The preliminaries of the campaign of 1880 were vexed by dissension within the ranks of the Greenbackers. In March the radical faction led by Pomeroy held a convention in St. Louis which claimed to speak for ten thousand Greenback clubs and two million voters. After Stephen D. Dillaye of New York had refused the presidential nomination at the hands of this convention, it adjourned to meet in Chicago on the 9th of June—the place and time already selected for the regular convention of the National party. One reason for the attitude of this faction appears to have been the fear of fusion with the Democrats. The Chicago convention finally succeeded in absorbing these malcontents, as well as a group of socialist delegates and representatives of various labor organizations who asked to be admitted. Dennis Kearney, the notorious sand-lot agitator of California was made chief sergeant at arms, and Susan B. Anthony was allowed to give a suffrage speech. The platform differed from earlier Greenback documents in that it contained no denunciation of the Resumption Act. That was now a dead issue, for on January 1, 1879, resumption became an accomplished fact, and the paper currency was worth its face value in gold. Apart from this the platform was much the same as that adopted at Toledo in 1878, with the addition of planks favoring women's suffrage, a graduated income tax, and congressional regulation of interstate commerce. On the first ballot, General Weaver received a majority of the votes for presidential nominee; and B. J. Chambers of Texas was nominated for Vice-President.
General Weaver in his letter of acceptance declared it to be his intention "to visit the various sections of the Union and talk to the people." This he did, covering the country from Arkansas to Maine and from Lake Michigan to the Gulf, speaking in Faneuil Hall at Boston and in the Cooper Union at New York, but spending the greater part of his time in the Southern States. He declared that he traveled twenty thousand miles, made fully one hundred speeches, shook the hands of thirty thousand people, and was heard by half a million. Weaver was the first presidential candidate to conduct a campaign of this sort, and the results were not commensurate with his efforts. The Greenback vote was only 308,578, about three per cent of the total. One explanation of the small vote would seem to be the usual disinclination of people to vote for a man who has no chance of election, however much they may approve of him and his principles, when they have the opportunity to make their votes count in deciding between two other candidates. Then, too, the sun of prosperity was beginning at last to dissipate the clouds of depression. The crops of corn, wheat, and oats raised in 1880 were the largest the country had ever known; and the price of corn for once failed to decline as production rose, so that the crop was worth half as much again as that of 1878. When the farmer had large crops to dispose of at remunerative prices, he lost interest in the inflation of the currency.
After 1880 the Greenback party rapidly disintegrated. There was no longer any hope of its becoming a major party, in the near future at least, and the more conservative leaders began to drift back into the old parties or to make plans for fusion with one of them in coming elections. But fusion could at best only defer the end. The congressional election of 1882 clearly demonstrated that the party was moribund. Ten of the Congressmen elected in 1880 had been classified as Nationals; of these only one was reëlected in 1882, and no new names appear in the list. It is probable, however, that a number of Congressmen classified as Democrats owed their election in part to fusion between the Democratic and Greenback parties.
The last appearance of the Greenbackers in national politics was in the presidential election of 1884. In May of that year a convention of "The Anti-Monopoly Organization of the United States," held in Chicago, adopted a platform voicing a demand for legislative control of corporations and monopolies in the interests of the people and nominated General Benjamin F. Butler for President. The convention of the Greenback or National party met in Indianapolis, and selected Butler as its candidate also. General Weaver presided over the convention. The platform contained the usual demands of the party with the exception of the resolution for the "free and unlimited coinage of gold and silver," which was rejected by a vote of 218 to 164. It would appear that the majority of the delegates preferred to rely upon legal-tender paper to furnish the ample supply of money desired. General Butler was at this time acting with the Democrats in Massachusetts, and his first response was noncommittal. Although he subsequently accepted both nominations, he did not make an active campaign, and his total popular vote was only 175,370. Butler's personal popularity and his labor affiliations brought increased votes in some of the Eastern States and in Michigan, but in those Western States where the party had been strongest in 1880 and where it had been distinctly a farmers' movement there was a great falling off in the Greenback vote.
Though the forces of agrarian discontent attained national political organization for the first time in the Greenback party, its leaders were never able to obtain the support of more than a minority of the farmers. The habit of voting the Republican or the Democratic ticket, firmly established by the Civil War and by Reconstruction, was too strong to be lightly broken; and many who favored inflation could not yet bring themselves to the point of supporting the Greenback party. On the other hand there were undoubtedly many farmers and others who felt that the old parties were hopelessly subservient to capitalistic interests, who were ready to join in radical movements for reform and for the advancement of the welfare of the industrial classes, but who were not convinced that the structure of permanent prosperity for farmer and workingman could be built on a foundation of fiat money. Although the platforms of the Greenbackers contained many demands which were soundly progressive, inflation was the paramount issue in them; and with this issue the party was unable to obtain the support of all the forces of discontent, radicalism, and reform which had been engendered by the economic and political conditions of the times. The Greenback movement was ephemeral. Failing to solve the problem of agricultural depression, it passed away as had the Granger movement before it; but the greater farmers' movement of which both were a part went on.
[CHAPTER VII.]
The Plight of the Farmer
An English observer of agricultural conditions in 1893 finds that agricultural unrest was not peculiar to the United States in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but existed in all the more advanced countries of the world: