of a scheme purporting to assist the
wage earner to become an independent producer. Accordingly, the history
of the National Labor Union became largely the history of labor's first
attempt to play a lone political hand on a national scale.

Each annual session of the National Labor Union faithfully reaffirmed
the decision to "cut loose" from the old parties. But such a vast
undertaking demanded time. It was not until 1872 that the National Labor
Union met as a political convention to nominate a national ticket. From
the first the stars were inauspicious. Charges were made that political
aspirants sought to control the convention in order to influence
nominations by the Republican and Democratic parties. A "greenback"
platform was adopted as a matter of course and the new party was
christened the National Labor and Reform Party. On the first formal
ballot for nomination for President, Judge David Davis of Illinois, a
personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, received 88 votes, Wendell Phillips,
the abolitionist, 52, and the remainder scattered. On the third ballot
Davis was nominated. Governor J. Parker of New Jersey was nominated for
Vice-President. At first Judge Davis accepted the nomination, but
resigned after the Democrats had nominated Horace Greeley. The loss of
the candidate spelled the death of the party. The National Labor Union
itself had been only an empty shell since 1870, when the national trade
unions, disaffected with the turn towards politics, withdrew. Now, its
pet project a failure, it, too, broke up.

In 1873, on the eve of the financial panic, the national trade unions
attempted to reconstruct a national labor federation on a purely
trade-union basis in the form of a National Industrial Congress. But the
economic disaster of the panic nipped it in the bud just as it cut off
the life of the overwhelming majority of the existing labor
organizations. Another attempt to get together on a national basis was
made in the National Labor Congress at Pittsburgh in 1876. But those who
responded were not interested in trade unionism and, mirroring the
prevailing labor sentiment during the long years of depressions, had
only politics on their mind, greenback or socialist. As neither
greenbacker nor socialist would meet the other half-way, the attempt
naturally came to naught.

Greenbackism was popular with the working people during the depressed
seventies because it now meant to them primarily currency inflation and