Greenback party

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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

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.