¹ Bryan, William Jennings, “Has the Election Settled the Money Question?,” The North American Review 163 (December 1896): 704.Google Scholar

² Goodwyn, Lawrence, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York, 1978)Google Scholar, 312.

³ Technically, countries on the gold standard fixed their currencies not relative to each other, but to gold. Yet because all had a common denominator, the relative value of gold standard currencies fluctuated less than 1 percent.

⁴ The standard history of the politics of money in the 1870s is Unger, Irwin, The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879 (Princeton, 1964).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵ Under free coinage, anyone could bring bullion to the Treasury and have it made into legal tender coins, free of charge. Gold had this privilege under the gold standard, and silverites wanted to extend this rule to silver—hence the term “bimetallists,” which silverites often used to describe themselves. The problem lay in the ratio between the two metals. If both gold and silver coins were to serve as legal tender, there had to be a legal ratio defining their relative value. Yet gold and silver were both commodities that traded in the open market, and if the market price of the two differed from the legal ratio by more than 3 or 4 percent, an irresistible opportunity for arbitrage presented itself. Traders would buy the undervalued metal and have it coined while melting the coins of the overvalued metal and selling the product on the free market. Through this process, coins of the more expensive metal vanished from circulation. In the early 1850s, when the California Gold Rush flooded the market for the yellow metal, silver coins disappeared. By the 1890s, the situation had reversed. In the 1870s, large discoveries of silver in the American West and the decision of France and Germany to adopt the gold standard flooded the market for silver, and by the 1890s its price had fallen as low as $.63 an ounce, half the official price of $1.29. By this time, silver no longer enjoyed free coinage, and so gold remained in circulation. There seems little doubt, however, that free coinage of silver would speedily lead to the disappearance of gold and put the United States on a de facto silver standard. See Taussig, Frank, The Silver Situation in the United States, 2nd edition, reprint (Freeport, NY, 1969)Google Scholar; Russell, Henry, International Monetary Conferences (New York and London, 1898)Google Scholar; Laughlin, J. Laurence, The History of Bimetallism in the United States, 4th edition (New York, 1900)Google Scholar. For a view of gold and silver over the (very) long term, see Braudel, Fernand, Civilization & Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, Volume I, The Structures of Everyday Life (New York, 1979), 457–470.Google Scholar

⁶ Most of the notes issued during the Civil War remained in circulation, but starting in 1879, the government stood ready to redeem them, on demand, in gold, at $20.64 an ounce.

⁷ Taussig, The Silver Situation.

⁸ Dillon, William, “The Battle of the Standards in America: Suggestions for a Compromise,” The Nineteenth Century 40 (August 1896): 207.Google Scholar

⁹ Speech of Senator John Daniel, September 14, 1893, 31. This speech was one of the many delivered during the Senate filibuster against the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in the fall of 1893. Senators often had these printed up and mailed out to constituents, and Google Books has collected many of them together as Silver Speeches in the U.S. Senate.

¹⁰ “Notes by the Editor,” The Arena 16 (July 1896): 338.Google Scholar

¹¹ Laughlin, History of Bimetallism, 95–101.Google Scholar

¹² The federal government collected tariff revenue and paid interest on its debts in gold, and gold was the currency of foreign trade, so there was an active market in which participants bought and sold gold for paper money. The United States did have $13.6 million in subsidiary silver coins in circulation, which had less than the legal weight of silver and were legal tender for only small transactions. Most of the silver dollars coined by the U.S. government before 1873 had been melted down because the market value of the silver in them was greater than their face value, and none were in circulation. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States from Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C., 1975)Google Scholar, 995, Series X424–432.

¹³ Emery, Sarah, Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People, 3rd edition (Lansing, MI, 1896)Google Scholar, 52, reprinted in Carpenter, Kenneth, ed., Gold and Silver in the Presidential Campaign of 1896 (New York, 1974).Google Scholar

¹⁴ U.S. Congress, 52nd Congress, 1st session, Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures, Free Coinage of Gold and Silver, 1893, 3.

¹⁵ Speech of Senator Wilkinson Call, October 4 & 6, 1893, 19, Silver Speeches.

¹⁶ U.S. Congress, 52nd Cong., 2nd session, Committee on the Judiciary, National Money System, Views of the Minority, 1893, 6.

¹⁷ Address of William Jennings Bryan to Bland Club of Chicago, reproduced in Stevans, Charles, Free Silver and the People (New York, 1896)Google Scholar, 13.

¹⁸ Parsons, Frank, “The Issue of 1896,” The Arena 16 (November 1896): 881.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Emery, Seven Conspiracies, 59.

²⁰ Since the Civil War, the United States had had a paper currency, known as greenbacks, that was worth what it could buy in the marketplace.

²¹ France's decision to close its mints to silver also had a great impact on the relative value of gold and silver, but the French reacted to events after the United States demonetized silver. Reti, Steven P., Silver and Gold: The Political Economy of International Monetary Conferences, 1867–1892 (Westport, CT, 1998), 83–84.Google Scholar

²² U.S. Senate, 53rd Congress, 1st session, Letter from Ernest Seyd to Samuel Hooper on the Subject of Coinage, 1893.

²³ Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform from Bryan to FDR (New York, 1955)Google Scholar, 67, 71, 73.

²⁴ Ostler, Jeffrey, “The Rhetoric of Conspiracy and the Formation of Kansas Populism, Agricultural History 69 (1995): 1–27.Google Scholar

²⁵ Keasbey, Lindley, “The New Sectionalism: A Western Warning to the East,” The Forum 16 (1894): 580Google Scholar; Ostler, Jeffrey, Prairie Populism: The Fate of Agrarian Radicalism in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, 1880–1892 (Lawrence, KS, 1993), 12–36.Google Scholar

²⁶ Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 58–59, 104–105.

²⁷ Friedman, Milton, “The Crime of ‘73,” Journal of Political Economy 98 (1990): 1159–1194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁸ Harvey, William, Coin's Financial School (Chicago, 1894)Google Scholar, 108.

²⁹ William Stewart, “The Struggle in the Senate: Misrepresentation of the Senate,” North American Review, Nov. 1893, 520.

³⁰ Speech of Sen. George Gray, September 20, 1893, 19, Silver Speeches.

³¹ Taussig, The Silver Situation in the United States, 109.

³² Wells, David A., Breakers Ahead: Cause of the Present Crisis (New York, 1896)Google Scholar, 7, reprinted in Gold and Silver in the Presidential Campaign of 1896.

³³ A Farmer's Letter on the Silver Question, [1896], 8, reprinted in Gold and Silver in the Presidential Campaign of 1896.

³⁴ Wallace Bartlett, A Union Soldier to His Comrades, August 28, 1896, 3, reprinted in Gold and Silver in the Presidential Campaign of 1896.

³⁵ Speech of Sen. William B. Allison, September 16, 1893, 9, Silver Speeches.

³⁶ U.S. Congress, 52nd Congress, 1st session, Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures, Free Coinage of Gold and Silver, 1893, 20, 26.

³⁷ Printed in the Cleveland Gazette, August 8, 1896.

³⁸ Harvey, Coin's Financial School, pp. 28–30; Bryan, William J., Speeches of William Jennings Bryan, Vol. 1 (New York, 1912), 274–282Google Scholar. Bryan and Coin argued that, by increasing the demand for silver, free coinage would raise its market price to one-sixteenth that of gold. Free silver would undoubtedly have raised the relative price of the white metal, which in 1896 stood at one thirty-second that of gold, but probably not enough to restore the sixteen-to-one parity. Certainly, the record of government efforts to prop up the price of silver was not encouraging. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act, under which the U.S. government had purchased the entire output of silver mines in the United States, failed to prevent the fall of silver relative to gold in 1890–1893.

³⁹ Between 1873 and 1897, the average wage of non-agricultural workers in the United States fell from $466 to $442, or 5 percent. Adjusted for prices, however, wages increased from $407 to $529 (1914 dollars), or 30 percent. The jump is particularly remarkable because the period in question includes two severe depressions, 1873–1879 and 1893–1897. Not surprisingly, most of the increase came in the 1880s, but wages did not fall (in real terms) during the depressions, although workers did suffer severely from unemployment. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, Washington, D.C., 1975Google Scholar, 165, Series D735–738.

⁴⁰ To American Bread-Winners: A Word on Wages in Silver Countries, [1896], 5, reprinted in Gold and Silver in the Presidential Campaign of 1896.

⁴¹ Harvey, Coin's Financial School, 27–29.

⁴² Parsons, “The Issue of 1896,” 884.

⁴³ “Editor's Table,” New England Magazine 15 (1896): 256.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Between 1860 and 1865, the nominal wages of urban workers increased, on average, from $363 to $512, or 41 percent. Prices, however, went up even faster. In constant (1914) dollars, average wages fell from $457 to $328, or 28 percent. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, 165, Series D 735–738.

⁴⁵ Bryan, “Has the Election Settled the Money Question?,” 710.

⁴⁶ Hicks, John D., The Populist Revolt (Minneapolis, 1931)Google Scholar, 375.

⁴⁷ See, for example, “To the Employees of the Chicago, Peoria, & St. Louis Railroad” [September 1896], William McKinley Papers, Library of Congress, reel 1.

⁴⁸ Williams, R. Hal, Realigning America: McKinley, Bryan, and the Remarkable Election of 1896 (Lawrence, KS, 2010)Google Scholar, 6.

⁴⁹ Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, 100.

⁵⁰ McKinley's enthusiastic support for the protective tariff—he was the author of the 1890 bill substantially raising it—also helped him among workers.

⁵¹ James Eckels, “How to Prevent a Money Famine,” North American Review, January 1894, 56.

⁵² Shearman, Thomas, “Need, Not of ‘More Money,’ But of Better Exchange,” The Forum 16 (December 1893): 463.Google Scholar

⁵³ Ibid., 460.

⁵⁴ Millard, Charles, “An Open Letter to Eastern Capitalists,” The Arena 18 (August 1897): 215.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Speech of Senator William Allen, August 24, 1893, 17, Silver Speeches.

⁵⁶ Speech of Senator James George, Sept. 20, 22, 1893, 32, Silver Speeches.

⁵⁷ Emery, Seven Financial Conspiracies, 25.

⁵⁸ Roberts, Albert, “Bank Monopoly—Specie Contraction—Bond Inflation,” The Arena 15 (May 1896): 1005.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Frank Parsons, “The Issue of 1896,” 883.

⁶⁰ Speech of Sen. John Daniel, September 14, 1893, 26, Silver Speeches.

⁶¹ See, for instance, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, 1894. Washington, 1894, 68–70; Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, 1895. Washington, 1895, 83–85.

⁶² Speech of Sen. James George, 59, Silver Speeches.

⁶³ Ritter, Gretchen, Goldbugs and Greenback (New York, 1997), 175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶⁴ Wilkins, Mira, The History of Foreign Investment in the United States to 1914 (Cambridge MA, 1989)Google Scholar, 197, 202.

⁶⁵ Aldredge, George in The White Elephant: Silver as Seen by Prominent Statesmen (Boston, 1896)Google Scholar, 17, reprinted in Gold and Silver in the Presidential Campaign of 1896.

⁶⁶ U.S. Congress, Free Coinage of Gold and Silver, 8.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 26.

⁶⁸ Overland Monthly 28 (October 1896): 481.

⁶⁹ Steward, “The Struggle in the Senate,” 520.

⁷⁰ Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks, 280.

⁷¹ Postel, Charles, The Populist Vision (New York, 2007)Google Scholar, 152.

⁷² Quoted in Russell, Henry B., International Monetary Conferences (New York, 1898)Google Scholar. 266.

⁷³ Green, E.H.H., “Rentiers versus Producers: The Political Economy of the Bimetallic Controversy, c. 1880–1898,” The English Historical Review 103 (1988): 588–612.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁷⁵ Democratic Platform, July 9, 1896, http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/chicagoplatform.html.

⁷⁶ Quoted in Williams, Realigning America, 189.

⁷⁷ Speech of George Hoar, August 15, 1893, 27, Silver Speeches.

⁷⁸ Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks, 83.

⁷⁹ John Sherman et al. to bimetallist meeting in London, 1894, Grover Cleveland Papers, reel 88, Library of Congress.

⁸⁰ Williams, Realigning America, 163.

⁸¹ The Nation, October 8, 1896, 2.

⁸² Harvey, Coin's Financial School, 82.

⁸³ White, Horace, Coin's Financial Fool: The Artful Dodger Exposed (New York, 1895)Google Scholar, 8.

⁸⁴ Postel, The Populist Vision, 150.

⁸⁵ Address of William Jennings Bryan to Bland Club of Chicago, reproduced in Stevens, Charles, Free Silver and the People (New York, 1896)Google Scholar, 12.

⁸⁶ Laughlin, History of Bimetallism, 153.

⁸⁷ The Nation, February 3, 1898, 83.

⁸⁸ O'Malley, Michael, Face Value: The Entwined Histories of Money & Race in America (Chicago, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 161.

⁸⁹ Wells, Wyatt, “Silver and Segregation,” Historically Speaking 14 (Nov. 2013): 2–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹⁰ Ross, Edward, Honest Dollars (Chicago, 1896)Google Scholar, 51, reprinted in Gold and Silver in the Presidential Campaign of 1896.

⁹¹ King, Frank H. H., The History of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Vol. II, The Hongkong Bank in the Period of Imperialism and War, 1895–1918 (Cambridge, UK, 1988)Google Scholar, 221.

⁹² To American Breadwinners: A Word on Wages in Silver Countries, [1896], 5, in Gold and Silver In the Presidential Campaign of 1896.

⁹³ Speech of Senator William Allen, August 24, 1893, 25, Silver Speeches.

⁹⁴ U.S. Congress, Free Coinage of Gold and Silver, 5–6.

⁹⁵ White Elephant, 7.

⁹⁶ Overland Monthly, 28 (October 1896): 480.

⁹⁷ Cleveland Gazette, August 8, 1896.

⁹⁸ Historical Statistics of the United States, 12, 684, 694, 731, 734, Series A57–72, P123–176, P231–300, Q321–8.

⁹⁹ Between 1880 and 1890, the average wage of non-agricultural workers increased from $386 to $475, or 23 percent. In constant (inflation-adjusted) dollars, the increase was even more, from $395 to $519 (1914 dollars), or 31 percent. Historical Statistics of the United States, 165, Series D735–738.

¹⁰⁰ Quoted in Stevens, Free Silver and the People, 14–15.

¹⁰¹ Nugent, Walter, Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction (New York, 2010).Google Scholar

¹⁰² The best broad studies on this process remain Wiebe, Robert, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; and Chandler, Alfred, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA, 1977).Google Scholar