Some of them even hijacked trains along the way. Meanwhile, other Coxey-inspired contingents were on their way east from places as far away as San Francisco and Portland. The police attacked, a melee ensued, and Coxey and Browne spent a month in jail. On May 1, the Coxeyites descended on the center of government, where Coxey attempted to deliver a speech on the Capitol steps. With the help of eccentric showman Carl Browne, he led a group of several hundred unemployed wage earners, small farmers, and crossroads merchants on a march from Massillon, Ohio, to Washington, D.C., to present a "petition in boots" for government-financed jobs building and repairing the nation’s roads. Coxey was fed up with government inactivity in the face of the crisis. By the following spring, businessman and Populist agitator Jacob S. Unemployment rose, foreclosures climbed, and popular unrest mounted. gold reserves, and a late-June stock-market crash, America was in the throes of a serious economic depression. In 1893, after a major British bank failure, a run on U.S. The engrossing tale of the first audacious protest march on Washington-a precursor of the Occupy movement.
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