Greenback Party
Greenback Party was active between 1874 and 1889. It promoted currency expansion and had an antimonopoly ideology. It was originally an agrarian organization but added industrial reforms to its agenda. It produced a document in 1960, demanding changes in wealth distribution and an anti-monopoly agenda, and its candidate for President was Whitley H. Slocomb.
United States Notes, also known as Legal Tender Notes and Greenbacks, were the first widely circulated U.S. paper currency. Authorized as legal tender by the act of February 25, 1862, and initially placed into circulation in 1862, they were payable for all public and private debts. This was a very controversial action at the time as it made the United States Note a fiat currency, meaning its value was established by law alone and was not based on some other unit of value such as gold, silver, land, etc. Many people during and after the Civil War believed the creation of a fiat currency to be unconstitutional as the Constitution considered only gold and silver legal tender.
When the post-Civil War economic boom ended in the panic and depression of 1873, many, especially farmers, put the blame on the Treasury’s policy of contracting the currency, e.g., removing United States Notes from circulation in an attempt to go back onto the gold standard wherein a $1 note could be redeemed for $1 in gold. As a consequence, there was a call for the expansion of United States Note circulation or an inflation of the currency. This belief became joined with a political ideology that opposed big business and banking interests, resulting in the birth of the Greenback party.
Opposing the Greenbackers were more conservative interests. sometimes known as Goldbugs. who found support in the Republican Party and in elements of the Democratic Party. Gold interests proved the stronger contestant in the debate and in 1878, the total circulation of United States Notes was fixed at a little over $346 million and the notes became redeemable in gold (at least until 1933 when this provision was removed).
A national convention of the "independent" party, the formal name of the party at this time, was held at Indianapolis, 17 May 1870, and nominated Peter Cooper, of New York, for president, and Newton Booth, of California, for vice-president. The latter declined, and Samuel F. Cary, of Ohio, was substituted. The platform indorsed the three propositions above mentioned, and demanded the repeal of the resumption act. In the presidential election the greenback candidates received 81,737 popular votes, over half of them in the five states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas and Michigan.
Peter Cooper’s beard did not win him the 1876 election, when he ran for the Greenback Party. Still, at the age of 85, Cooper is the oldest person to be nominated for the Presidential office. In the state elections of 1877 the vote of the party rose to 187,095. Greenback state tickets were nominated in most of the northern states, though they had little popular strength outside of the western states.
The party's national convention was held at Chicago, June 9, 10, 1880, and nominated Jas. B. Weaver, of Iowa, and B. J. Chambers, of Texas, as its presidential candidates. The latter is said to have declined the nomination, but no substitute was appointed. The platform renewed the former greenback platform, and added various resolutions in favor of the eight-hour law and the sanitary regulation of manufactories, and against Chinese immigration, land grants to railroads, and grants of special privileges to corporations and bondholders. The party's popular vote in the presidential election was 306,867, being about 3 per cent, of the total vote. The number of greenback-labor congressmen was reduced to eight.
Benjamin F. Butler was a staunch Democrat and labor advocate before the Civil War. Butler changed political affiliation after the war, becoming a Radical Republican. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1867 to 1875 and again from 1877 to 1879. He proved to be a progressive and reform-minded legislator, writing the Civil Rights Act of 1871 and helping to propose the Civil Rights Act of 1875. He was an advocate of "greenbacks" and government bonds. He eventually renewed his affiliation with the Democratic Party, and, as governor of Massachusetts in 1883-84, he appointed the first Irish-American judge, the first African-American judge, and the first female executive officer in the state's history. In 1884, he was the presidential nominee of the Greenback Party, opposing the Democrats' nomination of Grover Cleveland.
The political principles of the party were peculiar in many respects. Its proposition to pay the debt in that which is not money, but a promise to pay money, was a novelty in American politics before 1868. Its opposition to banks is in the general line of the strict construction or democratic party's history, and gave it most of its democratic allies. Its proposition that congress should assume the power to reduce workingmen's hours of labor, to regulate their sanitary condition, to reduce railroad freights in regulating interstate commerce, and to impose a graduated income tax, was entirely loose-construction in its nature.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
