Two self-mongering reincarnations of Christ, both fresh and clean, having nighted in decent hotels, led four hundred draggle-tail men into Washington and up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol grounds, enormous humiliated crowds looking on. Browne dismounted and leaped over the low stone wall. Coxey tried to make a speech. Both were good-naturedly arrested for trespassing on the public grass and violating a police ordinance. The leaderless men wandered back to a camp site that had been mercifully loaned. For a time they dully subsisted upon charity, ceased altogether to be news, and gradually vanished away.
iv
Though the Army of the Commonweal of Christ was dead, and Coxey himself was now a pusillanimous figure, Coxeyism survived in a formidable manner. The term was current in newspaper language; and the country seemed to be full of those forms of social insubordination which it was meant to signify. In the west rudely organized bands, some of them armed, and strong enough to overwhelm the police of the cities through which they passed, were running amuck. They bore no petition in boots; they were impatient and headlong. One of their pastimes was train stealing. They would seize a railroad train, overpower the crew and oblige themselves to outlaw transportation; and the railroad people, fearful of accidents, would clear the way to let them through. It was very exciting for men who had nothing else to do, and rather terrifying to the forces of law and order.
Public opinion was distracted and outraged.
Some said, “Put down Coxeyism. Put it down with a strong hand. To treat it tenderly is to encourage lawlessness.”
Others said, “You may be able to put down Coxeyism by force, but you will sometime have to answer the questions it has raised. Better now than later.”
There was a great swell of radical thought in the country. The Populist party, representing a blind sense of revolt, had elected four men to the Senate and eleven to the House of Representatives. Many newspapers and magazines were aligned with the agitators, all asking the same questions:
Why hunger in a land of plenty?
Why unemployment?