In 1894, the U.S. was in an economic depression, an Ohio businessman named Jacob Coxey led a march on Washington to protest national economic policies. This motley crew came to be known as Coxey’s army, and the phrases “enough food to feed Coxey’s army,” or “enough grub to feed Coxey’s army,” meaning “a whole lot of food,” showed up in print soon after. Both Coxey’s army and Cox’s army have also been applied to any ragtag group, the latter influenced by a much bigger march on Washington in 1932, that was led, as it happens, by Father James Renshaw Cox. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Feeding Coxey’s Army”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
When we were in Dallas recently for some appearances, a listener named Alan Josephson asked me about an expression that his mother Adele used all the time.
And I wonder if you’ve heard it, Grant. The phrase was, enough food to feed Cox’s army.
Enough food to feed Cox. I have heard it, but I don’t know anything about it. What do you know?
Yeah. Well, and as you can imagine, it means a whole lot of food, right?
Well, the weird thing was that I said, no, I’ve never heard of that expression.
And we turned to somebody who was standing nearby and we said, have you heard this expression, enough food to feed Cox’s army?
And the guy said, oh, sure.
Yeah, I use it all the time.
And this caught me up short.
And so the whole week that we were in Dallas, I was asking people about this phrase.
And again and again, all these Texans told me that they knew it as either enough food to feed Cox’s army or enough food to feed Cox’s army.
Coxies.
Yeah.
And come to find out that there was a Coxies army, C-O-X-E-Y.
And the story is pretty interesting.
In 1894, the United States was in the middle of a terrible economic depression.
And there was this Ohio businessman named Jacob Cox. He organized this massive march on Washington to protest economic policies and urge a public works program like road building, that kind of thing.
And he got a lot of publicity about it. He set out from Ohio and they covered about 15 miles a day. A lot of them were just walking.
And by the time he got to Washington, supposedly there were about 500 people there.
There were also a lot of journalists there.
And he later organized a bigger march in 1914 that he was saying was going to bring a million people.
It didn’t.
But anyway, the expression enough food to feed Coxie’s army started showing up in citations in the early 20th century, right about that time.
And an interesting footnote at that first march, L. Frank Baum was one of the observers.
And there has been speculation that Baum used some of those themes in The Wizard of Oz.
You know, you have the yellow brick road, which could be the road to Washington or road building.
You have the cowardly lion, who may have been a reference to William Jennings Bryan, who was perceived as a lot of people as cowardly, and so on and so forth.
There was also later, weirdly enough, a Cox’s army that marched on Washington, a whole different protest in the 1930s.
But I just found it really weird that there were all these people in this town we were visiting who knew this phrase and neither one of us did.
No, that’s really strange, right?
Yeah, but that’s the way language works.
Stuff stays local till it isn’t.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I don’t know any reason that it would be particular to Texas since it was a march on Washington.
Yeah, I don’t know either.
Weird stuff, right?
Weird stuff.
So thank you for sending us on that journey, Alan.
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