Greenback Party (1876–1884)

The National Independent or Greenback-Labor Party, commonly known as the Greenback Party, was launched in Indianapolis, Indiana, in November 1874 at a meeting organized by the Indiana Grange. The party grew out of the Panic of 1873, a post–Civil War economic depression, that hit farmers and industrial workers particularly hard. Currency was the basic issue of the new party, which opposed return to the gold standard and favored retention of the inflationary paper money (known as greenbacks), first introduced as an emergency measure during the Civil War.

[Page 244]

The party in 1876 ran Peter Cooper, a New York philanthropist, for president and drafted a platform that focused entirely on the currency issue. Cooper, though, received just 75,973 votes (0.9 percent of the popular vote), mainly from agrarian voters.

Spurred by the continuing depression, a Greenback national convention in 1878 effected the merger of the party with various labor reform groups and adopted a platform that addressed labor and currency issues. Showing voting strength in the industrial East as well as in the agrarian South and Midwest, the Greenbacks polled more than 1 million votes in the 1878 congressional races and won fourteen seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. This marked the high point of the party's strength.

A return of national prosperity undermined the party's appeal, however, and its ability to grow was hindered by an ongoing prospect that it would merge with one of the existing major parties and by a split between the agrarian and labor wings of the party. In the 1880 election, the party elected only eight representatives, and its presidential candidate, Rep. James B. Weaver of Iowa, received 305,997 votes (3.3 percent of the popular vote), far less than party leaders expected.

The party slipped further four years later, when the Greenbacks' candidate for president, former Massachusetts governor Benjamin F. Butler, a longtime Republican, received 175,096 votes (1.7 percent of the popular vote). With the demise of the Greenbacks, most of the party's constituency moved into the Populist Party, the agrarian reform movement that gained strength in the South and Midwest in the 1890s.