appeared as an influential factor in national politics by their fusion with the Greenback party near the close of the decade.

Neither the farmers of the West nor the industrial workers of the East felt any sympathy with the Liberal Republican movement of 1870-1872. They had little interest in the political questions of civil-service reform, amnesty for the Southern leaders, or antagonism to President Grant. The Liberal movement, as Professor Buck says, "failed to catch the ground swell of agrarian discontent." Its Western leaders, like Schurz, Brown, and Trumbull, had no particular interest in the farmer's problems; and Easterners, like Godkin and Greeley, ridi.culed the "whiskered agitators" and the "prairie financiers" who were presuming to attack our railroads and debase our currency. James Buchanan of Indiana, a doughty champion of the Greenback cause, characterized the Liberal movement of 1872 as one which "commenced in the sanctums of a few editors and culminated in a set-up game between Horace Greeley and Gratz Brown"; whereas the new movement was of the people, still waiting for its leader who should come to the front like "a financial Henry of Navarre" and, "sticking a greenback in his hat, instead of a white plume," should lead the cohorts of the people from victory to victory. And it was Peter Cooper, aged eighty-five, philanthropist and iron and glue maker, who was cast for the part of the dashing Henri Quatre!

The Labor Reform party made no impression on the national election of 1872, and the Greenback party made little on the election of 1876. But shortly after each of these elections, events happened which stimulated the independent movement. The first was the panic of 1873, with its aftermath of depression. We have noted the effect of the panic years on the farmers of the West (see page 91). In the East it caused a sharp falling off in production,' with a consequent drop in wages and

1 The value of our manufactured products, which had increased from $1,880,000,000 to $4,230,000,000 (or 125 per cent) in the decade from 1860 to 1870, grew only to $5,360,000,000 (or 27 per cent) in the decade from 1870 to 1880; while the growth in the amount of capital invested in these decades was 110 per cent and 32 per cent respectively.

widespread misery from unemployment. It was natural under these conditions that there should be a marked increase in the numbers and activities of the labor unions. The great railroad strikes of the summer of 1877 (to be noticed presently) gave still further impetus to the labor movement. Many of the leaders of the Greenbackers and the Laborites had already come to realize the advantages of pooling their strength. In some of the states (Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio) there were fusion tickets in 1877. On February 22, 1878, the alliance between the two parties was consummated in a convention held at Toledo, Ohio. Over eight hundred delegates from twentyeight states responded to the call. A platform was adopted advocating the usual financial remedies for the relief of the debtor and the laborer, "so that overgrown fortunes and extreme poverty" might be "seldom found within the limits of our republic." The organization was baptized with the name of the "National Party," but it is commonly referred to as the Greenback-Labor party.

The effect of the panic, the strikes, the agitation for cheap money, and the approaching resumption of specie payment under the act of Congress of 1875 was shown in the extraordinary success of the National party in the elections of the autumn of 1878. As against O'Conor's 29,000 Labor votes in 1872 and Cooper's 82,000 Greenback votes in 1876, the GreenbackLabor vote of 1878 reached 1,000,365. Iowa led the poll, but the great manufacturing states of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York were next in order. Fourteen congressmen were elected. The executive committee of the party confidently predicted that the Greenback-Labor vote would carry the country in the election of 1880.

The National party convention met at Chicago in June, 1880, and, repeating the demands for currency, labor, and land reform which appeared in the independent-party programs for a decade, nominated General James B. Weaver of Iowa for the presidency. Originally a Democrat, Weaver had joined the new Republican party after the Kansas-Nebraska legislation, and had served with gallantry in the Civil War. He left the

Republicans in 1877 because he believed that they had "sold out to the bondholding and gold interests." He was one of the two Iowans elected to Congress by the Greenback-Labor party in 1878. A vigorous man of forty-seven, he made a "whirlwind" campaign in 1880, like those of Bryan and Roosevelt in later years, traveling from Maine to Arkansas and addressing audiences which aggregated more than half a million people. But the results in November were sadly disappointing. The vote fell to 308,578, or less than one third the figure of the triumphant year of 1878. The causes of the slump are not far to seek. The very success of the Greenback-Labor party in the mid-term elections had provoked a concerted attack by the apprehensive press of the regular parties. Dissension appeared in the ranks of the new party between those who favored fusion with the Democrats and those who insisted upon an independent ticket. In certain quarters the party was accused of sympathy with socialistic and communistic activities, which were beginning to appear in our rapidly congesting and heterogeneous urban population. Chief of all the causes for the decline of the movement, however, was the improved condition in our economic situation. "The sun of prosperity was beginning at last to dissipate the clouds of depression." With the year 1879 the panic had run its course, and the prosperous days of the early eighties were beginning to dawn. The crops of wheat, corn, and oats in 1880 were larger than ever before in our history, exceeding by 50 per cent the value of the crops of 1878. Gold was beginning to pour in from Europe, and a surplus to accumulate in the Treasury. The amount of currency in circulation

1" In General Weaver," says Mr. F. E. Haynes, "the radical progressive sentiment, the so-called 'third party,' according to our traditional method of describing such enterprises, found its first real leader" ("Third Party Movements since the Civil War," p. 143).

2 The Iowa City Daily Press (Democratic) of July 5, 1880, proposed a platform for the new party, consisting of the twin planks "the Treasury of the United States shall pay $50 a month for life to all persons resident in the United States who have worked for forty-eight years and are tired"; and "so much of the third chapter of Genesis as is contained in the words, 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, until thou return unto the ground,' be and hereby is repealed."

increased from an average of $725,000,000 in the years 18761878 to $1,114,000,000 in 1881. Wages were rising, and the laborer abandoned the Greenback cause. In the election of 1880 only two of the industrial states of the East (Pennsylvania and New York) cast more than ten thousand votes for Weaver. In spite of the meager political results obtained by the Grangers, the Greenbackers, and the Laborites, in the decade 18701880, the significance of the variegated reform parties into which they grouped themselves from year to year looms large as we look back through the perspective of half a century. These earnest, if sometimes misguided, crusaders were the advance heralds in the battle for social and industrial justice, as their fathers had been the pioneers in the great work of opening up the Western lands. They assailed monopoly and privilege as a shameful caricature of the democratic ideal set up by the founders of the Republic. They scolded, harangued, and tormented a government which had been concerned only with political questions into realizing at least, if it did not yet attempt to remedy, the economic conditions which seemed to bear with intolerable weight upon large numbers of the people. Their influence continued, under other forms of organization, which we shall study in later pages, until many of their demands ceased to be regarded as the vagaries of madmen and were enacted into sober law.

"HIS HONESTY, THE PRESIDENT"

Rutherford B. Hayes belonged to that relatively rare class of public officials for whom principles are religious convictions of duty, and compromise an insidious temptation to infidelity. "I am determined from henceforth," he wrote in his diary at the age of nineteen, "to use what means I have to acquire a character distinguished for energy, firmness, and perseverance,

. and if ever I am a public man, I will never do anything inconsistent with the character of a true friend and a good citizen." Thirty-five years later, on the eve of the election of 1876, he confided to the pages of that same lifelong record of

self-examination the pledge: "If elected, the firmest adherence to principle against all opposition and temptation is my purpose; I shall show a grit that will astonish those who predict weakness." He had need of all his grit; for, perhaps with the exception of John Quincy Adams (in whose character and policies we can discover many similarities), no president in times of peace ever had a more trying situation to meet. There was a cloud on his title. By an extraordinary procedure he had been raised to the presidency above a rival who had received a substantial majority of the votes of the people. His face appeared in the cartoons of the opposition press with the word "Fraud" written across the brow. The Democrats had control of the lower branch of Congress during the first half of his administration, and of both Houses during the second half. His own party was divided on issues of reform to which he was pledged; and the most conspicuous and influential of the party leaders in Congress Blaine, Morton, Conkling, Logan, Cameron, Chandler-were not on his side.

Hayes considered himself a good party man. He had been 'regular" in his support of the Whigs until the slavery question had disrupted the party, and he had devoted himself with even greater enthusiasm to the Republican program of Union and free soil. He had supported the radical position after the war, voting for the Reconstruction Acts and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. He had approved the Fifteenth Amendment and the Federal Election Laws. He recognized the value of party solidarity, declaring in his inaugural address: "The president of the United States necessarily owes his election to office to the suffrage and zealous labors of a political party, the members of which cherish with ardor and regard as of essential importance the principles of their party organization." Yet before his administration was two months old, President Hayes found himself almost literally a man without a party. The reason for this unfortunate situation can be stated in a word: for Hayes the Republican party was an instrument to be used in the

1 Hayes was not in Congress when these measures passed, having entered on his first term as governor of Ohio in January, 1868.