The Wall Street Journal recently reported, “Trump’s crypto campaign echoes some other presidential candidates who have dedicated themselves to specific fiscal policies. Much of William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 campaign was a protest of the gold standard. After taking office, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an order restricting the private use of gold. Ron Paul’s 2008 campaign assailed the Federal Reserve.”
With apologies to Lloyd Benson, “I know Ron Paul, and Donald Trump, you are no Ron Paul.” Dr. Paul is famous for his grilling of Federal Reserve Chairman while in office. As a student of Austrian economics and friend of Murray Rothbard, he has always understood that the central bank creates inflation, not the opposite as they claim. Paul has said “we are in the process of a failing dollar.... So, yes, I want to restore integrity to the money, not be a counterfeiter. My proposal is not to close the Federal Reserve down and go back to the 19th century, it’s just to legalize that which the founders consider(ed) very important.” Thus he supported Americans being allowed to buy gold again in 1974 after FDR made it illegal to own the yellow metal in 1933.
Roosevelt’s executive order required Americans to turn in their gold coins and gold bullion, while foreigners continued to redeem gold in exchange for paper dollars until August 15, 1971, when President Nixon closed the gold window. From the end of World War II to 1971, US gold reserves were cut in half. With Executive Order 11825, President Gerald Ford repealed the executive order that Roosevelt used to call in gold in 1933.
William Jennings Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech is considered by some the most famous political speech in US history. Trump’s oratory skill comes nowhere close to Bryan’s. There was no central bank in 1896 and Bryan was advocating for a bimetal standard to include silver along with gold. It was that era’s plea for looser money to benefit indebted farmers and western silver mining interests. The speech was a response to The Crime of 1873—legislation passed on February 12, 1873—establishing gold as sole legal tender for all obligations.
As William Silber wrote in The Story of Silver: How the White Metal Shaped America and the Modern World, “The new law omitted the free and unlimited coinage of silver dollars at the mint, an option since 1792, and restricted the legal status of subsidiary silver coins, like dimes, quarters, and half-dollars, to five dollars or less.”
Silber quotes George M. Weston, secretary of the US Monetary Commission of 1876 who wrote, “It is impossible to doubt that the laws of the country have been tampered with. Who the perpetrators of this crime were is not likely ever to be satisfactorily known.”
Nobody cared about silver dollars at the time. In fact, very few people had seen a silver dollar, it was an “unknown coin.” Silber wrote, “For more than a generation silversmiths had turned the white metal into forks and knives rather than letting it circulate as currency. The value of the shiny cutlery at the dinner table was worth more than the mint price of $1.29 (per ounce).”
Bryan not only stumped for bimetallism, at a time when an ounce of silver was trading at 1/32nd of an ounce of gold, but pushed for free and unlimited coinage of silver at the pre-1873 ratio of 16 to 1. While some wondered why the Nebraskan cared about silver, Bryan’s farmer constituents knew more currency would mean higher prices for wheat, corn, and livestock, “not to mention higher prices for their heavily mortgaged farmlands, which were threatened with foreclosure.”
In The Progressive Era and in his US Economic History class, Rothbard referred to Bryan as an “inflationist” and “socialist.” But, compared with today’s central bankers practicing fiat monetary palooza and populist presidential candidates, William Jennings Bryan looks like a hard-money man. By the way, after peaking at 125 to 1 during COVID in 2020, the current gold to silver ratio is 82.557.
All modern politicians are Bryanites at heart. It’s doubtful either candidate would want to “crucify mankind upon a cross of [crypto].” Or anything that would limit the government’s money creation.
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