A Coxey Marcher's Family Left Destitute in Seattle
Two barefoot girls beg police for food after their father joins the industrial army marching on Washington and their mother is left unable to work.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
May and Maggie Weimer, two ragged, barefoot girls of 10 and 6 years of age, went to the police station yesterday asking for aid for their mother and her children, who they said had been without food for two days. Police Matron Taylor looked into the case and found Mrs. Weimer in a three-room, scantily furnished house on South Twelfth street, near Toone, twelve blocks below the South school. The woman was barefooted and clothed in a thin wrap. She has a family of five children: May, aged 10; Maggie, 6; Alfred; Beatrice; and a baby girl 3 months old, not yet named. Her husband joined the Coxey army several months ago and started on the march for Washington City, leaving his family destitute. He had been unable to obtain work and now, Mrs. Weimer says, is starving in the East. Mrs. Weimer, since the infant was born, has been unable to do anything, and the family has eked out an existence through the efforts of May and Maggie, who have gone on foraging expeditions every day to the various restaurants about town. For two days they failed to secure food and at last went to the police station, being sent there, they said, by a woman who met them. A collection was made for the little girls and a sack of flour, corn meal, butter, meat and coffee was sent to the house by Mrs. Taylor. Mrs. Weimer has applied for aid to the county commissioner and secured from them a sack of flour, and last Christmas the Associated Charities sent the family a dinner. But beyond this she has been dependent entirely upon the children, as her own condition, owing to the lack of medical attendance, was such that she could not leave the house. May and Maggie are bright little girls, and were regular attendants at the last term of the South school.
“Her husband joined the Coxey army several months ago and started on the march for Washington City, leaving his family destitute.”
Coxey's Army was a national protest of unemployed workers marching on Washington in 1894, and this Seattle story shows its cost at home: a father gone, a mother incapacitated and children scavenging restaurants for food. The tension between private charity, county relief and the sheer scale of unemployment still shapes how Seattle responds to families in crisis.
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