The vote for Tucker was over in fusion with the Democrats. 75,000, about 9 per cent of the total vote of the State. If, however, only the State outside of New York and Brooklyn be considered, it was slightly less than 12 per cent of the total. The vote was localised in the counties contiguous to Pennsylvania. No definite conclusion can be reached with regard to distribution between city and country. On the contrary, the conclusion seems to be warranted that the distribution was regional rather than occupational, that in the region in which the vote was heavy it was contributed to about equally by farmers and workingmen, and that in the region where it was light, the lack of support was common to both agricultural and industrial areas. In Pennsylvania, an alliance between the Workingmen's party and the greenbackers had already been completed in 1877. In 1878 the two movements were entirely fused. At the state convention, the workingmen favoured the nomination for governor of Thomas Armstrong, then editor of the Pittsburgh National Labor Tribune, but the greenbackers succeeded in nominating Samuel Mason, a lawyer. James L. Wright received the nomination for secretary of internal affairs, and Uriah S. Stephens was nominated for Congress in the Fifth Congressional District, a part of Philadelphia. The vote for Mason for governor reached almost 82,000, being nearly 12 per cent of the total vote cast. Still larger, however, was the congressional vote, which reached almost 100,000, or over 14 per cent of the total. The movement was relatively weak in Philadelphia, the vote in each of the 3 congressional districts where nominations were held being only 7 per cent of the total. The general conclusion to be reached with regard to the distribution of the vote over the State is that the strength of the Greenback Labor party was chiefly located in the anthracite coal mining region and to a less extent in the coal mining and manufacturing region of the West. The economically diversified northern belt was a secondary region of strength, while the overwhelmingly agricultural sections were about uniformly weak in greenback labour support, a weakness which (as in New York) was also evident in the largest industrial centre of the StatePhiladelphia. In Ohio, conditions during the year 1878 did not undergo material change. The alliance of the Greenback and Labor Reform parties continued. Andrew Roy, prominent in the coal miners' organisation and more recently a state inspector of mines, was the nominee for secretary of State - the highest office to be filled at the election. The vote for the State was 38,332, and for the city of Cleveland over 5,500. In spite of the considerable increase over the vote for 1877 in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, the strongest greenback States remained, as in that year, the agricultural States of the Middle West and the Southwest. The vote in Illinois was 15. per cent of the total, in Texas almost a quarter, in Iowa it was 22 per cent, in Kansas over 19 per cent. In Wisconsin, candidates for Congress were nominated in only 4 districts, and in Milwaukee County the vote was only 7 per cent of the total. In Missouri the movement over the State as a whole was very strong, the vote in St. Louis reaching 17 per cent of the total, but in Kansas City less than 8 per cent. In Colorado the movement was not strong, polling 8 per cent of the total. In California no election was held. Having reached its highest point in 1878, the greenback movement began rapidly to disintegrate in the next year. The month after the election of 1878 witnessed the disappearance of one of the chief demands of the party, the repeal of the resumption act. January 1, 1879, was the date fixed by the act for resumption, and on December 17, 1878, the premium on gold disappeared. From that day on, the resumption policy became a dead issue. Still more significant for the future of the party, however, was the renewal of industrial activity which set in with the new year. Even before the election it had become apparent that an industrial revival was at hand, and by the middle of 1879 it was in full swing. Another factor of great importance was the large increase in the volume of the currency. In 1881 the currency, which had averaged about $725,000,000 for the years 1876-1878, reached over $1,114,000,000. Under these conditions, all that remained available to the platform 6 Hardy, "Quantity of Money and Prices," in Journal of Political Economy, 1894-1895, III, 156. makers and propagandists of the party was their opposition to the monopolistic national banks with their control over currency, and to the refunding of the bonded debt. The disappearance of the financial issue snapped the threads which had heretofore held together the farmer and the wageworker. So long as depression continued, the issue was financial and the two had a common enemy - the banker. The financial issue once settled, or at least suspended, the object of the attack by labour became the employer, and that of the attack by the farmer, the railway corporation and the warehouse man. Prosperity had mitigated the grievances of both classes, but while the farmer still had a great deal to expect from polities in the form of state regulation of railway rates, the wageearners' struggle now became entirely economic and not political. Another weakening influence was the tendency towards fusion with the Democrats. The splendid showing made by the Greenback Labor party in the elections of 1878 filled the leaders with hope, while at the same time it inspired many of the old party leaders, particularly Democratic leaders, with fear. The natural result was for both classes of leaders to look to fusion the former to secure personal advantage and preferment, the latter to save their organisation. The only States in which fusion was actually accomplished in 1879 were Michigan and Massachusetts, but in every State in which a state election was held, fusion had its advocates and the controversy over the question, of necessity, greatly weakened the party. A few weeks after the election of 1879, the chairman of the national committee, F. P. Dewees, a Washington lawyer, and T. P. Murch, the chairman of the congressional committee, issued a call for a conference to be held at Washington on January 8, 1880, for the purpose of arranging for a national nominating convention later in the year. The call was addressed not only to the regular greenback organisation but to the national committee of the Pomeroy faction, which had seceded in 1878, and to representatives of labour organisations. Denis Kearney, the leader of the Workingmen's party of California, issued a similar call about the same time, but an un 7 See below, II, 263. derstanding was reached whereby he agreed to attend the conference called by the greenbackers. The conference was also attended by Albert R. Parsons,8 representing the Chicago Eight-Hour League, and by Charles Litchman, of the Knights of Labor. It drew up no platform, but merely appointed a committee to issue a call for a national convention to which any delegates coming from organisations in sympathy with the Greenback Labor party might be admitted. The call, which professed to have been issued on behalf of the "representatives of the Grangers and Farmers' open clubs, labour organisations, the Workingmen's Party of California, clubs and other organisations of the National and Greenback Labor parties, and Union Greenback-Labor party [Pomeroy's party], united with the committees of the National party and the congressional committee of the Greenback Labor party." Besides delegates from greenback organisations and Kearney, there were also in attendance at the convention, delegates from the Workingmen's party of Kansas and the Chicago Workingmen's Union and forty-four socialists. The platform adopted demanded the abolition of the note-issue power of the national banks, the substitution of greenbacks for the outstanding national bank-notes, and the payment of outstanding bonds therewith. Granger sentiment was appealed to by planks demanding congressional regulation of interstate transportation and the reservation of the public domain to actual settlers. A bid for the labour vote was made by including the principal labour demands, such as the enforcement of the national eight-hour law by stringent factory inspection, the regulation of prison 8 Albert R. Parsons, the only American among the Chicago anarchists, condemned to death in 1887, was born in 1850 in Montgomery, Ala., of parents with a prerevolutionary ancestry. He was successively a printer, Confederate soldier and Federal office-holder under Grant. His attention was first drawn to the labour problem in 1874, when the working people in Chicago united to compel the "Relief Aid Society" to render an account of the several million dollars collected to relieve the distress occasioned by the big fire of 1871. Parsons joined the Workingmen's party of the United States in 1876 and became a member of the Knights of Labor in the same year. He ran repeatedly for office on the socialist ticket between 1877 and 1879. In 1879 he was secretary of the Chicago Eight-Hour League, which invited Ira Steward to speak under its auspices in the fall of that year. At the second convention of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions in 1882, he sent in a resolution from this organisation adVocating the eight-hour day upon the grounds of Ira Steward's theory that " & decrease in hours means an increase in wages" and ultimately co-operation. labour, the establishment of a bureau of labour, the prohibition of child labour under fourteen years of age, the payment of wages in cash, and the immediate abrogation of the Burlingame Treaty with China. However, no special effort was made to reach the labour vote. Weaver, the nominee for president, spent most of his time in the South. The vote in New York fell to 12,000. In Pennsylvania, although the leaders of the Knights, such as Powderly and Wright, were present at the convention of 1880, by far the greater part of the workingmen in the coal regions of the East and the iron and steel region of the West, which had polled so heavy a vote for the party in 1878, deserted it in 1880, and the vote fell to 20,000. A careful study of the vote for Weaver in 1880 reveals the fact, that, with the exception of an industrial section running through seven counties in central Michigan, the greenback movement in 1880 presents itself as a distinctly agricultural movement, drawing the bulk of its strength from the agricultural States east of the Mississippi, and the remainder from the agricultural areas of the West. With insignificant exceptions, the desertion of the greenback cause by workingmen seems by 1880 to have been well nigh complete. 9 Libby, "A Study of the Greenback Movement, 1876-1884," in Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, |