‘Coxey's Army’ as a millennial movement

Abstract

‘Coxey's Army’ was the popular name for a march of unemployed workers which left Massillon, Ohio, on Easter Sunday 1894, and arrived in Washington, D.C., on May Day. It was the first nationally reported protest march on Washington and as an example of protest against economic conditions is usually classified as a form of Populism. Careful analysis, however, reveals that it possessed important religious elements, specifically an idiosyncratic millennialism. Its millennialism was compounded of three elements: (1) a premillennial view of history; (2) Populist conspiracy theory, identifying Jewish bankers as the cause of economic problems; and (3) a vulgarized belief in reincarnation, according to which all souls were deemed to include a fraction of the reincarnated soul of Jesus. Notwithstanding its doctrinal peculiarities, ‘Coxey's Army’ resembles many of the syncretic millenarian movements of the 1970s and '80s, with its fusion of fundamentalist doctrine, political radicalism, and Asian-occult elements.