page_title: James B. Weaver
section_title: Return to Congress
hierarchical_section_title: James B. Weaver / Return to Congress
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of Unassigned Lands (Oklahoma) - 1885 Source: https://www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/lessons/federal_indian_policy/federal_indian_policy.html, federal government site, public domain (Unassigned Lands outlined in red before posting) Area: 400x302 pix Size: 40.73 kb
context_page_description: James Baird Weaver was a member of the United States House of Representatives and two-time candidate for President of the United States. Born in Ohio, he moved to Iowa as a boy when his family claimed a homestead on the frontier. He became politically active as a young man and was an advocate for farmers and laborers. He joined and quit several political parties in the furtherance of the progressive causes in which he believed. After serving in the Union Army in the American Civil War, Weaver returned to Iowa and worked for the election of Republican candidates. After several unsuccessful attempts at Republican nominations to various offices, and growing dissatisfied with the conservative wing of the party, in 1877 Weaver switched to the Greenback Party, which supported increasing the money supply and regulating big business. As a Greenbacker with Democratic support, Weaver won election to the House in 1878.
  The Greenbackers nominated Weaver for president in 1880, but he received only 3.3 percent of the popular vote. After several more attempts at elected office, he was again elected to the House in 1884 and 1886.
context_section_description: Unlike in his previous congressional term, when Weaver entered the 49th United States Congress, he was the only Greenback member. The new president, Democrat Grover Cleveland, was friendly to Weaver, and asked his advice on Iowa patronage. As it had been for years, Weaver's chief concern was with the nation's money and finance, and the relationship between labor and capital.
  In 1885, he proposed the creation of a Department of Labor, which he suggested would find a solution to disputes between labor and management. Labor tensions increased the following year as the Knights of Labor went on strike against Jay Gould's rail empire, and a strike against the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company ended in the bloody Haymarket riot. Weaver believed the nation's hard-money policies were responsible for labor unrest, calling it "purely a question of money, and nothing else" and declaring, "If this Congress will not protect labor, it must protect itself". He saw the triumph of one plank of the Greenback platform when Congress established the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate the railroads. Weaver thought the bill should have given the government more power, including the ability to set rates directly, but he voted for the final bill.
  Weaver also took up the issue of white settlement in Indian Territory. For several years, white settlers had been claiming homesteads in the Unassigned Lands in what is now Oklahoma. After the Civil War, the Five Civilized Tribes had been forced to cede their unused western lands to the federal government. The settlers, known as Boomers, believed that federal ownership made the lands open to settlement under the Homestead Acts. The federal government disagreed, as did the Cherokee Nation, which leased its neighboring Cherokee Outlet to Kansas cattle ranchers, and many Easterners, who believed the Boomers to be the tools of railroad interests. Weaver saw the issue as one between the landless poor homesteaders and wealthy cattlemen, and took the side of the former. He introduced a bill in December 1885 to organize Indian Territory and the neighboring Neutral Strip into a new Oklahoma Territory. The bill died in committee, but Weaver reintroduced it in February 1886 and gave a speech calling for the Indian reservations to be broken up into homesteads for individual Natives and the remaining land to be open to white settlement.
  The Committee on Territories again rejected Weaver's bill, but approved a compromise measure that opened the Unassigned Lands, Cherokee Outlet, and Neutral Strip to settlement. Congress debated the bill over several months, while the tribes announced their resistance to their lands becoming a territory; according to an 1884 Supreme Court decision, Elk v. Wilkins, Native Americans were not citizens, and thus would have no voting rights in the new territory. When Weaver returned to Iowa to campaign for re-election, the bill was still in limbo. Running again on a Democratic–Greenback fusion ticket, Weaver was re-elected to the House in 1886 with a 618-vote majority.
  In the lame-duck session of 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Act, which allowed the president to terminate tribal governments, and broke up Indian reservations into homesteads for individual natives. Although the Five Civilized Tribes were exempt from the Act, the spirit of the law encouraged Weaver and the Boomers to continue their own efforts to open western Indian Territory to white settlement. Weaver reintroduced his Oklahoma bill in the new Congress the following year, but again it stalled in committee. He returned to Iowa for another re-election campaign in September 1888, but the Greenback party had fallen apart, replaced by a new left-wing third party, the Union Labor Party. In Iowa's 6th district, the new party agreed to fuse with Democrats to nominate Weaver, but this time the Republicans were stronger. Their candidate, John F. Lacey, was elected with an 828-vote margin. The Union Laborites and their presidential candidate, Alson Streeter, fared poorly nationally as well, and the new party soon dissolved. 
caption: Weaver supported white settlers' right to homesteads in the Unassigned Lands.
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