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But it was more than currency reform it was industrial democracy. "Greenbackism" was the American counterpart of the contemporary radicalism of Europe.
This early period of inflation propaganda has been described as "the social reform period, or the wage-earners' period of greenbackism, as distinguished from the inflationist, or farmers' period that followed."
Greenbackism was popular with the working people during the depressed seventies because it now meant to them primarily currency inflation and a rise of prices and, consequently, industrial prosperity not the phantastic scheme of the National Labor Union.
In the sixties we saw the national trade unions join with other local and miscellaneous labor organizations in the National Labor Union upon a political platform of eight-hours and greenbackism. In 1873 the same national unions asserted their rejection of "panaceas" and politics by attempting to create in the National Labor Congress a federation of trades of a strictly economic character.
The first attempts at organized political activity in behalf of greenbackism came not from the farmers of the West but from the laboring men of the East, whose growing class consciousness resulted in the organization of the National Labor Union in 1868. Accompanying, if not resulting from the Government's policy of contraction, came a fall of prices and widespread unemployment.
At the second convention in 1867 the enthusiasm was transferred from eight-hour laws to the bizarre social reform philosophy known as "greenbackism." "Greenbackism" was, in substance, a plan to give the man without capital an equal opportunity in business with his rich competitor.
The platform rehabilitated Greenbackism in cogent phrases, demanded government control of railroads and telegraph and telephone systems, the reclamation of land held by corporations, an income tax, the free coinage of silver and gold "at the present legal ratio of sixteen to one," and postal savings banks.
It meant taking away from bankers and middlemen their control over credit and thereby furnishing credit and capital through the aid of the government to the producers of physical products. On its face greenbackism was a program of currency reform and derived its name from the so-called "greenback," the paper money issued during the Civil War.
It was on this intense labor discontent that the greenback agitation fed and grew. Whereas in 1876 the greenback labor vote was negligible, notwithstanding the exhortations by many of the former trade union leaders who turned greenback agitators, now, following the great strikes, greenbackism became primarily a labor movement.
The government was to extend to the producer "free capital" in addition to free land which he received with the Homestead Act. The producers' cooperation, which offered the occasion for the espousal of greenbackism, was itself preceded by a movement for consumers' cooperation.
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