cks, but after only $44 million was retired, objections by the 'debtor class' stopped this process. The 'Ohio Idea,' advocated by Democratic Congressman George Pendleton in 1867, gained popular support. It held that "the war debt must be repaid in the selfsame Greenbacks which the bond-buyers had invested."
Greenbackism found support in a variety of quarters. Goodwyn says "the intellectual sources of greenback thinking can be traced to eighteenth-century works by 'anti-metallists' and inflationists in England. The labor movement was influenced by the anti-usury thinking of Edward Kellogg in the 1840s, and by Alexander Campbell, who favored in the late 1860s the issuance of government bonds and legal tender at low rates of interest and is sometimes called "the father of the Greenback Movement." In the late 1860s, economist Henry Carey foresaw a harmony of interest of labor and productive entrepreneurs against "a common and parasitical foe, the finance capitalists." Some early supporters of soft money policies were industrialists, who needed credit for expansion
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