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COMMENTS ON WYATT WELLS, “RHETORIC OF THE STANDARDS: THE DEBATE OVER GOLD AND SILVER IN THE 1890S”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2014

Walter Nugent
Walter Nugent*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame
*
e-mail: wnugent@nd.edu
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The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 69 - 76
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Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2015 

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References

NOTES

1 Milton Friedman places “deflation from 1875 to 1896 at a rate of roughly 1.7 percent per year in the United States and 0.8 percent per year in the United Kingdom, which means the gold standard world. In the United States, the deflation from 1875 to 1896 followed the even sharper deflation after the Civil War.” Friedman, “The Crime of 1873,” Journal of Political Economy 98 (Dec. 1990), 1170Google Scholar.

2 For the connections between the 1870s and 1890s gold-silver confrontation, see Nugent, Walter, “Money, Politics, and Society: The Currency Question” in Morgan, H. Wayne, The Gilded Age (Revised and enlarged edition; Syracuse, 1970), 109–127Google Scholar.

3 Wells cites Irwin Unger's The Greenback Era as “The standard history of the politics of money in the 1870s” (footnote 4). It is a fine book that deserved its 1965 Pulitzer Prize. Also relevant, however, are Sharkey, Robert P., Money, Class, and Party: An Economic History of Civil War and Reconstruction (Baltimore, 1959)Google Scholar; Weinstein, Allen, Prelude to Populism: Origins of the Silver Issue, 1867–1878 (New Haven, 1970)Google Scholar; my own books, The Money Question during Reconstruction (New York, 1967)Google Scholar and Money and American Society, 1865–1880 (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; and two articles by Friedman, Milton: “The Crime of 1873,” Journal of Political Economy 98 (Dec. 1990): 1159–1194CrossRefGoogle Scholar (which does not cite the Unger book but does cite Money and American Society several times), and “Bimetallism Revisited,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 4 (Autumn 1990): 85–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Many earlier treatments exist, starting with Mint Director Henry R. Linderman's Money and Legal Tender in the United States (1878) through to S. Barnett's, Paul “The Crime of 1873 Re-examined,” Agricultural History 38 (July 1964): 178–181Google Scholar. For a discussion of these many works, see the concluding “Bibliographical Review” in my Money Question during Reconstruction. The Kenneth Carpenter book, which Wells cites several times, consists of nine items on both sides of the gold-silver conflict, mostly on the gold side. A book both entertaining and revealing of the opposing viewpoints is Worth Miller's, RobertPopulist Cartoons: An Illustrated History of the Third-party Movement in the 1890s (Kirksville, MO, 2011)Google Scholar.

4 The Commission's members were Senators John P. Jones (R-NV), Lewis V. Bogy (D-MO), and George Boutwell (R-MA); Representatives Randall Gibson (D-LA), George Willard (R-MI), and Richard P. Bland (D-MO); plus former Congressman William S. Groesbeck (D-OH) and Harvard professor Francis Bowen.

5 Emery has been the subject of scholarly inquiry only once, to my knowledge: Adams, Pauline and Thornton, Emma S., A Populist Assault: Sarah E. Van De Vort Emery on American Democracy 1862–1895 (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1982)Google Scholar. Adams and Thornton remark judiciously that “Too bad Emery did not rest her case with the presentation of the deplorable state of the masses and her facts on financial legislation, for they were indictment enough; to use conspiracy to explain her facts was both unnecessary and detrimental to her cause” (pp. 54–55; also, pp. 89ff.).

6 Adams and Thornton (p. 88) quote a letter from John W. Breidenthal, then Kansas state chairman of the Union Labor Party, and another from the Vincent brothers, publishers of the American Nonconformist of Winfield, Kansas, stating that fifty to a hundred thousand copies of Emery's book were “distributed” in Kansas—in the 1888 Union Labor campaign, not the People's Party campaigns of 1890 and later. Breidenthal, however, became state chairman of the People's Party after it was formed in June 1890, and may have distributed Emery's book then as well.

7 Davis to the editor of the (Topeka) Advocate, Jan. 27, 1897, quoted in Nugent, Walter, The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism (Chicago, 1963)Google Scholar, 107; in the 2013 edition, 81.

8 According to series D735 in the Historical Statistics of the United States (1975 edition), p. 165, annual earnings in current dollars fell from 482 in 1892 to 420 in 1894, ultimately recovering to 483 in 1900. In inflation-adjusted dollars, annual wages were 527 in 1892, dipped to 484 in 1894, and came back to 527 again in 1898, rising to 573 in 1900. But the heading of the series reads “Money (when employed).” Series D86 (p. 135) shows unemployment as “percent of civilian labor force” at 4.0 in 1890, rising to 18.4 in 1894, 13.7 in 1895, 14.4 in 1896, and 14.5 in 1897. In 1900 it fell, mercifully, to 5.0. Such was the depression of the 1890s, which affected non-farm workers as well as farmers. Most of these figures, both in the 1975 and the 2006 “Millennial” edition of the Historical Statistics, come from Lebergott, Stanley, Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record since 1800 (New York, 1964)Google Scholar.

9 Knox's transmittal of his coinage bill to Secretary Boutwell included a long and prominently headed note marked “Silver Dollar—Its Discontinuance as a Standard.” Nugent, Money and American Society, 1865–1880, p. 136. “The demonetization of silver in the Coinage Act of 1873 was known, planned, and brought off by Sherman, Boutwell, Linderman, Knox, [Samuel] Hooper [chair of the House Banking and Currency Committee], and others in order to secure what they believed, and believed mistakenly, to be the public interest. Gold monometallism was the only monetary standard they understood, because they believed in its ideology and in the rhetoric which seemed to make it the embodiment of civilization, natural law, proper political economy, and good morals.” Ibid., 170.

10 In 1868, 55,000 silver dollars were coined at the Philadelphia Mint; in FY 1872, 1,109,000. See Mint Director's Report, 1872, Appendix D, and Secretary of the Treasury Report, 1872, p. 442, in House Executive Document 2, 42nd Congress 3d Session; also Linderman's piece in the Banker's Magazine, March 1873, pp. 710–712, cited in Money Question during Reconstruction, pp. 90–91, notes 24, 25. Wells is mistaken in saying that Sherman and other “financial sophisticates … did not anticipate … the shift of Germany and France to the gold standard and the discovery of huge deposits of silver in the American West.” To the contrary, they suspected an impending flood of silver as early as 1866, and knew it for certain no later than 1870. And they and the world knew by late 1871 that the new German Empire would shift from silver to gold coinage, a crucial change in supply and demand made possible by the huge gold indemnity demanded and received from France at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. France did not suspend silver coinage until 1876.

Wells states (p. 4, note 12), that “The United States did have $13.6 million in subsidiary silver coins in circulation” but carrying little legal tender power. He is correct in his citation, p. 995 of the Historical Statistics (1975), series X424–X437, “Currency in Circulation, by Kind: 1800 to 1970.” But Series X426, “Silver Dollars,” shows none before 1878. This absence in the source is puzzling, as Linderman's and Boutwell's reports show the 1,109,000 coined in 1872. In my Money Question during Reconstruction, pp. 90–91, note 25, I cite the reports of the Mint director (Henry Linderman) and the Secretary of the Treasury (George Boutwell), which showed 1,109,000 coined at Philadelphia in FY 1872. I also cite the Linderman-Torrey report, “The production of Gold and Silver,” Nov. 1872, in Bankers’ Magazine, March 1873, 710–712. For detailed discussion, see chap. 5 of The Money Question during Reconstruction.

Presumably, many more silver dollars were being coined at the Carson City branch. James Pollock, by then director of the Philadelphia Mint, told Boutwell “that great amounts of it [silver] were coming into the Mint for coinage (Ibid., 90). If these men knew, Sherman certainly knew, and he and international financial circles knew about the German shift from silver to gold, and could well imagine its full effect, well before he brought the coinage bill before the Senate in January 1873. The text (p. 991) explaining the tables in the Historical Statistics for Series X426 reads, “The figures for 1860–1889 have been revised from the best data available in annual reports of the Secretary of the Treasury. The records are not complete and the figures for gold and silver in those years are only estimates.”

11 Friedman, “Crime of 1873,” 1176–1177.

12 Friedman, “Bimetallism Revisited,” 91.

13 As Wells correctly observes, p. 2, n. 5.

14 Hammond, Bray, “The North's Empty Purse, 1861–1862,” American Historical Review 67:1 (October 1961): 15–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Banks and Politics was published by Princeton University Press in 1957.

15 Schumpeter, Joseph A., Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process (Mansfield, Centre, CT, 2005 [reprint of the original 1939 edition, New York]), I: 544–545Google Scholar.

16 “Gold Heads for Worst Annual Loss in 32 Years,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 21, 2013.