List: $14.99
| Sale: $10.50
Club: $7.49
A Petition in Boots
1894: Coxey's Army, Jack London & the First Organized March on Washington
Author: Jerry Spencer
Narrator: AI Voice
Unabridged: 7 hr 50 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: TimelessTales.Media
Published: 10/10/2026
Categories: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Nonfiction, History, Us History, Political Science, Political Ideologies
Includes:
Bonus Material
Synopsis
This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Spring, 1894. Millions are out of work, the banks are failing, and Washington has no answer. Jacob Coxey of Massillon, Ohio, has one: a petition in boots. He will march an army of the unemployed to the Capitol and lay their demands on its steps.
Other armies rise behind him. One gathers in Iowa under a man named Kelley, and among its ragged recruits is an eighteen-year-old drifter named Jack London. He rides the rails with them, goes to jail for vagrancy, and carries what he saw into the work that made him America’s great voice of the poor.
Half a century later, Hank Spencer sits at his kitchen table in 1944 and tells it the way he lived it: the cold boxcars, the hunger, the Texas desert, the long road east. Hogan’s men seize a locomotive in Butte and run it through the Bozeman Tunnel with the law behind them. Kelley refuses a stolen train and marches on. These men are not heroes in the usual way. They are the first to ask a question the country still argues over: what does a nation owe the people it leaves behind?
Built on primary accounts, newspapers of the day and Jack London’s own words, A Petition in Boots moves like a Western and reads like the truth. It is the story of the first great march on Washington, the birth of American protest, and the making of a writer who would speak for the downtrodden for the rest of his life.
For readers of Jack London, labor and Western history, and novels like News of the World, The Cold Millions and Ragtime.
Spring, 1894. Millions are out of work, the banks are failing, and Washington has no answer. Jacob Coxey of Massillon, Ohio, has one: a petition in boots. He will march an army of the unemployed to the Capitol and lay their demands on its steps.
Other armies rise behind him. One gathers in Iowa under a man named Kelley, and among its ragged recruits is an eighteen-year-old drifter named Jack London. He rides the rails with them, goes to jail for vagrancy, and carries what he saw into the work that made him America’s great voice of the poor.
Half a century later, Hank Spencer sits at his kitchen table in 1944 and tells it the way he lived it: the cold boxcars, the hunger, the Texas desert, the long road east. Hogan’s men seize a locomotive in Butte and run it through the Bozeman Tunnel with the law behind them. Kelley refuses a stolen train and marches on. These men are not heroes in the usual way. They are the first to ask a question the country still argues over: what does a nation owe the people it leaves behind?
Built on primary accounts, newspapers of the day and Jack London’s own words, A Petition in Boots moves like a Western and reads like the truth. It is the story of the first great march on Washington, the birth of American protest, and the making of a writer who would speak for the downtrodden for the rest of his life.
For readers of Jack London, labor and Western history, and novels like News of the World, The Cold Millions and Ragtime.