Jacob Coxey – 1854-1951

A socialist politician from Ohio, Coxey is best remembered as the leader of what was popularly called Coxey’s Army. In 1894 and again in 1914, he marched at the head of bands of unemployed men from his hometown of Massillon, Ohio, to Washington, D.C., to demand that Congress vote for funds to create jobs for the unemployed. Coxey’s two “armies” were never large, and he was widely ridiculed in his own time, but the idea of creating public works jobs for the unemployed became a cornerstone of FDR’s New Deal during the Great Depression of the 1930s.