Coxey's Crusade for Jobs: Unemployment in the Gilded Age

In the depths of a depression in 1894, a highly successful Gilded Age businessman named Jacob Coxey led a group of jobless men on a march from his hometown of Massillon, Ohio, to the steps of the nation's Capitol. Though a financial panic and the resulting widespread business failures caused millions of Americans to be without work at the time, the word unemployment was rarely used and generally misunderstood.

In an era that worshipped the self-reliant individual who triumphed in a laissez-...