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Updated: June 17, 2025
It also implied an attitude of aloofness from all those movements which aspire to replace the wage system by cooperation, whether voluntary or subsidized by government, whether greenbackism, socialism, or anarchism.
But greenbackism differed from the scheme of Lassalle in that it would utilize the government's enormous Civil War debt, instead of its taxing power, as a means of furnishing capital to labor.
In the Mountain States were many interested in silver as a commodity whose assistance could be counted on in a campaign to increase the amount of the metal in circulation. There were, moreover, many other voters who, while regarding Greenbackism as an economic heresy, were convinced that bimetallism offered a safe and sound solution of the currency problem.
It was not until the panic of 1873 had intensified the agricultural depression and the Granger movement had failed to relieve the situation that the farmers of the West took hold of greenbackism and made it a major political issue. The independent parties of the Granger period, as a rule, were not in favor of inflation. Their platforms in some cases demanded a speedy return to specie payment.
In 1866 when the eight-hour demand was as yet uppermost, the National Labor Union resolved for an independent labor party. The espousal of greenbackism in 1867 only reenforced that resolution. The leaders realized only too well that neither the Republican nor Democratic party would voluntarily make an issue of a scheme purporting to assist the wage earner to become an independent producer.
The lure of "greenbackism" was that it offered an opportunity for self-employment. But already in the sixties, it became clear that the workingman could not expect to attain self-employment as an individual, but if at all, it had to be sought on the basis of producers' cooperation.
Whether he went on the land or stayed in industry, he needed access to reasonably free credit. The device invented by workingmen to this end was the bizarre "greenback" idea which held their minds as if in a vise for nearly twenty years. "Greenbackism" left no such permanent trace on American social and economic structure as "Republican education" or "free land."
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