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In 1893, William Hope Harvey, a Chicago journalist, published
Coin's Financial School, which sold 400,000 copies within
a year. It argued that the gold standard penalized farmers and
working people and that backing the dollar with silver as well
as gold would solve the nation's economic problems.
In 1792, Congress had made both gold and silver coins legal
tender. In 1873, no provision was made for continuing the silver
dollar as legal tender, and Congress declared gold the single
unit of value. Falling crop prices and high interest rates led
farmers to focus on the elimination of silver as legal tender
as the prime reason why money had become so scare. This decision
to make gold the sole legal tender was known as "the crime
of 1873."
Using an easy-to-read style, Coin's Financial School
argued that since the world's gold supply was limited, the amount
of money available for investment and loans was restricted. Backing
the dollar with silver would expand the currency, cut interest
rates, and make investment capital more readily available. But
the clash between gold and silver came to symbolize a much deeper
conflict--about whether the United States would be a rural and
agricultural or an urban and industrial society.
The early and mid-1890s were years of bitter contention. Farmers,
who had suffered depressed prices, difficulties in obtaining credit,
and high costs in producing and shipping their crops since the
1870s, saw conditions worsen. The depression of 1893 was one of
the most severe in the nation's history. Labor violence broke
out in many parts of the country, culminating in 1894 with the
Pullman strike that temporarily paralyzed half the nation's railroads.
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