Ohio History Journal

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The OHIO HISTORICAL Quarterly

The OHIO HISTORICAL Quarterly

VOLUME 67 ~ NUMBER 4 ~ OCTOBER 1958

 

 

 

Bryan's Benefactor:

Coin Harvey and His World

 

By JEANNETTE P. NICHOLS*

 

 

 

THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES are "temperamentally given

to experiments, to impatient and Utopian solutions," according to a

distinguished British historian of the present day,1 following a line

of thought traversed by many other analysts, domestic and foreign,

past and present. Few Americans would deny that the nation has

shown a lively and persistent faith in innovation and perfectability,

and that that faith has thrived in many regions. The Middle West,

in its days of greatest fluidity, spawned its full share of causes and of

saviors.

Of the venturesome folk who sought the Mississippi Valley to

better their fortunes, to appease their wanderlust, or to fulfill their

dreams, the progeny of not a few were enticed yet further west;

and some of these, whom the Further West of the nineteenth cen-

tury failed to satisfy, returned, undaunted, to the valley to preach

various causes. Such restless souls--rolling stones--sometimes

widened their personal-betterment-seeking to embrace preachments

of reform to the generality. This type tended to adopt protest as a

career and eagerly sought leadership of one group after another.

The valley at times seemed rather hospitable to the endeavors

 

* Jeannette P. Nichols is associate professor of history at the University of Pennsyl-

vania.

1 Frank Thistlethwaite, The Great Experiment: An Introduction to the History of

the American People (New York, 1955), 320.