Greenback Labor Party

GREENBACK LABOR PARTY. Formally known as the National Independent Party, the Greenback Labor Party was organized in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1875 by a coalition of midwestern grangers and eastern labor reformers who allied upon their common belief that the social inequalities and economic crises of industrial society were the result of the control of the nation’s currency by private financial interests. Squeezed by their deepening debts for land and machinery, the rising costs of transportation and storage of grain, and falling wholesale commodity prices, farmers embraced the economic panaceas of Edward Kellogg, an antebellum labor reformer whose demands for a federally-engineered inflation of the currency (by replacing gold-based dollars with paper dollars, or “greenbacks”) seemed to meet their most immediate problems. Kelloggism had long inspired workers with its promise to reform rather than abolish industrial capitalism by forcing the federal government to support artisanal entrepreneurship and producer cooperatives by nationalizing the instruments of currency and credit.

Initially, the party was primarily agrarian in membership, but it soon swallowed up much of the independent labor party movement after the great railroad strikes of 1877. Supported by the Knights of Labor and local Workingmen’s parties, the greenbackers added labor planks to their platforms in a number of states and reaped the reward of sending more than a dozen members to Congress and polling more than a million votes in 1878.

Though harshly critical of the greenbackers’ obscuring of the issues of class by their myopic focus on financial questions, the newly organized Socialist Labor Party aligned itself with the National Independent Party and its presidential candidate, James B. Weaver, in 1880. In a contest between four former Civil War generals, Weaver had a hard time distinguishing himself from both Republicans and Democrats, as his platform overlapped with each. In the end, he polled fewer than 400,000 votes and lost a number of key greenback congressional seats. In the wake of the greenbackers defeat, the Socialist Labor Party fractured as the anarchist and syndicalist factions left both the party and electoral politics altogether.

Ultimately, the greenback idea proved too weak a glue to overcome the sectional, cultural, and class divisions within the alliance of merchants and farmers in the West and urban workers in the East. In the 1884 presidential election, the greenbackers supported Benjamin Butler, a political chameleon, in the desperate hope that his fame as the longtime standard-bearer of labor reform in Massachusetts would bring eastern labor back into the fold. Butler, however, garnered but a third of Weaver’s 1880 total. Though Butler proved to be the last greenback candidate for president, the greenbackers’ rhetoric and leadership soon rose again beneath the banner of populism.

Destler, Chester McArthur. American Radicalism, 1865–1901. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966.

Haynes, Fred E. Third Party Movements since the Civil War with Special Reference to Iowa: A Study in Politics. New York: Russell and Russell, 1966.

Kleppner, Paul. The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900. New York: Free Press, 1970.

Lause, Mark A. The Civil War's Last Campaign: James B. Weaver, the Greenback-Labor Party & The Politics of Race & Section. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2001.

Montgomery, David. Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.

Unger, Irwin. The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964.