Free Silver Movement after The Crime of ‘73
Free Silver was a movement that developed after the Coinage Act of 1873, an Act which both blocked silver from being minted in the U.S. Mint and limited the amount of silver that could be used as legal tender to $5.00. This effectively chose Gold over Silver as a monetary policy and legal choice and left a lot of farmers and ranchers in the Midwest, South and out West holding silver that had been devalued with little option that to exchange the silver for gold at deep discounts for Gold to pay their debts. The movement to correct the crime of ’73 and initiate a Fourth Coinage Act that included silver and established a bimetallism monetary system was born from these events.
In many ways, the Gold vs. Silver debate was a haves vs. have nots debate that pitted the Eastern monied interests (slaves to London and the Bank of England) along with the corporations, oligarchs, railroads, and other big money entities against the People who at the time were primarily farmers and ranchers. Larger city workers and citizens were not supportive of silver, primarily due to the never-ending propaganda by the media owned by the Gold backers in the larger cities and their foreign masters (sound familiar?). Silver had already been knocked out in the Coinage Act of 1834 where Jackson and his allies used an attack on silver to crush the Second Bank of the United States. Closer to the Coinage Act of ’73 (“the Crime of ;73), there was fear from the Gold camp that the massive amounts of silver coming from the Comstock Lode and other silver deposits in Nevada and out west that were to be minted and when they entered the money supply would cause inflation.
Free Silver advocates did not deny that the silver entering the money supply, had it been allowed to naturally, would cause inflation, but disagree whether this inflation would be a net negative for the economy or not. One relatively temporary success that came from the Free Silver movement, which also contained a “poison pill” trick within it, was the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act required the U.S. Government to purchase millions of ounces of silver, driving its price up and pleasing the silver miners and farmers/ranchers. The problem was that the silver was paid for in gold notes, which reduced the coinage of silver, created a “run” on the Treasury’s gold, and helped create the paint of 1893.
The Panic of 1893 became a focal point in the Free Silver movement as the argument that the resulting deflation, high unemployment in industrial areas, and severe distress for farmers could have been averted with Free Silver that had been intentionally sabotaged in the Crime of ’73 (Coinage Act of 1873). The Panic combined with the factors that led to it and the rising tensions of Gold vs. Silver camps resulted in the Presidential candidates of the Democratic Party for 1896 being focused around Free Silver. This is when the infamous “Cross of Gold” speech by William Jennings Bryan was delivered.
Bryan, the advocate for Free Silver, lost both the 1896 and the 1900 elections. Given the recent focus on election integrity and there being a good probability that massive election fraud has been ongoing for some time now in the United States, these results should now be viewed questionably and not interpreted as a true gauge of the People’s will on silver as money. The Free Silver movement, once boasting three private activist groups with over a million members and dominating policy discussions during the 1896 and 1900 Presidential elections, slowly died away thereafter.
Have we restarted the Free Silver movement here in 2020? Is this merely a hyped run up of a commodity or a long-lasting demand for free, fair, and honest money in bimetallism that can benefit both the well-off and those of more modest means (“the People”)? Who determines this future is YOU and the rest of the People.
