Ohio History Journal

  • 1
  •  
  • 2
  •  
  • 3
  •  
  • 4
  •  
  • 5
  •  
  • 6
  •  
  • 7
  •  
  • 8
  •  
  • 9
  •  
  • 10
  •  
  • 11
  •  
  • 12
  •  
  • 13
  •  
  • 14
  •  
  • 15
  •  
  • 16
  •  
  • 17
  •  
  • 18
  •  

JOHN SHERMAN AND THE SILVER DRIVE OF 1877-78:

JOHN SHERMAN AND THE SILVER DRIVE OF 1877-78:

THE ORIGINS OF THE GIGANTIC SUBSIDY

 

By JEANNETTE P. NICHOLS

 

That tour de force, the Silver Purchase Act of 1934, is too

close to the present to be judged fairly.1 While some critics claim

that it simply signifies a cowardly, unpatriotic surrender to a small

group of wealthy mine-owners, others suspect that the faithful

servitors of those interests--the fourteen senators from the seven

silver states--had the power and disposition to wreck the Admin-

istration's broader domestic and foreign program if their demands

were not met. A third group sees silver agitations as mere parts

of a larger popular urge for inflation--an urge which in hard

times has affected eastern as well as western blocs, manufacturers

(particularly of exports) and laborers as well as farmers and

miners, hard money voters as well as fiat money voters.

Today evidence upon the compulsions of the present Admin-

istration is lacking; but much evidence is at hand upon silver

movements of earlier depressions. During that of 1873 the silver-

men inserted their entering wedge for powerful leverage, forcing

upon the Hayes Administration monthly purchases of not less than

$2,000,000 worth of silver. Deeper they thrust their wedge in

1890, compelling the Harrison Administration to purchase 4,500,-

ooo ounces monthly. When Grover Cleveland in 1893 had ended

their subsidy, they helped to wreck his Administration. During

that of the present Roosevelt, they have obtained the tremendous

concession that silver should become one-fourth of our monetary

stocks. Obviously, so strong a movement, long surviving, must

ramify into the emotions and objectives of a much larger class

than the silver producers.

1 For the terms of the 1934 Act, see U. S. Statutes at Large, XLVIII, p. 1178,

Perhaps the bitterest denunciation of this act is Neil Carothers' Silver in America,

published during the 1936 campaign under the auspices of the Reserve City Banks.

(148)