The Gilded Age: First March on Washington D.C.

TRACING THE PATH PODCAST

This podcast episode explores the hidden complexities of the Gilded Age, a term coined by Mark Twain to describe a period that was shimmering with technological innovation on the surface but rotting with economic inequality underneath.

By tracing the impact of the Panic of 1893 and the clash between the elite and the working class, the story connects the rise of the railroad industry to the desperate struggles of silver miners and farmers.

Central to the story is Jacob Coxey’s 1894 march on Washington, the first of its kind, which featured a young Jack London and served as a conceptual precursor to modern protest. Ultimately, the story illustrates a historical lineage of social activism, linking the labor unrest and Pullman strikes of the 19th century to the global influence of Mahatma Gandhi and the American Civil Rights Movement.

Where did the civil rights movement get the idea to march on Washington? Was it something they read in a book or were they much much closer to the idea originator? Is it possible that Mark Twain and Jack London were involved?

Well, it happened in 1894, a year that should be as familiar to you as 1492, 1620, 1776, and in 1929. If you didn’t, this story will change your perspective. What you’re about to hear has never been told before.

It has been labeled the Gilded Age, that period between the end of the Civil War up to 1900, or perhaps more specifically 1894. And while the Gilded Age sounds like something to do with Victorian times, where every door and coffee cup were adorned with gold leaf, it really is something different.

And it might surprise you to find out who coined this term and what he meant by it. For it was the famous author Mark Twain who gave us the name and it is from one of his earliest books. He wasn’t trying to say everyone and everything was ornate.

In fact, his book was satire. He was trying to point out that while the post Civil War period was filled with shiny objects, underneath it was a darker space.

And believe it or not, but the story you’re about to hear involves that other famous American author whose books you had to read in middle school as well.

Both Mark Twain and Jack London play a role. Both before they were famous.

After the Civil War, it was the development of the nation’s railroads that grew America like it never had before. Between 1860 and 1880, the miles of railroad track laid doubled, reaching more and more of the rural population.

Railroads led to the growth of farming, ranching, and mining all across the West. In fact, it was right after the Civil War in 1869 that the Golden Spike was driven in the first transcontinental railroad.

Travel from New York to San Francisco became 6 days, not 6 months. Railroads were so lucrative that Europe invested a great deal in America’s railroad companies through America’s financial center, Wall Street.

On top of that, innovation was growing like wildfire.

There were 500,000 patents issued between 1860 and 1890, 10 times the number that had been filed since 1787.

AT&T was started. Elisha Otis invented the elevator, which meant skyscrapers.
George Westinghouse invented air brakes.
And George Pullman invented the train sleeping car.

And don’t forget popcorn, the Statue of Liberty, the telephone, ketchup, and root beer. All led to the label of the Gilded Age.

And to show the world how shiny we were, we hosted two world fairs in Philadelphia in 1879 and Chicago in 1893. America was truly proving the Gilded Age. Which brings us to the other side of that story.

But in order to understand the other side, we must go back to 1791 when Alexander Hamilton was the Treasury Secretary.

It’s crazy to think, but even in 1791, 15 years after the United States became a country, the US didn’t even have its own currency. Everything was done using foreign money.

Hamilton wanted to change that and he proposed a national mint. His plan came to be with the passing of the Mint Act in 1792 and the unit of value would be called the Dollar.

The act provided that any citizen could bring their silver or gold to the mint and exchange it for Dollars. 1.6 grams of gold or 24 grams of silver.

Hamilton knew the value of gold and silver fluctuated but decided they would set it at a 15:1 ratio for now, knowing they could change it later. While They did change it a few times. It wasn’t until the 1848 gold rush that the price of gold lowered drastically with the influx of all the new mined gold.

By default, that meant silver got more valuable.

It gained so much value it didn’t make sense to take it to the mint anymore. It was worth more overseas. So soon there was a deficit of silver.

But no sooner had silver found a home abroad that two brothers discovered a silver silver mine in California, which we now consider the Comstock Lode. The Silver Rush in 1859 brought thousands of people to California in the 1860s, many of whom were looking to get rich and others who were looking to flee the impending Civil War.

One of those people was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who we all know as Mark Twain.

Silver mining was so lucrative, thousands of mines were opened until there was so much silver the value bottomed out and the debate started as to whether it should even be used for coins. But it didn’t really remain purely a debate.

The bankers, millionaires, and monopolists in the northeast started pressuring Washington DC to end silver and go straight to a gold standard.

That action unified the working class farmers, miners, railroad workers, and cattlemen united behind silver, the people’s currency.

They would not be shut out by the rich.

For them, the elimination of silver would be a real problem. When the railroads connected the nation to the most rural places of the West, the working class borrowed money to buy land, farms, equipment, and construction.

The de-monetization of silver would then cause deflation, meaning the working class would make less money, but their loan payments would be the same. And so, a group rose to bring their concerns to Washington.

They called themselves the Populist Party.

This feeling is what stirred inside Mark Twain. At the time, he was a news reporter and fledgling minor in California. He was there to report on the Silver Rush and all the technological innovations happening in America.

But he felt the working man’s plight, and published his thoughts in a book called The Gilded Age, to which the world adopted the name for this period. Unfortunately for the farmers and miners of the South and West, their economic situation got a little worse in 1873 when the government actually passed the Coinage Act of 1873, which eliminated silver coins altogether and heeding the calls of the rich.

That meant those holding silver with the plan to one day turn it into money had nowhere to take it.

Free silver was over.

Seeing the problems the gold standard was causing the working class voters, however, the government felt the need to find a solution that would help them without hurting the northeast. So five years later, they came up with a plan, the Bland Allison Act.

It would require the government to buy 2 to 4 million ounces of silver per month in exchange for gold coins or dollars.

And thus, they felt like they had addressed the problem, which brings us to the next chapter.

George Pullman was born in 1831 in New York, the son of an engineer and inventor. His father worked on the construction of the Erie Canal, and he started a company that could move buildings, a task that was required in canal construction.

George Pullman grew up helping his father, and at 22 years of age, he took over the company when his father died. A few years later, in 1859 when Chicago was lifting every building in the city in order to construct an underground sewer system, George Pullman was there to help.

But it was a simple overnight train trip that would change his career forever.

Uncomfortable sleeping in his seat on the train, Pullman decided to start building sleeping cars.

He built the first in 1859, and by 1862, he was building luxurious sleeping births with carpet, drapes, upholstered chairs, libraries, card tables, and more. The births were so luxurious, President Lincoln requested one be built for him.

So when he was assassinated in 1864, it was George Pullman’s sleeper car that carried his body from Washington DC to Springfield, Illinois.

And because thousands of people lined the railroad tracks after the ordeal was over, orders for sleeping cars came in from everywhere.

Pullman didn’t actually sell the cars, however. He offered to attach them to railroad company’s trains, offering them a percentage of the profit of the people who booked them. Otherwise, they remained his.

He staffed and maintained them.

Pullman felt the company needed more than first class service. So he hired freed men, African-Americans who had previously been slaves to serve as Pullman train carporters.

The role required them to be porters, waiters, valet, seamstresses, and entertainers all rolled into one. He paid them really well. They got to travel the country, which made the job quite prestigious in the black communities.

Since the wealthy elite were their customers, Pullman didn’t feel the problem associated with silver or the upcoming labor industry problems of the 70s and 80s.

And while the luxury Pullman cars were more evidence of the Gilded Age, the labor industry battles underneath were heating up.

Now, while its roots go back to 1810 in Scotland, the movement that workers only work 8-hour days had reached America. (And perhaps we’ll leave the story of how it began in Scotland for another day.)

But the movement hit Chicago in the 1880s.

Fed up with 10 to 16-hour work days for low wages, the International Working People’s Association formed and dedicated its resources to establishing an 8-hour workday. Together with the American Federation of Labor in 1884, they adopted a resolution that all companies create 8-hour work shifts, or starting on May 1st, 1886 2 years later, they would all go on strike.

And since most companies didn’t take them seriously, on May 1st, 1886, 340,000 railroad workers didn’t go to work.

Instead, they peacefully marched through the streets. Things got out of hand when replacement workers showed up, causing great tension between the strikers and these scabs.

And the police wanted to make an example of the striking workers for all the rest to see. And thus, two demonstrators were actually killed by police. But that just escalated the situation.

Another two days later, the striking workers set up another rally to protest the police violence. But many of these protesters that showed up that night at Heymarket Square did not have peace on their minds. 

After the last rally speech, as the police stepped in to disperse the crowd, a protester lobbed a dynamite bomb into the police line, killing officer Mathias J. Degan. And then both sides opened fire, leaving 70 people dead, protesters and police.

And would you believe it was just a couple months later that the proposal to host the World’s Fair in Chicago was created?

And in New York City, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated.

Freedom and joy in a moment of turmoil. Which brings us back to the farmers and the miners.

Despite the bland Allison Act partially solving the silver problem, the continued overmining of silver kept the price of silver low and was threatening another deflationary cycle. And while President Cleveland threatened to repeal the Silver Acts altogether, he enacted the Tariff Act of 1890, adding tariffs to imports in hope of protecting farmers American products.

That left international markets scrambling. And on top of that, the railroads that were heavily invested in were suddenly not as profitable as everyone had hoped which caused some like the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad to go bankrupt.

This new uncertainty and uneasiness meant people lost confidence in the Dollar and so instead of bringing gold into to exchange it for money. They just kept the gold.

And those with silver started exchanging it in for gold, which caused the panic of 1893, the largest stock market dip and depression in the history of the United States, to that point.

It caused 15,000 companies and 5,000 banks to fail.

Northern Pacific Rail and Union Pacific went bankrupt.
Thousands lost their jobs. and walked away from their houses.

There hadn’t been a darker time. The panic of 1893 killed the Gilded age. And while this depression affected the whole world, the city of Chicago was largely immune.

Chicago was about to host The Great Colombian Exposition, the World’s Fair. Considered before the panic of 1893, the World’s Fair was designed to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage.

And it was a massive undertaking.

They’d have to construct 200 buildings and build entire new railroad lines to serve all the visitors. It would be the singular extension of the Gilded age, showing American optimism, architecture, and the arts. For Chicago, it was a chance to show they had rebounded from the Great Fire of 1871. 

46 countries had pavilions and President Cleveland would be there to open it. Full-size replicas of Columbus’s Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria were built to show the world how innovative America was.

They didn’t want a static monument to symbolize the event.

The Eiffel Tower and Crystal Palace in Paris and London were built to wow the crowds there, but they were static. They didn’t have any movement.

Chicago had another idea.

They built a 246 tall ring that rotated with cars each holding 40 people that would carry them to the top of the ring. It would be called the Ferris Wheel. And for most riders, it was the highest they had ever been.

Even Buffalo Bill Cody would play a part. While not inside the fair, he set up his Wild Wild West show, just outside. 

Visitors would get to see the first moving walkway, the invention of spray paint, the marvels of Nikolai Tesla, Juicy Fruit, Quaker Oats, Shredded Wheat, Cracker Jacks, Pabst Blue Ribbon, a Braille book printer, and the Zipper were all launched. Milton Hershey bought the equipment he needed to start Hershey’s. The Pledge of Allegiance was introduced by school children. John Philip Sousa, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Scott Joplin, Anton D’vorjac and WC Fields performed.

Helen Keller, Katherine Lee Bates, Alexander Graham Bell, and Frederick Auguste Bartholdi all visited.

There was nothing bigger or more positive in the world, than the World’s Fair.

It would open May 1st, otherwise known as International Workers Day, a celebration of the Haymarket Event. And just outside the Fair was another attraction visitors ventured to see. 

A few years earlier, George Pullman had an idea. He’d build a town with his train car factory in the middle. All the employees would live and work there. The town would have restaurants and stores for the people. He would have everything they needed.

In essence, George Pullman would pay the factory employees, and then he’d get the money right back when they bought stuff from his stores and restaurants.

It seemed perfect for him and fine for the employees.

But the outside situation with the labor market and the panic of 1893 was about to change everything at Pullmantown.

This would make 1894 of the year the world should never have forgotten.

1894 is actually marked by two simultaneous world changing events. For Pullman, the recession that followed the panic slowed the demand for luxury items and Pullman started losing money because fewer people took his cars.

So he cut the wages of his workers in the town. But he didn’t lower the prices in his stores or lower their rent which created the undercurrent of mutiny.

Many of the workers in Pullmantown were members of the American Railway Union which was headed by Eugene V. Debs. Debs heard about the strife and made a trip to Pullmantown to see it for himself.

The workers had already held one strike, but Pullman hadn’t budged.

So Debs sent Pullman a note that if he didn’t capitulate in 5 days, no American railroad worker would work on a train carrying Pullman sleeping cars. But Pullman didn’t budge again.

So on June 26th, 1894, all work on Pullman trains was halted. Aware the strike was coming, the railroad companies hired replacement workers, which resulted in more tension and violence. And the millionaires who ran the railroad companies employed the government to get involved. S

o Grover Cleveland actually ordered federal troops to stop the strikers and work the trains themselves. In addition, they arrested Eugene V. Debs, whose attorney was Clarence Darrow and convicted him on the only charge they could make stick. Conspiracy to stop the US mail which was carried by trains.

And another brick in the wall separating the working class from the rich had been laid.

And while that was going on, another event was underway, which brings us to our final hero.

Mr. Jacob Coxey was just a guy from a little town in Ohio called Massillon. Coxey had been a businessman his whole life and had run for various public offices. He was sympathetic to the Free Silver Movement and was part of another fringe party, the Greenbacks, and he’d build quite an audience for his ideas.

As unemployment skyrocketed, Coxey had a plan to cure the national economic crisis and began espousing that plan. His plan was to have the government build a public works program dedicated to the improvement of roads.

He’d have the government set aside 500 million in paper currency backed by bonds.

The nation could get it to roads fixed, unemployment stopped, and money for everyone. And to make that statement, he and his friend Carl Brown organized the first march on Washington DC.

They sent out telegrams to the workers unions around the country, and a multi city attempt at marching on DC began.

The biggest group to join was led by General Charles T. Kelly in San Francisco. Others around the country joined in, each with their own an idea of how to solve the crisis. To get from the West Coast to DC, however, the groups needed trains, some of which were offered to them as help, and others, which they actually stole.

But the trek was arduous, and most didn’t actually make it beyond the Mississippi River. Jacob Coxey’s group had started in Massillon, Ohio, a much easier and closer pilgrimage.

When General Kelly’s army, the biggest of them all, started. They had 1,500 people, but it had dwindled to 900 by Omaha. There they couldn’t get any trains to cooperate and were faced with a small progression problem.

But that delay provided the moment for our long anticipated author to join the story. Jack London. Fortunately for history, if it weren’t for Jack London himself, nobody would ever know of his involvement. But we do because later in his life, Jack wrote a story called 2000 Stiffs detailing his role.

At the time of Coxey, London was living in San Francisco. Unbelievably, Jack’s mother, Flora, was from the same town as Jacob Coxey, Massillon, Ohio.

In San Francisco, he was living the life of a hobo. He’d been a schooner pilot. He’d worked on a ship that went to Japan and back, and when he found out about the march, he thought it would be his next great adventure.

But he arrived six days late to leave with General Kelly’s army.

A little Jack London hobo ingenuity and the ability to sneak on trains and in 11 days, he met up with the halted Kelly’s army in Omaha. That is when they decided to press on by foot across Iowa.

It was on the road he noticed the drastic difference between himself and these 2,000 stiffs he was walking with. He realized all these unemployed men were marching for structure. They wanted their life back, their jobs, their strict work hours.

But Jack, he only craved freedom.

When they got to Des Moines, someone suggested they make boats and float down the Des Moines River, another adventure.

So, they built rafts for 10 people each, and on they went down the river.

For Jack, however, the structure was too much. He and a couple buddies paddled ahead. They got far enough ahead they were able to pillage the food and supplies sympathetic towns people had left by the river for Kelly’s army.

So when they got to the intersection of the Des Moines River, the Mississippi River, in Hannibal, Missouri, which happened to be Mark Twain’s hometown, Jack London left the group.

The serious nature of the men involved made him realize he needed to get off the road and become, in quotes, “a vendor of the brain”, not a mindless wanderer. It is from that moment that the literary genius of Jack London was born.

And no one was happier to get rid of this food stealing kid than General Kelly.

And while somewhat isolated on their journey, General Kelly and Coxey got word of the unemployed protests and violence happening in Cleveland, Ohio, known as the Mayday riots.

It was sad, but they were bolstered by the news that their solution was needed nationwide.

Those who made the distance began gathering in DC on May 21st for the March on Washington. About 500 of Coxey’s army set up camp on the front lawn of the Capitol building with about 4,000 more protesters a day away from arriving, including Kelly’s group.

Then, just as Coxey stood on the steps opening his speech, they were surrounded by police. Coxey and Brown were arrested and put in jail for 20 days. And without leadership, the march was over.

After thousands of miles of travel with huge dreams and aspirations. Coxey and Brown would be charged with walking on the grass and carrying banners on capital grounds and thus would end the stories of the Gilded Age. But this story is actually just the groundwork or the prequel to the greatest movement of the 20th century, the fight for civil rights. 

BONUS: . On June 7th, 1893, during that railroad boycott of Pullman trains, Mahatma Gandhi was on a train in South Africa when he was arrested. for sitting in the whites only section of the train as a protest to their segregation apartheid protocol.

With that knowledge, this story picks up in 1925 when A. Phillip Randolph helped form and become president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Carporters, the first successful union of Pullman employees.

It was A. Philip Randolph who heard the stories of Coxey’s army and felt that a better organized and structured group could make an actual march on Washington successful.

And so he and Bayard Rustin proposed it in 1941.

And one of the elements they needed was finding personalities that the people could rally around like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Well, prior to Rosa Parks’s famous bus movement, she had attended a civil rights training class in Tennessee where she learned all about Gandhi’s peaceful train protest and decided that’s how she would make an impact.

And after she got arrested, famously it was E.D. Nixon, a prominent Pullman porter who bailed Rosa Parks out of jail. Coxey’s army and Mahatma Gandhi are why 1893 and 1894 should never be forgotten.