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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?

Why was the economic machine making this frightful noise?

The Federal and state governments were afraid to act effectively against Coxeyism because too many people sympathized with it, secretly or openly. It was partly a state of nerves. Writers in the popular periodicals and in some of the solemn reviews laid it on red. In Coxey’s march they saw an historic parallel. In almost the same way five hundred volunteers, knowing how to die, had marched from Marseilles to Paris with questions that could not be answered, and gave the French Revolution a hymn that shook the world. Human distress was first page news. The New York World gave away a million loaves of bread and whooped up its circulation. The New York Herald solicited donations of clothing which it distributed in large quantities to the ragged.