“Anything I can,” I said.
“You are from the west,” he continued, “and therefore you’re not likely to know how jumpy the Wall Street people are about what’s going on. They are afraid of this Coxey movement,—of what it may lead to. They want to know a lot about it,—more than they can get from the newspaper stories. I’ve been sending a confidential letter on it daily to Valentine ... you know, ... John J., president of the Great Midwestern Railroad. He wants the tale unvarnished, and what you think of it, and what others think of it. He particularly wants to know in the fullest way how the Coxeyites are received along the way, for therein is disclosed the state of public feeling. Well, I wish you to take this commission off my hands. It pays fifty a week for the life of the circus. I’ll see him in New York, tell him who you are and why I left it for you to do. Then when the thing is over you can run up to New York from Washington and get your money.”
I hesitated.
“It’s Wall Street money,” I said.
“It’s railroad money,” he replied. “That may be all the same thing. But there’s no difficulty, really. It’s quite all right for anyone to do this. What’s wanted is the truth. Put in your own opinions of Wall Street if you like. Indeed, do that. Wall Street people are not as you think they are. Valentine is a particularly good sort and honest in his point of view. I vouch for the whole thing.”
So I took it; and thereafter posted to John J. Valentine, 130 Broadway, room 607, personal, a daily confidential report on the march of the Commonwealers.
I would not say that the fact of having a retainer in railroad money changed my point of view. It did somewhat affect my sense of values and my curiosity was extended.
For the purpose of the Valentine reports I made an intensive personal study of the Commonwealers. I asked them why they were doing it. Some took it as a sporting adventure, with no thought of the consequences, and enjoyed the mob spirit. Some were tramps who for the first time in their lives found begging respectable. But a great majority of them were earnest, wistful men, fairly aching with convictions, without being able to say what it was they had a conviction of, or what was wrong with the world. Their notions were incoherent. Nobody seemed very sanguine about the Coxey plan; nobody understood it, in fact; yet something would have to be done; people couldn’t live without work.
Unemployment was the basic grievance. I took a group of twenty, all skilled workmen, sixteen of them married, and found that for each of them the average number of wage earning days in a year had been twelve. They blamed the money power in Wall Street. When they were asked how the money power could profit by their unemployment, what motive it could have in creating hard times, they took refuge in meaningless phrases. Most of them believed in peaceable measures. Only three or four harbored destructive thoughts.
The manner of the Army’s reception by farmers, villagers and townspeople was variable and hard at first to understand. Generally there was plenty of plain food. Sometimes it was provided in a generous, sympathetic spirit; then again it would be forthcoming as a bid for immunity, the givers at heart being fearful and hostile. The Army was much maligned by rumor as a body of tramps obtaining sustenance by blackmail. It wasn’t true. There was no theft, very little disorder, no taking without leave, even when the stomach gnawed.