The American History of the Greenback Party

Goodwyn says that "because of the color of their ink, the notes quickly became cognize to the public as 'greenbacks.'" The war fueled prosperity in the North, yet was accompanied by high inflation. After the war, line of work interests in the East called for the retirement of the greenbacks and a return to a hard currency redeemable in gold. In 1866, copulation authorized a gradual reduction of the greenbacks, but aft(prenominal) only $44 million was retired, objections by the 'debtor class' stopped this process. The 'Ohio Idea,' advocated by Democratic Congressman George Pendleton in 1867, gained popular support. It held that "the war debt must be repaid in the selfsame notes which the bond-buyers had invested."

noticeism found support in a variety of quarters. Goodwyn says "the intellectual sources of greenback thinking stool be traced to eighteenth-century works by 'anti-metallists' and inflationists in England. The labor front man was influenced by the anti-usury thinking of Edward Kellogg in the 1840s, and by Alexander Campbell, who prospered in the late 1860s the issuance of government bonds and legal peeled at low rates of interest and is sometimes called "the render of the Greenback Movement." In the late 1860s, economist Henry Carey foresaw a harmony of interest of labor and productive entrepreneurs against "a reciprocal and parasitical foe, the finance capitalists.

" So

Unger, Irwin. The Greenback Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964.

Although it contained within its midst a broad base of supporters and at long last espoused progressive demands such as the establishment of a national income tax and federal aid to agriculture which were eventually adopted, the Greenback Party fundamentally failed because its focus on soft silver was too narrow to appeal to more than a elegant segment of the electorate. Bibliography

The retirement of the greenbacks in the late 1860s and the resulting contraction in the supply of money lowered prices for wages and agricultural commodities, but the Northern economy rapidly recovered from the recession of 1866-1868, a period of railroad expansion.

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