ricultural.
In Massachusetts, the situation was dominated by General Benjamin F.
Butler, lifelong Republican politician, who had succeeded in getting
the Democratic nomination for governor and was endorsed by the Greenback
convention. He received a large vote but was defeated for office.

But just as the Greenback-Labor movement was assuming promising
proportions a change for the better in the industrial situation cut
under the very roots of its existence. In addition, one month after the
election of 1878, its principal issue disappeared. January 1, 1879, was
the date fixed by the act for resumption of redemption of greenbacks in
gold and on December 17, 1878, the premium on gold disappeared. From
that day on, the greenback became a dead issue.

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 $1,111,000,000. Under
these conditions, all that remained available to the platform-makers and
propagandists of the party was their opposition to the so-called
"monopolistic" national banks with their control over currency and to
the refunding of the bonded debt of the government.

The disappearance of the financial issue snapped the threads which had
held together the farmer and the wage-worker. So long as depression
continued, the issue was financial and the two had, as they thought, a
common enemy--the banker. The financial issue once settled, or at least
suspended, the object of the attack by labor 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 politics in
the form of state regulation of railway rates, the wage earners'
struggle now turned entirely economic and not political.

In California, as in the Eastern industrial States, the railway strikes
of 1877 precipitated a political movement. California had retained gold
as currency throughout the entire period of paper money, and the labor
movement at no time had accepted the greenback platform. The political
issue after 1877 was racial, not financial, and the weapon was not
merely the ballot, but also "direct action"--violence. The anti-Chinese
agitation in California, culminating as it did in the Exclusion Law
passed by Congress in 1882, was doubtless the most import