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Updated: June 12, 2025


It may not be wholly lacking in interest to the reader when I say that, some years later, as I one morning sat in my library looking through the window at the far-distant smoke of Newcastle, I had just laid aside a copy of the Times, in which paper I had read of the results of a political contest in the State of Illinois. The Republicans had won. The Greenbackers and the Democrats had lost.

The notable achievement of the independent parties in the domain of legislation was the enactment of laws to regulate railroads in five States of the upper Mississippi Valley.* When these laws were passed, the parties had done their work. By 1876 they had disappeared or, in a few instances, had merged with the Greenbackers.

As far back as 1872 the Labor Reformers had condemned the "capitalists" for importing Chinese laborers; in the same year the Republicans and Democrats had opposed further grants of public land to corporations and monopolies referring in the main to the railroads; in 1880 the Greenbackers and in 1884 the Anti-Monopolists, the Prohibitionists and the Democrats had denounced the corporations and called for government action to prevent or control them; and in 1888 the Union Labor party, the Prohibitionists and the Republicans had urged legislation for doing away with or regulating trusts and monopolies.

It was during this feverish epoch that organized labor first entered the arena of national politics. When the policy as to the national currency became an issue, the lure of cheap money drew labor into an alliance in 1880 with the Greenbackers, whose mad cry added to the general unrest. In this, as in other fatuous pursuits, labor was only responding to the forces and the spirit of the hour.

It is a curious fact of human nature that nothing so surely reconciles a man to risking his life as a handsome sum in cash. General Washington, being perfectly aware of this fact, generally contrived to have a sum of what he called "hard money" at headquarters all through the war. Spies do not readily take to paper money. There are no Greenbackers among them.

He received 143 votes to 125 for James A. Garfield, while 13 members elected as Greenbackers cast their votes for Hendrick B. Wright of Pennsylvania.

The Grangers growled about the middle-men; the Greenbackers said there wasn't circulating medium enough, and, in the midst of it all, hard-working, discouraged farmers, like Simeon Burns, worked on, unable to find out what really was the matter. And there, on this beautiful Sabbath morning, Sim sat and thought and thought, till he rose with an oath and gave it up.

Delegates from the Agricultural Wheel, the Corn-Planters, the Anti-Monopolists, Farmers' Alliance, and Grangers, attended a convention in February, 1887, and joined the Knights of Labor and the Greenbackers to form the United Labor party.

The Grangers growled about the middlemen; the Greenbackers said there wasn't circulating medium enough, and, in the midst of it all, hard-working, discouraged farmers, like Simeon Burns, worked on, unable to find out what really was the matter. And there, on this beautiful Sabbath morning, Sim sat and thought and thought, till he rose with an oath and gave it up.

The old greenbackers came out of their temporary retirement, and helped Bradley's cause simply because he was young and a dissenter. They were a power, for most of them were deeply read on the tariff and on the railroad problem; in fact, were all round radicals and fluent speakers. Judge Brown kept out of it. "I don't want to seem too prominent in this campaign," he said to Colonel Peavey.

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