Robert E. Wright

Just about every US history textbook devotes a paragraph or two to “Coxey’s Army,” a group of unemployed men who descended upon Washington, DC in 1894 seeking to influence national economic policy. That a movement that called itself “The Commonwealth of Christ” ended up in the history books with such a militant label is an object lesson in elite political self-preservation. The government’s reaction to protest at the Capitol then bears some instructive similarities and differences to its reaction in 2021.