Coin Harvey
William Hope Harvey (1851-1936) was a writer whose economic theories once enthralled thousands of readers. He also ran for president of the United States in 1932 as a third-party candidate.
The man whose nickname "Coin" came from his theory for the free coinage of silver, was born in the town of Buffalo, in Putnam County in what is now West Virginia.
He studied at Marshall College, practiced law, and interested himself with monetary theories. He was a vigorous advocate of bimetallism when the argument over coinage of silver was at its height, and ran against
FDR as a third party candidate.
His Coin's Financial School, published in 1894, attempted to explain the money question in simple terms. Harvey's sturdy pamphleteering had great influence on the Populist party. His demand for free coinage
of silver was given full expression when William Jennings Bryan ran for President in 1896.
Coin's Financial School
The nature of the American financial structure was the subject of contentious debate throughout the late 19th century. By the 1890s, gold-based and silver-based currency represented distinct political, as well as,
monetary philosophies.
As Houghton Mifflin's Reader's Companion to American History notes, "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restored limited bimetallism, but was repealed owing to the erosion of Treasury funds after the crash of June 1893.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."
William Hope Harvey saw an opportunity in the midst of this unprecedented social strife and published his Coin's Financial School,
which quickly became the quintessential expression of the free-silver philosophy.
"Capitalizing on rural distrust of the urban East and of British monetary power," says the Campion, "Harvey denounced attempts to restrict bimetallism as a conspiracy against farmers and debtors."
Harvey charged that such attempts 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," says Houghton Mifflin. "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."
Coin's Financial School, printed in cheap paper editions, quickly sold a cool million copies. Historians say that without it, William Jennings Bryan could never have struck so receptive a chord in his "Cross
of Gold" speech in 1896.