Chapter 3

The Greenbackers

A National Political Culture

The political culture of Humboldt County was to a surprising degree national in its orientation. Local and state issues concerned Humboldters of course, but they were keenly and increasingly aware of national developments. The cosmopolitan origins of the early settlers was undoubtedly a factor, and as Michael Katz and his associates have argued, “High rates of transiency may have worked against a local sense of community but nationally had the opposite effect—it created a sense of national identification.”¹ In addition, a shared democratic–republican heritage reinforced by sectional crisis and the Civil War heightened Humboldters’ sense of their national identity. Moreover, as Robert Sharkey has observed, the 1860s was a decade of nationalization in many phases of economic life.² The national banking system, the income tax and conscription (for part of the Civil War), a high protective tariff, the Homestead Act, and various land-grant acts became law.

In no area of public policy did the scope of federal government activity and power increase more than in the sphere of national monetary policy. Certainly the banking system had been a contentious issue from the founding of the nation. But the financial exigencies of the Civil War, the printing of almost $500 million greenbacks, and a vast increase in the national debt embroiled the federal government in monetary policy on an unprecedented scale.³ Decisions about how to fund the national debt and how much to expand or contract the money supply had direct and far-reaching impacts on people’s lives. Furthermore, as Sharkey, Irwin Unger, and David Montgomery have demonstrated, these were not issues that concerned only the moguls of finance. People from all classes perceived an intimate relationship between their economic well-being, that of the nation, and national monetary policy. During 1866 and 1867, currency reform became an issue of paramount interest to the American labor movement. In 1868, William Sylvis, president of the National Labor Union, proclaimed that “when a just monetary system has been established there will no longer exist a necessity for Trade Unions.”⁴ Sharkey, Unger, and Montgomery, while suggesting the importance of the monetary question at the community level, arrive at this conclusion largely by inference. Most of their evidence comes from statements by national politicians, businessmen, currency theorists, and labor leaders.⁵

The saga of the Humboldt County Greenback Labor party indicates the extent to which disquiet over national monetary policy percolated down to the local level. By 1880, the panaceas of Greenback theorists found a receptive audience in Humboldt County partly because they entailed a comprehensive critique of the American economy and the nation’s ailments since the Civil War, and partly because the county was hit by the severest agricultural depression of the Gilded Age. The prescriptions of the Greenback Labor party suffused Humboldt County’s dissident political culture with an even more cosmopolitan perspective, one that envisaged a greater role for the state.

The Dissenters Regroup

Two Greenback clubs were founded in 1878, at Rohnerville and Iaqua in rural southern Humboldt County,⁶ but this was the only manifestation of support for the Greenback movement before 1880. In the early summer of 1880, the Democratic Standard, which had been giving increasing publicity to the Greenback Labor party, urged reform-minded citizens to establish Greenback clubs. By late summer, hardly a township in the county did not have a club.⁷ On July 17, 1880, the remaining members of the Humboldt Workingmen’s party assembled at the Eureka Greenback Club to dissolve their organization, one hour before the founding convention of the Humboldt County Greenback Labor party. Many leading lights of the defunct Workingmen’s party were elected to high offices in the new party: W. J. Sweasey was elected vice-president; J. N. Barton became head of the committee on resolutions. The convention endorsed both the ticket and platform of the national Greenback Labor party. M. E. Morse delivered a rousing keynote speech in which he asserted that “the robbers and traitors, made robbers and traitors by the vicious system of land monopoly, usury and financial jugglery borrowed from the old world, have disinherited, defrauded and pauperized the wealth producers, the toiling hard working millions, of our country.”⁸

The years 1879 and 1880 proved especially hard for Humboldt County farmers. In the summer of 1879, unseasonably heavy rainfall destroyed most of the potato crop, reducing production from 19,608 tons in the year ending July 1, 1879, to 4,714 tons in 1880 and to only 2,907 tons by 1882.⁹ An unusually cold winter in 1879–1880 inflicted heavy losses on the county’s sheep farmers.¹⁰ Wool production declined from 696,844 pounds in 1879 to 352,980 pounds in 1880 and to only 400 pounds the following year.¹¹ In the summer of 1880, a plague of grasshoppers devastated fields and orchards in many parts of the county.¹² Falling prices compounded the farmers’ woes and led to a decline in the production of cereal crops. From 1880 to 1882, annual wheat production declined from 86,600 bushels to 39,079; the production of barley went from 55,418 to 11,593 bushels; and the number of cattle raised fell from 27,815 to 19,393.¹³ William Ayres embarked on a tour through the county in the fall of 1879. He reported that in southern Humboldt County, in the fertile Eel River Valley, “the cry of hard times is universal.”¹⁴ Writing from the region, “Win Too” reported that “migration and depopulation is one of our most sad occurrences. I observe some of our most striving and industrious people passing by, going to seek homes and fortunes in northern counties.”¹⁵ In September 1881, the Humboldt Times noted the drastic decline of cereal farming in the county.¹⁶ The Times, however, was unsympathetic. It blamed farmers for relying too much on the potato crop “and a few head of scrawny cattle” and added that “it is just this type of man who is attracted by the panaceas of the workingmen’s party or the greenback party.”¹⁷

One such farmer was Charles Ferdinand Keller, who in the early 1880s was to succeed Sweasey as the county’s leading dissident and sow the seeds of a trade union movement. Keller, who was born in Germany in 1846, emigrated with his parents to Pennsylvania, and over the strong opposition of his father, enlisted in the Union army in 1864. He came to California in 1867 and attempted to establish a brewery in San Bernardino. Then he took up a land claim with some other settlers in the vicinity of San Buena Ventura. The land, however, was part of a disputed Spanish land grant, and after two years of expensive legal battles, Keller and his cohorts were evicted.¹⁸ In the mid-1870s, Keller moved to Centerville, 15 miles south of Eureka, filed a homestead claim, and commenced farming. In May 1880, he began writing a series of impassioned and embittered letters to the Democratic Standard:

Men are no longer equal. There is an aristocracy exempt from taxation that feeds upon the vitals of the nation. . . . They have the money hence they control the labor; for if you shut off the supply of money labor cannot exist. This being the case they have the power to declare what a day’s or month’s labor shall be worth. . . . Labor is subservient to capital. We have lost our individuality, and are a nonentity as regards the affairs of the nation.¹⁹

Keller’s polemic provides an important clue as to why the nation’s monetary system and the size of the money supply were issues of profound concern to Gilded Age radicals. The answer lies in the perceived connection between the democratic–republican tradition, the labor theory of value, and the money supply. To the dissenters, money represented the exchange value of different commodities. If the value of people’s labor was to be rewarded properly, there had to be a sufficient quantity of money in circulation to reflect the labor value of the producing classes. In the view of many Gilded Age radicals, for at least a decade before the Populists appeared on the scene, the money supply simply did not represent the collective value of the labor of the producing classes. Moreover, contraction, or lack of expansion, of the money supply hurt the producing classes and benefited the nonproducing, moneylending class. As the nation’s money supply decreased, the value of the dollar rose; as a result, the value of loans and the interest on them became increasingly burdensome on the producing classes, who were dependent on the loans.²⁰ In an editorial, the Democratic Standard expressed this view succinctly. It characterized the Greenback Labor party as the party “opposed to a bondocracy” and asserted that “it is the game of bankers to reduce the money circulation per capita to so small a figure that the laborer is virtually a slave in their hands.”²¹

The Humboldt County Greenbackers insisted that the people, and indeed Congress, had no control over the nation’s money supply. The Eureka Greenback Club, meeting in March 1881 in the context of congressional debates to consider the terms on which the national debt was to be refunded, declared that “the actions of the banks prove . . . that the power to control, to expand or contract the currency of the nation must not be delegated to any corporation, but must be restored to the national Government where it belongs.”²² William Ayres summarized the Greenbacker position in a lengthy article in which he stated that “we Greenbackers believe in a trinity of money, gold, silver and paper, all interchangeable, and that each should have equality . . . that all should be issued direct from the government” and that “a careful limitation shall be placed by constitutional amendment . . . determined by a careful analysis of the needs and requirements of commerce and ex-hange, and a faithful comparison of this volume of the money medium now in use by the most successful and prosperous commercial nations of the world.” Ayres said that the amount of money in circulation in America was much smaller per capita than in Europe, and he produced a battery of statistics purporting to prove it. He concluded that “by having a sufficient amount of money issued by the government gauged per capita to fully accommodate the business of the country, and not subject to the control and contraction of 2,300 banking corporations . . . we should to a great extent destroy the robbery of the industrial classes that has been going on for so long.”²³

In early September 1880, the newly formed Humboldt Greenback Labor party met to adopt a platform and nominate a ticket for the upcoming elections. With the notable exception of the Eureka delegation, the majority of Greenback delegates were farmers.²⁴ The party nominated Campbell Berry as their candidate for Congress in the 3rd District. Berry was a native of Jackson County, Alabama, who had migrated to California and had become a farmer in Sutter County.²⁵ He was the Democratic party incumbent, and received the nomination of the Humboldt Democratic party as well. Nevertheless, the Greenbackers were convinced that he was loyal to their principles. Chosen as candidate for the state assembly was Gilman Mudgett, who had held offices in several states before coming to California. He had been a “messmate” of General Weaver during the Civil War and an “independent” since 1870.²⁶

The Humboldt Times, alarmed by the challenge of the Greenbackers, lamented that “many former Republicans . . . have got off the old track, and . . . have accepted the fallacious doctrines of the Greenback party.”²⁷ The Times published a series of articles entitled “The ABC of Finance.” But the principal weapon employed by the Times to discredit the Greenbackers was ridicule. The Greenback program was derided as the work of hopelessly naive and utopian cranks “demanding an unlimited and ceaseless flow of paper ‘money,’ whose only value is the color of the ink in which the word ‘dollar’ is printed.”²⁸ The Times also tried to convince Greenback voters that Berry and Mudgett were working in the interests of the Democratic party and had no real commitment to Greenback principles. Yet reports in most of the county press, both pro- and anti-Greenback, indicate that Berry’s position was totally consistent with the Greenback platform throughout the campaign.

The Humboldt County Greenback Labor party performed impressively at the 1880 elections. Humboldt voters gave James Weaver, the Greenback Labor presidential candidate, 25 percent of the vote (725 of 2,880 votes cast); Democrat Winfield Hancock also received 25 percent of the vote, and Republican James Garfield garnered a 50 percent share. The vote for Weaver in Humboldt County contrasted with the mere 2.1 percent of the vote he received in California and the 3.3 percent he obtained nationally. It is more difficult to gauge the strength of the Greenback vote in Humboldt County from the other results because the Democrats also endorsed Berry and did not nominate anyone for the state assembly seat. Mudgett beat his Republican opponent for that seat, however. Berry was narrowly outvoted by his Republican rival in Humboldt County, but secured enough votes from other counties to be reelected. Precinct returns reveal that the Greenback Labor party replicated the performance of the Humboldt County Workingmen’s party in 1878 and 1879.²⁹ Weaver performed best in the agricultural townships of Ferndale and Table Bluff; although he did not do as well in Eureka, he still secured a creditable 26.3 percent of the vote in the county’s metropolis. This was a higher proportion of the vote than he obtained in well over half the rural precincts. The Greenback Labor party, like the Workingmen’s party, made its poorest showing in small rural precincts in the most remote sections of the county. The solidity of Greenback support in Eureka and its comparative weakness in many rural precincts indicate that it would be wrong to describe the party as simply one of disgruntled Humboldt farmers.

Factionalism and Political Opportunism

The Greenback Labor party was the focal point of oppositional political activity in Humboldt County for the next two years. By the 1882 election, however, support for the party had waned considerably. The Greenback candidate for governor of California, Thomas J. McQuiddy, received only 10 percent of the vote, although this compared favorably with the meager 3 percent he got statewide. Even Humboldt County’s favorite son, W. J. Sweasey, running as the Greenback candidate for lieutenant governor, obtained only 14 percent of the vote in Humboldt County. Thomas Devlin, the Greenback candidate for the state assembly, received a respectable 20 percent of the vote. But the Greenback candidates for most county offices fared poorly, rarely getting more than 15 percent of the vote.³⁰ Richard Sweasey (W. J. Sweasey’s son) and Stanford Turner were the Greenbackers’ only successful candidates in county contests. After the 1882 elections, the Humboldt County Greenback Labor party expired as an effective political organization and resorted to endorsing the nominations of the “best men,” who were usually Democrats.

In 1882, the county’s agricultural economy was still in a severe depression, and so it is hard to attribute the decline of the Humboldt Greenback Labor party to any amelioration in the farmers’ condition. A complex array of factors, largely unrelated to the economy, account for its demise. The close relationship between the fate of Greenbackers at the local, state, and national levels cannot be overestimated. Any momentum that the Humboldt Greenbackers might have gained from their creditable performances in the 1880 election was offset by the party’s poor performance at the state and national levels. Dedicated grass-roots support could not sustain indefinitely a local party that addressed itself primarily to national issues. The local press gloated over the weak showing of the Greenback Labor party nationally after 1880. Thus, following Weaver’s poor performance in his home state of Iowa in the 1881 election, the Humboldt Times commented that “the fiat craze has seen its balmy days, and some other ism must be hunted up around which the faithful can rally.”³¹

Factionalism within the California Greenback Labor party also helped to undermine the movement’s coherence and credibility. The Democratic Standard repeatedly noted the internecine struggles among San Francisco Greenbackers, and Humboldt Greenbackers were frequently at odds with the dominant element in the state party. For example, in 1882, Humboldt Greenbackers and the state party nominated different candidates to contest the 3rd congressional district. Part of the reason for the division was that by the 1882 elections, the California Greenback Labor party had to confront a rejuvenated Democratic party bent on attracting the workingman’s vote. The strength of the Greenback party in Humboldt County emboldened the local Democratic party to adopt an even more brazen copy of the Greenback program than that of the California Democratic party. The Humboldt Democratic platform spoke of “labor as the basis of all capital” and stated that the “paramount living issue of the day” was whether the people will “submit to be ruled by the ever-grasping and never satisfied corporations.” The platform expressed firm opposition to any increase in the bonded debt at the local, state, or national levels; another resolution demanded “honesty and strict economy in all departments of public service.” The “great curse of land monopoly” was to be discouraged “by all legitimate means.”³² The Greenback platform on this issue was a little more specific. It demanded that many of the land grants to the railroads be revoked and that these lands revert to the public domain at a minimum price to bona fide settlers.³³ Humboldt Democrats did not propose to “substitute legal tender paper for national bank issues,” as the Greenbackers advocated, but they were in favor of the “unrestricted coinage of silver and gold” and laws to restrict the economic and political influence of the banks.³⁴

The platform of the Democratic party at the local and state levels revived the sagging fortunes of Humboldt Democrats. At the 1882 elections, they shared the spoils with the Republican party in county contests and garnered almost as many votes as the Republicans in statewide races. The local and state Democratic party’s shift to a more populist stance not only preempted the Greenbackers on many issues but also led to a split among Humboldt Greenbackers between those wanting fusion with the Democrats and those determined to adhere to the third-party route.³⁵ Humboldt Democrats cunningly refrained from making nominations at their convention, to encourage fusionist sentiment among the Greenbackers. After a bitter struggle, led by Keller and the Ferndale Greenbackers, the antifusionists got their way. Leading Greenback fusionists, however, including Ayres, continued to plot fusion after the convention.³⁶

Local factors also led to the demise of the Humboldt Greenback Labor party. The party’s stance on the Chinese question and temperance proved a political liability, and injudicious nominations sealed the Greenbackers’ fate. In 1880, relations between the county’s white and Chinese residents began to deteriorate. The small township of Garberville, located in the southern extremity of the county, expelled all Chinese people in March of that year. A brief newspaper account gave no reason for the expulsion.³⁷ During 1880, the Eureka press commented with increasing frequency and disapproval on the existence of opium dens and prostitution rings in the city’s Chinatown. More important, some lumber employers seriously contemplated the extensive employment of Chinese labor. “The impending crisis has arrived,” announced the Democratic Standard. The Standard warned that “some of our millowners threaten the poor white man who is eking out a miserable existence at a mere pittance” by employing Chinese workers in the mills and cautioned that “such a course would be suicidal on the part of the millowners.”³⁸ By the early 1880s, employers were making more extensive use of Chinese labor in railroad work, in the fishing canneries on the Eel River, and in agriculture. In 1884, the Standard declared, with reference to harvesting the potato crop, that “instead of the Indian who has done that kind of work the abominable ‘Heathen Chinee’ are swarming in herds to dig the potatoes and take the wages out of the country.”³⁹ In the lumber industry, most employers retreated from their threat to employ Chinese labor. The only recorded attempt was thwarted in March 1882 when 21 white men went on strike at Fay’s Shingle Mill at Fairhaven after 22 Chinese workers were hired.⁴⁰ George Speed, who was to become an important figure in the Humboldt County Knights of Labor and a nationally prominent leader in the IWW, took the initiative. He rallied his fellow workers and marched to the mill. The Chinese workers were removed and placed on the next boat leaving the county. When Speed’s employer, George Fay, asked him by what authority he acted, Speed replied, “By the force of public sentiment which is higher than any written law.”⁴¹

The growing sense of unease about the presence of Chinese in Humboldt County manifested itself on March 9, 1882, when in the context of pending federal legislation to restrict Chinese immigration, a mass meeting in support of the legislation took place in Eureka.⁴² The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act may have mollified some fears, but not all. Anti-Chinese sentiment would culminate in the expulsion of the Chinese from Eureka in 1885 and from the whole county in 1886. The platform of the Humboldt County Greenback Labor party in 1882, however, did not contain an anti-Chinese plank. By contrast, the Humboldt Democratic party adopted a very strong anti-Chinese plank that echoed the wording of the state Democratic party. The failure of the Humboldt Greenbackers to pander to anti-Chinese sentiment almost certainly cost it support.

The Humboldt Greenbackers’ sudden support for temperance reform also proved costly to its fortunes. Temperance organizations in the county, such as the Sons of Temperance and the International Order of Good Templars, had enjoyed a good membership since the first lodges were founded in the early 1850s. But in 1880, a wave of temperance revivalism swept the county. In a two-week visit, the Reverend D. I. K. Rine induced over 800 people in Eureka and Arcata alone to sign a pledge of total abstinence.⁴³ No political party in Humboldt County endorsed temperance reform in 1880, but by 1882 the Democratic Standard was calling for vigorous enforcement of a “Sunday Law” prohibiting drinking alcohol on the Sabbath. The 1882 election platform of the Humboldt Greenbackers not only called for “strict” enforcement of this law but also advocated an amendment to the state and national constitutions that would prohibit “the manufacture, sale or use of all intoxicating beverages.”⁴⁴ The Humboldt Democratic and Republican platforms did not address the issue. Whether the Greenbacker support for prohibition was born of political expediency or conviction is a matter of conjecture. Regardless of their motives, their stance on temperance backfired politically. Numerous letters to the press revealed that people did not think that temperance laws could be effective and expressed concern that a large and expensive police force might have to be recruited to enforce prohibition. At the same time, saloon license fees provided the county with an important source of revenue. Finally, many people did not believe that legislating temperance should be the province of government. Robert Gunther asked what right government had “to dictate what they [the people] shall eat, what they shall drink, and how they should spend their time?”⁴⁵

Injudicious nominations hurt the Greenback Labor party as much as they had the Workingmen’s party. In several instances, both parties nominated people who betrayed the cause, either by ignoring the party platform when elected or by reverting to their former party affiliation shortly afterward. Pierce Ryan, elected to the state senate on the Workingmen’s ticket in 1879, returned to the Humboldt Democratic party in 1880.⁴⁶ A number of others elected on the Workingmen’s ticket followed suit. Most damaging to the Greenbackers’ cause in 1882 was the record of Gilman Mudgett, whom they had elected to the state assembly in 1880. Humboldt Greenbackers were stunned when Mudgett, a month after assuming his seat, voted against repeal of the highly controversial and unpopular Debris Bill, passed by the California legislature in 1880. This bill had set up drainage districts to cope with the devastation hydraulic mining was causing California farmland. One of the critical dams constructed to deal with the problem failed. Half a million dollars had been wasted, and there were strong suspicions of fraud.⁴⁷ Humboldt County was not directly affected by the disaster or the hydraulic mining controversy, but this was an issue about which Humboldt Greenbackers felt strongly. They hastened to repudiate Mudgett, and Greenbackers at Ferndale and Petrolia circulated petitions calling for Mudgett’s resignation.⁴⁸

Both the Workingmen’s and Greenback Labor parties were naive victims of political opportunism. In fairness, though, given the short history of the parties in the county, it was difficult to ascertain the sincerity and loyalty of aspiring third-party candidates. It was also tempting to nominate someone of established political stature in the county who would lend a new party credibility and respectability. Furthermore, even dissidents expected some political experience from men who would represent them in the state legislature, and many county offices required a modicum of professional training and experience.

The Humboldt Greenback Labor party’s existence was as short-lived as that of the Workingmen’s party, but it would be wrong to conclude that there was something ephemeral about the dissenting culture that gave rise to them. The short history of the Greenback Labor party indicates that the discontent of the late 1870s reflected more than a desire to reform the state constitution. There was a deep-seated discontent with Gilded Age capitalism that continued to express itself in the mid-1880s when the IWA and the Knights of Labor appeared on the scene and in the 1890s when the Populists became a strong force in county politics. The Humboldters’ disquiet about the political economy of Gilded Age America was reinforced by the monetary policies of the federal government in the 1870s and early 1880s. Among Humboldt radicals, interest in the financial panaceas of the Greenback Labor party accentuated the cosmopolitan orientation of a dissenting ideology that was anything but parochial by 1880. The increasing scope of federal involvement in national economic policy militated against a localist orientation and convinced dissenters of the need for national regulation of the banking system and controls on corporations, especially railroads.