honor of his father's quirky monetary obsessions. First political interests Coxey was born to parents who supported the Democratic Party and he entered politics under this banner. With the coming of the economic crisis of 1877, Coxey became a partisan of the United States Greenback Party, which ascribed the nations economic woes to faulty economic principles which led to a severe contraction of the money supply in the years after the American Civil War. Prosperity could be restored, Greenbackers believed, by the issuance of sufficient quantities of paper money. When the People's Party emerged at the start of the 1890s, it earned the support of Coxey and most other Greenbackers and he shifted his allegiance to that political organization. Coxey had experience as a laborer and an employer; he was also aware of the agricultural situation. He was a reformer who was willing to spend time and money to promote his plans for the betterment of the social order. Coxey was regarded by many contemporary observers as convincingly earnest. One reporter wrote, "He seems to be profoundly impressed with the suffering of mankind and with a belief that there is a deep-laid plan of monopolist to crush the poor to the earth." He was often branded as a crank for challenging the economic system that made him so prosperous. Coxey's Army In 1893 a severe economic depression swept the United States – a crisis remembered as the Panic of 1893. Unemployment skyrocketed, bank runs paralyzed the local financial system, and credit dried up, while a protracted period of deflation put negative pressure on wages, prompting widespread lockouts and strikes. Never one to be short of either self-confidence or political ambition, Coxey believed that he held the key to the nation's economic woes and began espousing a plan of public works, specifically road improvement, to be financed through the issuance of $500 million in paper money, backed by government bonds. This expenditure would in one swoop improve infrastructure, put unemployed workers to work, and loosen the strangled credit situation, Coxey believed. To accompany his novel and controversial economic program, organized around the slogan "Good Roads", Coxey and his close political associate Carl Browne devised a novel political strategy designed to force the United States government into action. Rather than attempt to form a conventional political organization to capture decision-making offices, Coxey decided upon a course of what would later be known