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Those people that worked a lot of different jobs, he wasn't a regular reporter for the San Francisco Business Weekly and Brown was also sent to the expo with a costume suit intended to make him look like Buffalo Bill so that he could be part of a living exhibit about the Wild West. So he was wearing a number of different hats, both literally and figuratively here. Brown was a big personality. He was a gifted speaker. He was a showman. He was a jack of all trades.

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And he's been described as a labor agitator. His ideas of reform, which centered around ensuring that any able bodied person who sought work could find it really aligned with Cox's. His orations on labor reform had so irritated the leadership of Chicago that the mayor kicked him out of the city and he was not a quiet, subdued man least. But Jacob Coxie saw Carl Brown's potential and he saw that he could be the megaphone for the Coxie plan. And while they sort of are often described as an odd couple as partners, Brown and Coxie aligned on their shared vision that something big and drastic had to be done to get the country back on track.

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Carl came with some quirks, though he believed and told anyone who would listen that Coxie was the reincarnation of Andrew Jackson Browne had some interesting views, religiously speaking. He thought that he had absorbed his wife's soul into his own as he sat at her deathbed. He also thought that he and many others that they eventually rallied to their cause had absorbed the soul of Jesus Christ and that that was what was driving their efforts and that Jacob Coxie had absorbed a significant amount of that soul.

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He also didn't stop wearing that Buffalo Bill costume when the expo ended. Instead, he just made it part of his personal brand. He is really a fascinating character. As for Jacob Cox's views of all of this reincarnation talk, one reporter at the time wrote, quote, Cox's religious views did not prevent his ready conversion to Brown's abortive theosophy. He does not claim any supernatural wisdom, as Brown does, but modestly poses as the living representation of Christ because Brown says so.

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Though he was an eccentric, Carl Brown was crucial to the growth of Coxie support base. He was really good at communicating with people and gaining their trust, Karl's orations and the desperation of the men that they were speaking to. That was a powerful combination. Slowly, they garnered a pretty significant following, and at this point, Coxie was more passionate about his plan than ever. He was a wealthy man, but his own businesses had struggled due to the panic.

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He had to sell his horse farm and his crushing mill was struggling. On December 7th, 1893, Brown and Coxie formed the James Coxie Good Roads Association of the US. Brown was the organization's secretary and Jacob Coxie was, of course, its president. In Cox's eyes, one of the villains that all this was the press. He felt that all the reporting about a currency crisis had actually caused some of the worst problems as panicked readers started to hoard gold.

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His relationship with the press only became more contentious as his activism became more high profile. That's something. We'll get back to you shortly. Yeah, it's interesting. And you'll you'll see it as we talk about it. But even though Coxie has this sort of like, dim view of the press and what they have done at various points, it's really Carl Brown that kind of gets into it with them. Just a few months after its founding, the Good Roads Association was making very real progress.

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Senator William A. Peiffer, a populist from Kansas, was willing to introduce Cox's two bills in Congress. But this idea of getting the Federal Reserve to print money to fix the economy didn't go over all that well. But Coxie and Brown were just undeterred. They had hatched a plan earlier in the year that was intended to underscore their idea and make it clear to elected officials just how much support Cox's plan had among the working men of the country who were voters who were unable to find jobs.

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Coxie and Brown, who was likely the architect of this whole idea, organized a march on Washington, an unemployment protest that would be too big to be ignored. And before we dig into how that all plays out, let's pause for a quick sponsor break.

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Get Down to Cape Town is a podcast about the explosion of Korean culture all over the world and why it's here to stay. I'm your host, Esther Choi, founder and chief of several restaurants in New York City. And I truly believe that food is the ultimate gateway to getting to know a culture. And that's how it all started for me. I've been using my passion for cooking to cultivate a deeper understanding into my culture. And now I can proudly say that I am an ambassador of Korean food and culture.

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Real talk with real people. Listen to get down in Cape Town on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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So this march that we mentioned before the break was conceived as what Coxie and Brown called a petition in boots, they intended to gather supporters as they traveled with the hopes of reaching Washington with a huge throng of men.

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The men they had won over while still in Ohio started their journey in Maslon on March 25th, 1894, which was Easter Sunday. But residents were not all that enthused about being a convergence point for this rally. A lot of them believe that the participants in Cox's protest march were just itinerant troublemakers, and they wanted them to hurry up and get out of town quickly. This perception would follow them throughout the whole trip. A lot of Write-Ups referred to Cox's men as just a band of tramps.

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There were also always people who were suspicious that they would bring lawlessness and violence as they moved through the country.

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Yeah, they definitely got like a duality reception in most places where some people were really genuinely enthusiastic about them and what they were trying to do. And others were like, keep those troublemakers out of our town. In the beginning, there were an estimated 50 to 100 participants in the march. That number varies depending on your source. And there were also forty three reporters that marched with them. But they were, of course, not counted among their numbers.

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These reporters were there on assignment because this story was sensational. And in chasing that sensationalism, their coverage was not always accurate. It also sometimes made fun of the whole effort. But the important thing to Jacob Coxie was his march was getting national coverage. Yeah, as I was looking for a picture to use on our social media and stuff with this, I found a lot of editorial cartoons satirizing Coxie in his march. From the start of the march had been a show Cox's wife, Henrietta Jones, Coxie and their newborn son were at the front of the parade.

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Coxing had named this baby legal tender to show his commitment to legal tender currency as a revitalising force for the nation. Though there are some accounts that Henryetta and the baby marched with the group that's actually a little misleading. They were part of the procession as it was headed out of town, but they didn't stay with the march. They arranged to meet back up with Coxie at the destination at the nation's capital, but still quite a trip with a five week old baby, though yet not an awesome thing to do with the best modern conveniences and health standards really unwise.

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In the 90s, Brown had set up the structure of this whole march. He's often really, really cited as being like the guy who is running the actual march. And as we said, he was a showman. He dubbed the march the commonweal of Christ. He made banners and fabric badges for the men to wear, all of which read things like peace on Earth, goodwill toward men, but death to interest on bonds. And these banners all had a mix of religious symbolism and economic commentary in the art.

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I've often I've seen them described in a number of sources as being really confusing because he was trying to get a lot of different ideas and ideologies represented in them, like his religious views, as well as his political views, as well as issues of the economy and kind of blending them together, leaving some onlookers to kind of scratch their heads. Brown continued to wear that Buffalo Bill costume and Coxy wore a union army uniform.

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Brown also may have cost Coxie a lot of money. It was reported that the bill for printing up recruitment flyers had come to a whopping two thousand dollars. That's 2000, 1894 dollars. On top of that, Coxie was footing the bill for some of the camp supplies, although they did take donations to cover most of their needs as particularly being food. Food turned out to be an ongoing problem as the march played out, because in a recession, donations could be pretty sparse.

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The men really weren't ever getting enough to eat. Yeah, there are lots of descriptions of how, like in some towns, you know, volunteers and people that wanted to welcome them would come and they would have brought food and prepared like these huge meals, but like there was never enough to go around. And so it was like, well, you might get soup one day and only bread the next story. You might only get two meals a day and one meal this day.

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It just was not consistent. And when you think about how much they were walking in any given day, you realized that this was a very, very difficult undertaking.

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Because of all the press coverage, though, more groups had started marching from all over the country, some as far as California in the hopes of joining what had at this point colloquially come to be known as Cox's Army. Some of this coverage had actually started way back in January when Coxie and Brown announced that they were planning this. And to be very, very clear, the reason people were so willing to do this was because there was a lot of desperation throughout the country at this time.

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This was only the second year of what would be a four year recession and. Families were going hungry and there was no relief on the horizon, so for a lot of men, this seemed like the only way that they were ever going to make their voices truly heard by people with power and hopefully catalyze an improvement in their family's quality of life. Some of them traveled in wagons, some on horses. Some were simply on foot. But all of them had the intent that they were going to meet up with Coxie and converge on Washington.

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So while there were occasional deserters who probably joined up for the promise of free meals along the way, maybe even just the security of traveling with a group, the spots that they left filled in behind them as the army kept moving through more towns. Increasingly, it was made up entirely of men who were just tired of waiting for better times. And they wanted to take some kind of action.

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And as they traveled, the press became more and more critical of this whole operation. They started writing commentary about how Brown's cowboy gear was an affectation, and then they started talking about how dirty his suit and he was. And they started calling him Old Greasy, which he enjoyed about as much as you might expect.

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The press characterization of the rest of the marchers similarly degraded over time. While some of the accounts in the early days describe the participants as enthusiastic and idealistic, that shifted soon. They were referring to the protesters as an unwashed army.

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For example, there's one early article at the start of the march in Massillon where the New York Times reported, quote, Most of those now here are hard looking people, but up to the present time, they have shown no disposition to be unruly. Coxy and his lieutenants are elated and declared that they will have 10000 men in line when the word forward is given.

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But in a story from mid-April, a few weeks into the march, the Times first outlined how the 5th Corps of Cox's army traded their instruments for beer and then got arrested. The write up of the incident describes Coxie handling the situation while explaining that there would be no tolerance for that kind of behavior and that the point of their march was much more important than getting drunk. But then it completely discredits them at the end, saying that he was made happy when he met a fortuneteller on their journey who told him that he would live to be 100.

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Yeah, when you read the the flow of that particular brief article, it's the weirdest thing because it really is like this great portrait of like, wow, he's really a good leader. Like, he explains to them, like, why they are doing what they are doing and reminds them of the gravity of this effort. And then they're like, oh, and then he got all into a fortune teller for a little while.

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It's like, oh, eventually Carl Brown got really tired of all these jabs from reporters and he started calling them Argus II Demons of Hell. This actually quite delighted. The press. They started a little club amongst themselves that they dubbed the Argus Eyed Demons, and this club even had elected officers. But really, it was mostly just about like finding a good watering hole and drinking wherever they stopped for the night.

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But even without the press commentary, the group was not helping its own reputation because of the hardscrabble nature of their day to day survival. When Coxie and his men arrived in a town, they could basically watch the faces of the people who greeted them fall as they saw how ragged everyone looked. The movement sounded so robust on paper, but in person it was often really disappointing. And men who had planned to join Coxie sometimes opted out of that plan once they saw how rough things had become.

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When Cox's army finally arrived in Washington, DC on May 1st, that was after 35 days of walking. It had quintupled in size, at least by some counts. There are others that put it closer to being 400 men versus five hundred others listed as thousands. But this gets a little bit unclear because there were multiple groups that were starting to come together. So the numbers shift really quickly and like in big chunks, depending on how any given reporter defined Cox's group, whether it was only counting those that traveled with him and Brown specifically, or whether other groups that joined up towards the end should be part of that count.

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But it quickly got to be really pointless to try to count the newcomers anyway, as thousands of thousands of locals had also shown up for the march, some to support it and some just to watch the spectacle of it. But they were kind of all traveling in this huge throng together.

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Coxie really hoped that he and his marchers would be able to enact rapid change. After all, he had the bill written and ready to go for Congress, and it read in part, quote, be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives and Congress assembled that the secretary of the Treasury of the United States is hereby authorized and instructed to have engraved and printed immediately after the passage of this bill. Five hundred million dollars of Treasury notes, a legal tender for all debts, public and private Fed notes to be in denominations of one dollar, two dollars, five dollars and ten dollars.

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And to be placed in a fund to be known as the General County Road Fund system of the United States and to be expended solely for said purpose, Mamie Coxie, who was Jacob 17 year old daughter from a previous marriage, joined this procession at some point before it arrived in Washington. And when they approached the Capitol building, she was at the front of the parade dressed as the goddess of peace, all in white.

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And she wrote a white Arabian horse that was one from Cox's farm, like she was intended to be a visual harbinger of change, but maybe had a primary admirer in Carl Brown, who said of the young woman, quote, I thought that she was the most beautiful sight I had ever beheld.

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So they had made it. Coxie and Brown had led their band to Washington. They were right there ready to demand a jobs bill that they believed would help get the lives of so many Americans back on track. But the end of Cox's march for reforms that would reinvigorate the working class in the economy was a bit of a letdown.

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And we're going to talk about their arrival at the Capitol building and what happened there after we first take a quick sponsor break. It was an unimaginable crime, we couldn't believe something like that would happen here, people get all from the same family.

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It would become the largest criminal investigation in Ohio's history. Pike County sheriffs requested state help immediately after they got word.

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Nobody had a clue about who or why. And that's really scary.

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You're trying to piece together a puzzle that seems to not have any pieces to it. I mean, where do you go with this?

[00:29:21]

Could it be a cover up? And would another family be next? Got eight people and things like that don't usually happen in a small town. I mean, they don't usually happen anywhere. This is the PYKEN massacre. Listen to the pectin massacre on the I Heart radio app, on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What happens when two therapists walk into a podcast and then hold people accountable for their advice? Hey, I'm Lori Gottlieb. I write the dear therapist advice column for The Atlantic, and I'm Guy, which I write the Dear Guy advice column for Ted.

[00:30:02]

And we're the hosts of a new podcast from radio called Dear Therapist.

[00:30:08]

One of the most frustrating things for us is advice columnist is that afterward no one gets to hear how the advice worked out.

[00:30:14]

But on our show, you will we guide people through a consultation and then have them come back and tell us what worked or didn't and what we can all learn from it.

[00:30:24]

I was raised in a generation where men didn't show emotion. I am not good at words, but going through it has helped me grow in that sense.

[00:30:35]

I think being a single dad for two years and his daughter, the six year old, she hates me one minute and loved me 10 minutes later.

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I don't want to lose sight of the negative feelings that I caused her.

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I just hope that at some point you can forgive me if you'd like to walk into our podcast, email us with your dilemma at Laury and Guy at, I hope, Media Dotcom.

[00:30:56]

Listen to the therapists on Apple podcasts, the I Heart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:31:11]

So when he and all of his followers had arrived in Washington, D.C., Jacob Coxie had applied for and received a parade permit. He had also applied for a permit to speak on the steps of the Capitol. That permit was denied. And really, if Jacob Coxie had been paying attention and actually accepting certain truths, he probably would have seen that coming as early as March 24th.

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The day before the march started, reports out of Washington had made clear that this commonweal or army was not going to be welcomed by lawmakers. A report from Washington that ran in the New York Times from March 24th read, quote, Nothing but ridicule is heard in regard to the Coxie movement among well-informed persons here. There is not the remotest prospect of any congressional action to grant a permit for any mob to assemble on the Capitol grounds in violation of a specific act of Congress.

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So as they got up to the Capitol and Coxie and Brown moved through the crowd of onlookers and police in D.C. as the parade got to their destination, the scene quickly turned frantic. They had been headed for the steps that was off limits and the police were watching Brown, who, of course, in this nutty garb, this was very large man stood out in any crowd. So he was pursued by police. He was tackled and beaten. A chant of Coxie Coxie started among the thousands of spectators and supporters.

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The police realizing they had no control over the situation, panicked. And they also turned on bystanders. They swung their clubs without regard for who they were striking. After about 15 minutes of mayhem, it was over and no speeches had been given the headlines the next day, read Coxie, driven from the Capitol, not allowed to deliver his harangue. That same story often ran with another Subedar that indicated that Coxie had not even been arrested. But he and several of his associates were in fact arrested and they did face charges.

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Jacob Coxie, Carl Brown and Christopher Columbus Jones were all found guilty of carrying illegal banners onto Capitol grounds. They were sentenced to 20 days in jail a week after the rally. They also had to pay a fine of five dollars each for trespassing on the grass.

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Yeah, that was one of those things. It was off limits while the three movement leaders, Christopher Columbus Jones, had come in later and kind of served in a capacity of wrangling some of the people on the march while they were serving out their jail term, the men who had followed them to Washington did not all disperse. They still wanted to advocate for Cox's plan. So they had made a camp at Bladensburg, Maryland, and they waited the three weeks out.

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But most of them at that point had moved on. And while there really were some efforts to keep the protest and the movement going, including a second smaller protest in which Carl Brown allegedly appeared in drag is the goddess of liberty. This whole thing was really over, though. By mid-July, even the most ardent supporters and stragglers had moved on.

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After the march, Jacob Coxie had stayed heavily involved in politics. He also expanded his business and bought a second quarry in 1914 in Dundee, Ohio. He ran for public office 11 times for various positions. He was elected mayor of Massillon, Ohio, in 1931. This was his only election win, and his time in office went pretty poorly.

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He also spearheaded a second march on Washington in 1914, once again championing the cause of laborers. And he made it to the Capitol and he addressed a small group of protesters from the steps. He wasn't arrested that time, but he also didn't have much press coverage. And not many people really seemed to care about what he was doing.

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Although Coxy had been ridiculed for his ideas by a lot of people, a lot of those same concepts were part of President Franklin D.. Roosevelt's New Deal, including the makework projects of the 1930s.

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On the fiftieth anniversary of the original march on the Capitol, Jacob Coxie was invited and finally able to give the speech on the Capitol steps that he had planned for 1894. Tracy and I are going to take turns reading it because it's quite long and this is an abridged version, but it begins. The Constitution of the United States guarantees to all citizens the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances and furthermore declares that the right of free speech shall not be abridged.

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We stand here today to test these guarantees of our Constitution here rather than at any other spot on the continent. It is fitting that we should come to mourn over our dead liberties and by our protest, arouse the imperiled nation to such action. I shall rescue the Constitution and resurrect our liberties upon these steps.

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Where we stand has been spread a carpet for the royal feet of a foreign. Princess, up these steps, the lobbyists of trusts and corporations have passed unchallenged on their way to committee rooms, access to which we, the representatives of the toiling wealth producers, have been denied. We stand here today on behalf of millions of toilers whose petitions have been buried in committee rooms and whose opportunities for honest, remunerative, productive labor have been taken from them by unjust legislation which protects idlers, speculators and gamblers.

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We come to remind the Congress here, assembled of the declaration of a United States senator quote that for a quarter of a century, the rich have been growing richer, the poor poorer, and that by the close of the present century, the middle class will have disappeared as the struggle for existence becomes fierce and relentless.

[00:36:59]

We are here to petition for legislation which will furnish employment for every man able and willing to work. We are engaged in a bitter and cruel war with the enemies of all mankind, a war with hunger, wretchedness and despair. And we ask Congress to heed our petitions and issue for the nation's good, a sufficient volume of the same kind of money which carried the country through one awful war and saved the life of the nation.

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We have come here through toil and weary marches, through storms and tempest's over mountains and amid the trials of poverty and distress to lay our grievances at the doors of our national legislature and ask them in the name of him, whose banners we bear in the name of him, who plead for the poor and the oppressed, that they should heed the voice of despair and distress that is now coming up from every section of our country that they should consider the conditions of the starving unemployed of our land and enact such laws as will give them employment, bring happier conditions to the people and the smile of contentment to our citizens.

[00:38:03]

And his later years, Coxie continued to pursue new business endeavors as well as politics. He sold a mild laxative called Coxie Lack's, which he swore was the source of his longevity. He also sold copper and zinc discs to wear inside of shoes, were supposed to help with aches and pains, and he gave instructions out to people who wanted to make their own.

[00:38:26]

Incidentally, Carl Brown and Mamie Coxie did become a couple. They were married in 1895. That was much to Jacob Cox's chagrin. The couple had a son together, but that marriage did not last.

[00:38:39]

Jacob second wife, Henrietta, died on January 13th, 1951, after their child legal tender, who only lived to be seven. The couple had three other children. They were Jacob Jr., David and Ruth. After Henrietta's death, Jacob Cox's own health went downhill pretty quickly. He had a stroke on May 18th, 1951. He had lived only four months longer than his wife did. Yeah, he is one of those eccentric and marvelous characters in history that we don't really get all that much information about normally.

[00:39:15]

But I both love his idealism and shake my head and go, Oh, ma'am.

[00:39:22]

Do you have some listener mail for us? I do. I have a couple of pieces. The first is from our listener, Naomi, who writes hello in a recent podcast. The letter was read where listener thanks, Tracy, for her contribution to a BBC show. It was described like a Game of Thrones of sort. I was listening in traffic and forgot the name. I would love to check it out. Please help.

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It was actually me, but the I wanted to read this because I want to make sure she knows about it in case she wants to hear it, because it is a really good show that is called to Monday to Emma in Y by John Dryden. And it's wonderful. You can find it like our show everywhere you get podcasts. Wanted to make sure I touched on that. Our other one is from our listener, Cynthia, and it is exciting to me.

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She writes in declaring my husband stuff. I found this pamphlet that his mother had kept and I thought of you I would be happy to mail it to you if you send me an address. It is Cynthia. This pamphlet is called How to Buy a School Dress. And it is I'm not sure what year it's from the style, I would guess, early fifties. And it talks about how you should think about your clothes as you purchase them for the school year.

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I think this is some charming business and I superduper want it.

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And I assure you it will be in a place of love and probably framed and hanging on my wall. So, Cynthia, I am 100 percent sending you an address. If you would like to write to us. You should absolutely do that. You can do that at History podcast it I heart radio dotcom. You can also find this pretty much everywhere on social media as missed in history.

[00:40:54]

And if you would like to subscribe to the podcast or two, one way or any other show you like, you can do that on the I Heart radio app and Apple podcast or wherever it is you listen.

[00:41:07]

Stuff you missed in history class is the production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts from My Heart radio visit by her radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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I'll even wear it until the next day. Or what makes Stephanie Rule so passionate about voting? It's about what kind of country, what kind of world you want to live in. Hi, I'm Holly Fahri and I'm hosting a new podcast called Why I'm Voting. I realized my father had never participated in any election. That's how democracy fails everyone assuming somebody else. Why I'm voting. A new podcast from my heart radio available on the I Heart radio app and Apple podcasts or wherever it is you listen.