David Davis of Illinois was nominated for president and Joel M. Parker of New Jersey for vice-president. Neither of the gentlemen were workingmen. Both withdrew a few weeks later; and no further nominations were made. Two years later, independent reform candidates were nominated in Illinois and, perhaps, elsewhere. In 1875, the editor of The Workingman's Advocate was interested in the Greenback Party.
Undoubtedly many members of the National Labor Union who were committed to political action and opposed to the "money monopoly" became members of the Greenback Party. Others who were more radical turned to the Workingmen's Party of the United States. In other words, the small but aggressive class-conscious element within the National Labor Union joined the latter party; and the element which stood for reform affiliated with the Greenback movement. Those who joined the Greenback Party adopted the philosophy of the small proprietor and the skilled artisan; but those who united with the Workingmen's Party and later the Socialist Labor Party, adopted the economic theories of Karl Marx. The Greenbackers did not propose to do away with private ownership of capital; they only desired to prevent the concentration of capital in the hands of a few large capitalists. The Greenbacker was a reactionist rather than a progressive; he wished to prevent the growth of monopoly and large-scale industry. His viewpoint was that of the pre-Civil-War period; he looked backward instead of forward. Consequently, the Greenback movement is much more closely related to anarchism than to socialism.[1]
The American workingman of the generation immediately following the Civil War was still saturated with the philosophy of the frontier or of Jacksonian democracy; he as yet accepted the oft-repeated, and not-frequently contradicted, dictum that each and every wage earner had an excellent opportunity to become a small proprietor or even a captain of industry. As long as this situation obtained, it was not difficult for "pure and simple" trade unionism generated in a period of stress and of rising prices like the last years of the Civil War, to be gradually transmuted into "labor reformism" and "greenbackism." The greatest labor organization of the period under discussion, the Knights of Labor, was primarily a reform association. The ultimate aim of its leaders during its years of growth was some form of a cooperative commonwealth. Its famous preamble was taken almost verbatim from one drawn in 1874 for another organization, by George E. McNeill, the "Apostle of the Eight-hour Movement." But hard times, unemployment, the disappearance of the famous westward-moving frontier line, the rush of immigrants from Southern Europe, the consolidation of capital, and the failure of sundry reform movements were preparing
- ↑ For a statement of the theory of greenbackism, see "Documentary History of American Industrial Society," Vol. 9: 33–43.
