In the United States, bimetallism became a center of political conflict toward the end of the 19th century. During the Civil War, to finance the war the U.S. switched from bimetallism to a fiat money currency. After the war, in 1873, the government passed the Fourth Coinage Act and soon resumption of specie payments began (without the free and unlimited coinage of silver, thus putting the U.S. on a mono-metallic gold standard.) Farmers, debtors, Westerners and others who felt they had benefited from wartime paper money formed the short-lived Greenback Party to press for cheap paper money backed by silver. The latter element—"free silver"—came increasingly to the fore as the answer to the same interest groups' concerns, and was taken up as a central plank by the Populist movement. Proponents of monetary silver, known as the silverites, referred back to the Fourth Coinage Act as "The Crime of '73," as it was judged to have inhibited inflation, and favored creditors over debtors. Some reformers, however, like Henry Demarest Lloyd, saw bimetallism as a red herring and feared that free silver was "the cowbird of the reform movement, likely to push the other eggs out of the nest. Nevertheless the Panic of 1893, a severe nationwide depression, brought the money issue strongly to the fore again. The "silverites" argued that using silver would inflate the money supply and mean more cash for everyone, which they equated with prosperity. The gold advocates said silver would permanently depress the economy, but that sound money produced by a gold standard would restore prosperity.