August 11 - Workers Demands Fall on Deaf Ears

On this day in Labor History the year was 1894.  That was the day that federal troops pushed “Kelly’s Industrial Army” out of Washington D.C and across the Potomac River.  The “army” was a group of unemployed men who had come to the capitol to protest government inaction.  The country was in the grip of an economic depression.  The nation’s Agricultural regions in the South and Great Plains were also hit by a drought.  Times were hard for American workers and families. The call had gone out across the nation for the unemployed to make their way to the doorstep of Congress.  The goal was to petition for public infrastructure projects to put people back to work. Businessman Jacob Coxey had organized a march of the unemployed from Ohio.  Charles T. Kelly and his group came from California.  They rode the rails and made it to Des Moines, Iowa where they encamped.  After a while the local residents decided the unemployed group had outstayed their welcome.  The Iowans provided lumber so the Industrial Army could build flatboats and be on their way.  By the time Charles Kelly and his men made it to D.C., Coxey had already been sentenced to twenty days in jail for trespassing on the Capitol lawn. Yet unemployed men from across the country kept coming into the nation’s capital. 1,200 men arrived from different points across the country.  One of those in Kelly’s group was a young Jack London.  The wrote of the experience, “Across the “wild and wooly West,” clear from California, General Kelly and his heroes captured trains; but they fell down when they crossed the Missouri and went up against the effete East.”   The marchers’ protests earned no help from the capitol.