Greenback party

Greenback party in U.S. history, political organization formed in the years 1874-76 to promote currency expansion. The members were principally farmers of the West and the South; stricken by the Panic of 1873, they saw salvation in an inflated currency that would wipe out the farm debts contracted in times of high prices. They were opposed by the conservatives, who managed to get the Resumption Act of 1875 passed. The Greenbackers had in 1874 hoped to capture the Democratic party, but the nomination of Samuel J. Tilden killed that hope, and the Greenback party nominated Peter Cooper as its own candidate for President in 1876. The Greenbackers got only 81,737 votes. In 1878, however, certain labor organizations, embittered by the labor troubles in 1877, united with the advocates of cheap money in the Greenback-Labor party, and the combination party polled over 1 million votes and elected 14 Representatives to Congress that year. The Greenbackers' hopes for 1880 were high, and bidding for wider support they broadened their program by endorsement of woman suffrage, federal regulation of interstate commerce, and a graduated income tax. For the presidency in 1880 the party nominated its most notable figure, Gen. James B. Weaver , but the return of prosperity, the passage of the Bland-Allison Act (1878), and the success of the Resumption Act had allayed the discontent on which the party had grown, and the Greenback-Labor vote declined in 1880 to just a little over 300,000. When the candidate in 1884, Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler (1818-93), did very badly, the party dissolved. Some members joined the Union Labor party in 1888, but more of them went back to the old parties. Later many Greenbackers, among them Weaver and Ignatius Donnelly, became leading figures in the Populist party .

Greenback Party US political party (1875–84). Deriving its main support from Western farmers, it favoured the issue of more greenbacks to stimulate prices. It nominated Peter Cooper for president (1876) and elected 14 Congressmen in 1878. It declined in the 1880s.

Greenback Labor Party. The Greenback Labor party represented a brief but potent Gilded Age expression of working‐class anti‐monopoly sentiment.In the aftermath of the depression of 1873, the formation of the agrarian‐based Greenback Party in 1874–1875, the railroad strikes of 1877, and the electoral success of local workingmen's parties in industrial states in 1877, 150 delegates assembled in Toledo, Ohio, in February 1878 to organize the National (or Greenback Labor) party. Its labor‐oriented platform called for shorter working hours, a ban on contract prison labor, immigration restriction, and government bureaus of labor statistics. The party attracted a million votes in the 1878 midterm election and elected fifteen congressmen across the East, South, and Middle West. In some localities, it took on a distinctly radical character; in the coal districts of Alabama, black Greenback‐Laborites exercised leadership among both black and white miners.

The party's 1880 platform included farmer‐labor planks that foreshadowed the Populist party's 1892 Omaha Platform, calling for government control of transportation and communications, a graduated federal income tax, opposition to a standing army, and the lifting of all restrictions on suffrage. Despite the party's impressive start, however, its 1880 presidential candidate, the Civil War general James Weaver of Iowa, attracted only 3 percent of the vote, mostly in agricultural districts. The end of the depression in 1878 and the government's resumption of specie payments (the gold standard) in 1879 had sapped the party's fortunes. Nevertheless, hopes for an independent labor party revived with the rise to prominence of the Knights of Labor after another wave of national strikes in the 1880s.
See also Depressions, Economic; Immigration Law; Industrialization; Labor Movements; Monetary Policy, Federal; Populist Era; Strikes and Industrial Conflict.

Bibliography

Gretchen Ritter , Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America, 1997.
Elizabeth Sanders , Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917, 1999.

Shelton Stromquist