Coin's Financial School
Throughout the late nineteenth century the nature of the American financial structure was the subject of contentious debate. By the 1890s, gold-based and silver-based currency represented distinct political as well as monetary philosophies. The Coinage Act of 1873 introduced a currency based on gold alone. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 restored limited bimetallism, but was repealed owing to the erosion of Treasury funds after the crash of June 1893. By mid-1894 the American economy was in deep depression, and calls for some kind of monetary inflation mounted. In the midst of unprecedented social strife, William Hope Harvey published Coin's Financial School. It quickly became the quintessential expression of the free-silver philosophy.
Capitalizing on rural distrust of the urban East and of British monetary power, Harvey denounced attempts to restrict bimetallism as a conspiracy against farmers and debtors. Such attempts, he charged, were designed to enrich eastern financiers controlled by London. The appeal of the book lay in its simple, accessible style and its graphic cartoons. The eponymous hero, youthful and uncorrupted, lectured financiers and politicians, many of them real-life figures, on the errors of their ways. The depression, he argued, was caused by reliance on gold monometallism, which restricted the money supply and lowered prices. Free and unlimited coinage of silver was the only solution. Printed in cheap paper editions, Coin's Financial School quickly sold a million copies. Without it, William Jennings Bryan could never have struck so receptive a chord in his Cross of Gold speech in 1896.
