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As early as 1872 the labor reformers nominated state tickets in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. In 1875 they nominated Wendell Phillips for Governor of Massachusetts. In 1878, in coalition with the Greenbackers, they elected many state officers throughout the West. Ten years later, when the Union Labor party was at its height, labor candidates were successful in several municipalities.
He declared that, in a choice between bullocks and babies, he would stand for babies, and he staged a successful filibuster at the close of a session in order to force the consideration of a bill for the opening of part of Oklahoma to settlement. The preliminaries of the campaign of 1880 were vexed by dissension within the ranks of the Greenbackers.
The Labor Reformers in 1872 demanded the eight-hour day, for example; the Greenbackers had a definite program for relief in 1880; the Anti-Monopolists in 1884 and the Union Labor and the United Labor parties in 1888. By 1892 the great parties found themselves face to face with a growing labor vote. The labor planks in the two platforms of that year were strikingly similar.
Easily first among the Greenbackers elected to Congress in 1878 was General James B. Weaver of Iowa. When ten years of age, Weaver had been taken by his parents to Iowa from Ohio, his native State. In 1854, he graduated from a law school in Cincinnati, and for some years thereafter practiced his profession and edited a paper at Bloomfield in Davis County, Iowa.
Therefore, I suggest that this is an auspicious occasion for passing suitable resolutions reaffirming Nevada's invincible repugnance to a debased currency, her unalterable fidelity to hard money and her distinguished approval of the resumption of specie payment." "Get in a whack at the Greenbackers," said Col. Orndorff. "I surely approves the suggestion," said Mr. Stewart.
The last appearance of the Greenbackers in national politics was in the presidential election of 1884. In May of that year a convention of "The Anti-Monopoly Organization of the United States," held in Chicago, adopted a platform voicing a demand for legislative control of corporations and monopolies in the interests of the people and nominated General Benjamin F. Butler for President.
The members of the clubs and their leaders constituted, as a matter of fact, the more radical of the Greenbackers. They usually opposed fusion with the Democrats and often refused to follow the regular leaders of the party. In the election the Greenback ticket polled only about eighty thousand votes, or less than one per cent of the total.
In Wisconsin, for example, there was little difference between Democrats and Greenbackers on the currency question, and even the Republicans in their platform leaned toward inflation, although the candidates declared against it. No general elections were held in 1877 in some of the States where the Greenback sentiment was most pronounced.
In 1886, for instance, the Knights of Labor and the trades unions, for once cooperating harmoniously, joined forces locally with the moribund Greenbackers and with farmers' organizations and won notable successes at the polls in various parts of the Union, particularly in the Middle Atlantic and Western States.
The currency is now at 22 per cent. discount as compared with gold, and further depreciation is apprehended. Let us hope that Japan may soon be able to follow the Republic farther by making it convertible as good as gold. Notwithstanding its wide "base" in short, our greenbackers' "base" it doesn't seem to work here any better than at home.
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