This early labor party was simply a party of mild protest. It originated in Massachusetts, where there had been a number of serious labor disputes and a certain shoe manufacturer had imported a carload of Chinese to operate his machinery. Although Wendell Phillips, who had declared the emancipation of labor to be the next great issue after the emancipation of slaves, was prominently identified with it and stood next to Justice Davis on the first poll in the convention, the party as a whole manifested no tendency to open a distinct class struggle, and the leading planks of its program were shortly accepted by both of the old parties.
Standing upon such a temporary platform, and unsupported by any general philosophy of politics, the labor reform party inevitably went to pieces. Its dissolution was facilitated by the rise of an agrarian party, the Greenbackers, who, in their platform of 1880, were more specific and even more extensive in their declaration of labor's rights than the "Reformers" themselves had been. It was not until 1888 that another "labor" group appeared, but since that date there has been one or more parties making a distinct appeal to the working class. In that year, there were two "labor" factions, the Union Labor party and the United Labor party. Both groups came out for the public ownership of the means of transportation and communication and a code of enlightened labor legislation. The former advocated the limitation of land ownership and the latter the application of the single tax. Both agreed in denouncing the "Democratic and Republican parties as hopelessly and shamelessly corrupt, and, by reason of their affiliation with monopolies, equally unworthy of the suffrages of those who do not live upon public plunder." The vote of both groups in the ensuing election was slightly over 150,000.
The labor groups which had broken with the old parties took a more definite step toward socialism in 1892, when they frankly assumed the name of the Socialist Labor party[34] and put forward a declaration in favor of the public ownership of utilities and a general system of protective labor legislation. Although the socialism of Karl Marx had by this time won a wide influence among the working classes of Europe, there are few if any traces of it in the Socialist Labor platform of 1892. That platform says nothing about the inevitable contest between labor and capitalism, or about the complete public ownership of all the means of transportation and production. On the contrary, it confines its statements to concrete propositions, including the political reforms of the initiative, referendum, and recall, all of which have since been advocated by leaders in the old parties. The small vote received in 1892 by the socialistic candidate, 21,532, is no evidence of the strength of the labor protest, for the Populist party in that year included in its program substantially the same principles and made a distinct appeal to the working class, as well as to the farmers.
Indeed, the discontent of the two decades from 1876 to 1896 was confined principally to the small farmers, who waged, in fact, a class war upon capitalists and financiers, although they nowhere formulated it into a philosophy. They chose to rely upon the inflation of the currency as their chief weapon of offense. A precursor to the agrarian movement in politics is to be found in the "Granger Movement," which began with the formation of an association known as the "Patrons of Husbandry" in 1867. This society, which organized local lodges on a secret basis and admitted both men and women, was originally designed to promote agricultural interests in a general and social way, and its political implications were not at first apparent. It naturally appealed, however, to the most active and socially minded farmers, and its leaders soon became involved in politics.
The sources of agrarian discontent were obvious. During the War, prices had been high and thousands of farm "hands" and mechanics had become land owners, thanks to the homestead laws enacted by the Republican party; but they had little capital to start with, and their property was heavily mortgaged. When the inflated War prices collapsed, they found themselves compelled to pay interest at the old rate, and they figured it out that capitalists and bondholders were the chief beneficiaries of the Federal financial legislation. In spite of all that had been paid on the national and private debts, the amount still due, they reckoned, measured in the products of toil, wheat and corn, was greater than ever. They, therefore, hit on the conclusion that the chief source of trouble was in the contraction of the currency which reduced the money value of their products. The remedy obviously was inflation in some form.[35]
While the currency thus became the chief agrarian issue, the farmers attributed a part of their troubles to the railway companies whose heavily "watered" capital made high freight rates necessary, and whose discriminations in charges fell as heavy burdens on shippers outside of the zones of competition. The agrarians, therefore, resorted to railway legislation in their respective states—the regulation of rates and charges for transportation and the conditions under which grain should be warehoused and handled. In Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and other states, the law makers yielded to the pressure of the farmers for this kind of legislative relief, and based their legal contentions on the ground that the railways "partook of the nature of public highways." The Grangers were strengthened in their convictions by the violence of the opposition offered on the part of the railways to the establishment of rates and charges by public authority, and by their constant appeals to the courts for relief.[36]
Of course, the fixing of flat rates without any inquiry into the cost of specific services was open to grave objections; but the opposition of the companies was generally based on the contention that they had a right to run their business in their own way. The spirit of this opposition is reflected in an editorial published in the Nation, of New York, in January, 1875: "We maintain that the principle of such legislation is either confiscation, or, if another phrase be more agreeable, the change of railroads from pieces of private property, owned and managed for the benefit of those who have invested their money in them, into eleemosynary or charitable corporations, managed for the benefit of a particular class of applicants for outdoor relief—the farmers. If, in the era of progress to which the farmers' movement proposes to introduce us, we are going back to a condition of society in which the only sort of property which we can call our own is that which we can make our own by physical possession, it is certainly important to every one to know it, and the only body which can really tell us is the Supreme Court at Washington."
Not content with their achievements in the state legislatures, the agrarians entered national politics in 1876 in the form of the Independent National or Greenback party, designed to "stop the present suicidal and destructive policy of contraction." They declared their belief that "a United States note, issued directly by the government and convertible on demand into United States obligations, bearing a rate of interest not exceeding one cent a day on each one hundred dollars and exchangeable for United States notes at par, will afford the best circulating medium ever devised." In spite of the small vote polled by their standard bearer, Peter Cooper, of New York, they put forward a candidate in the next campaign[37] and made a third attempt in 1884, growing more and more radical in tone. In their last year, they declared: "Never in our history have the banks, the land-grant railroads, and other monopolies been more insolent in their demands for further privileges—still more class legislation. In this emergency the dominant parties are arrayed against the people and are the abject tools of the corporate monopolies." The Greenbackers demanded, in addition to currency reform, the regulation of interstate commerce, a graduated income tax, labor legislation, prohibition of importation of contract laborers, and the reduction of the terms of United States Senators. Although their candidate, B. F. Butler, polled 175,000 votes in 1884, the Greenbackers gave up the contest, and in 1888 yielded their place to the Union Labor party.
The agrarian interest was, however, still the chief source of conscious discontent, and the disappearance of the Greenbackers was shortly followed by the establishment of two societies, the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union and the National Farmers' Alliance, the former strong in the South and West, and the latter in the North. In 1890, these orders claimed over three million members, and in several of the southern states they had dominated or split the Democratic party. The Northern Alliance was likewise busy with politics, and in Kansas and Nebraska, by independence or fusion, carried a large number of legislative districts.