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"Hay" was immediately surrounded and asked to describe what he saw ashore. "I have had the honor of photographing a detachment of the Cuban Army of Liberation," he replied, quizzically. "To tell the truth, it looked like a part of Coxey's army. There were about thirty of them, and the clothing of the whole outfit wouldn't supply a New England farmer with a season's scarecrow.

For instance, a detachment of regular troops in Montana captured a band coming East on a stolen Northern Pacific train, and militia had to be called out to rescue a train from a band at Mount Sterling, Ohio. Coxey's own army never amounted to more than a few hundred, but it was more in the public eye.

The novelty of his movement, however, had worn off, and results were so poor that on the 26th of July he issued a statement saying he could do no more and that what was left of the army would have to shift for itself. In Maryland, the authorities arrested a number of Coxey's "soldiers" as vagrants.

Coxey's leadership, set out on a long and toilsome march over the Alleghanies to the capital, living by charity on the way.

The General was a weasel faced person of almost any age between thirty-five and sixty. Sometimes he could have passed for a hundred and ten. He had won his military title as a boy in the famous march of Coxey's army on Washington, or, rather, the title had been conferred upon him in later years as a merited reward of service.

The distress among the wage-earners became extreme; unemployment was common; strikes, like that beginning in Pullman in 1894, were bitter and prolonged. "Coxey's army," composed of unemployed workmen, marched to Washington with a petition for relief. As is usually the case in our politics, the blame for the industrial disturbance was laid at the door of the party in power.

And it would be so small a part of Coxey's army that the main body would march on and never miss it. I had just gone through that long, soul-killing period of idleness and had barely managed to find a job before I collapsed. Now that we were to strike I would have to push that job aside and sink back into the abyss.

No three people would more welcome opportunities to outline the idealistic possibilities of this future art. And a well-known American painter was talking to me of a midnight scolding Charlie Chaplin gave to some Los Angeles producer, in a little restaurant, preaching the really beautiful film, and denouncing commerce like a member of Coxey's illustrious army.

There, in the park, I met a fellow-hobo who told me his life-story and who wrestled with me to join the United States Army. He had given in to the recruiting officer and was just about to join, and he couldn't see why I shouldn't join with him. He had been a member of Coxey's Army in the march to Washington several months before, and that seemed to have given him a taste for army life.