The United States Greenback Party is established as a political party consisting primarily of farmers affected by the Panic of 1873.
The Panic of 1873 was a financial crisis that triggered an economic depression in Europe and North America that lasted from 1873 to 1877 or 1879 in France and in Britain. In Britain, the Panic started two decades of stagnation known as the "Long Depression" that weakened the country's economic leadership. In the United States, the Panic was known as the "Great Depression" until the events of 1929 and the early 1930s set a new standard.The Panic of 1873 and the subsequent depression had several underlying causes for which economic historians debate the relative importance. American inflation, rampant speculative investments (overwhelmingly in railroads), the demonetization of silver in Germany and the United States, ripples from economic dislocation in Europe resulting from the Franco-Prussian War (18701871), and major property losses in the Great Chicago Fire (1871) and the Great Boston Fire (1872) helped to place massive strain on bank reserves, which, in New York City, plummeted from $50 million to $17 million between September and October 1873.
The first symptoms of the crisis were financial failures in Vienna, the capital of Austria-Hungary, which spread to most of Europe and to North America by 1873.
The Greenback Party (known successively as the Independent Party, the National Independent Party, and the Greenback Labor Party) was an American political party with an anti-monopoly ideology which was active between 1874 and 1889. The party ran candidates in three presidential elections, in 1876, 1880, and 1884, before it faded away.
The party's name referred to the non-gold backed paper money, commonly known as "greenbacks," that had been issued by the North during the American Civil War and shortly afterward. The party opposed the deflationary lowering of prices paid to producers that was entailed by a return to a bullion-based monetary system, the policy favored by the Republican and Democratic Parties. Continued use of unbacked currency, it was believed, would better foster business and assist farmers by raising prices and making debts easier to pay.
Initially an agrarian organization associated with the policies of the Grange, the organization took the name Greenback Labor Party in 1878 and attempted to forge a farmer–labor alliance by adding industrial reforms to its agenda, such as support of the 8-hour day and opposition to the use of state or private force to suppress union strikes. The organization faded into oblivion in the second half of the 1880s, with its basic program reborn shortly under the aegis of the People's Party, commonly known as the "Populists." Later, during the early 20th century, parts of the agenda from both parties were accomplished by the Progressives.