The first organized and pointed criticisms of corporations
and the earliest demand for their control by the Government,
came from the Greenbackers. So did the demand for the
conservation of the public domain for actual settlers. Their
natural successors, the Populists, took up the cause and
began to give it effect in the early nineties.

By reason of the important place early taken among the
Greenback leaders of the country by Mr. Edward P. Allis of
Milwaukee, and the wide attention attracted by a paper
written by President Steele of Lawrence University, this
state's place in the National Movement was far more in-
fluential and prominent than the merely numerical strength
of the party in Wisconsin warranted, and in that fact lies one
of the features of special interest in considering the purely
local history of the movement.

I submit this pamphlet to those into whose hands it may
fall, in the hope that the materials here gathered together
may inspire more capable laborers in this interesting and,
heretofore, quite undeveloped field of political history.
ELLIS B. USHER.

Milwaukee,

June 21, 1911.

Background of Greenbackism.

TH

CHAPTER ONE.

HE greenback theories which came to the fore after the Civil War were new only in name and immediate application. They embodied ideas of irredeemable paper money that early in the Eighteenth Century had made John Law for a time the financial wizard of France, and that have recurred in this country with every season of financial stress, from the days of the Revolution to the free silver stampede of the Democratic Party in 1896.

Robert Schilling of Milwaukee, who was one of the early and persistent organizers in Labor politics, in a pamphlet issued in 1896, refers to a pamphlet, later enlarged to a book, written after the panic of 1837, by Edward Kellogg, as "the bible of the early currency reformers," and to Alexander Campbell, of La Salle, Illinois, as "their Moses."

Edward Kellogg was a New York merchant who from a victim of the "hard times of '37" became a student of finance and an authority for arguments in favor of a currency "limited only by the wants of business."

To him is credited the discovery of the proposition for an interconvertible bond currency, which became the backbone of the greenback doctrine of thirty-five years later.

*See history of the Bank of North America.

Official Souvenir of National Convention Peoples Party of the United States of America," St. Louis, July 22, 1896.

*Member of Congress.

Kellogg's proposition, in condensed form, is found in the preface to an edition of his work published in 1883, prepared by his daughter, and disciple, Mary Kellogg Putnam. She writes as follows:

He saw that money ought not to be made of gold and silver, which cannot be had in sufficient quantities to meet any great financial crisis, and which nobody wants when confidence exists; that it must be a legal representative of value, and thought it ought to be founded on real estate, or on a public credit resting on the national resources, he saw how to issue it in exchange for mortgages of productive real property-there was no great public debt- but how to redeem it? He tried it in every way he could imagine; he knew there must be some right way of doing it, but what was it? It was of no use to point out the evil unless he could show a remedy for it. He thought upon it by night and by day, and at last, after looking for it three years, one night in the spring of 1843, as he lay in his bed revolving once more his problem, it dawned upon him like an inspiration, "Redeem it with a bond bearing interest." He turned it to and fro for a moment and exclaimed, in the very words of the old philosopher, "I have found it!"

It was written and submitted to Horace Greeley, who, Mrs. Putnam remarks, was "ever prompt to consider any proposition for bettering the condition of mankind." Mr. Greeley took it to a printer and it appeared as a pamphlet entitled; "Usury: The Evil and the Remedy."

The interchangeable bond and money proposition was stated as follows:

For the purpose I have before mentioned (to supply the people with a good and sound currency), the United States should establish an institution, which I shall call a Safety Fund. I give it this name because I think it will be the means of securing to the producers a fair remuneration for their productions. It will save us from the power of any foreign nation over our international improvements, or anything else of great importance. It will enable the nation-as far as man can have such control-to decide its own destiny. Therefore it will be a "National Safety Fund."

In order to explain the nature of this Safety Fund, I will here write out, in full, two bills, one for a circulating medium, the other for a Treasury Note. By reading these the system may be almost entirely understood. Should such an institution be established, the bills might be more brief, as the laws on the subject would be known, and it would be unnecessary to have as much expressed as in the following.

(CIRCULATING Medium or Safety Fund Note)

The United States promise to pay to A. B., or bearer, at their Safety Fund, in the City of....... One Hundred Dollars, in a Treasury Note, bearing interest at the rate of two per cent, per annum, payable half-yearly, in gold or silver coin; and until such payment is made this note shall be a legal tender for debts, the same as gold or silver coins are now a tender.

"Labor and Capital," by Edward Kellogg, John W. Lovell & Company, New York, 1883. Paper.