“We are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned. We have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded. We have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came.
We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!” William Jennings Bryan (1896). Some things never change – or will they?
In 1896, William Jennings Bryan believed it was unnecessary for the government to maintain gold reserves equal in value to all the paper currency in circulation. During his presidential campaign, Bryan advocated the coinage of silver at a fixed ratio with gold (16 ounces of silver coin for every ounce of gold reserve), which he hoped would break the Eastern banks’ monopoly on gold-based currency, and simultaneously inflate the meager prices that farmers received for their crops, easing their debt burden.
The thirty-six-year-old former Congressman from Nebraska aspired to be the Democratic nominee for president, and he had been skillfully building support for himself among the delegates. Bimetallism and “Free Silver” were demanded by William Jennings Bryan.
“We say in our platform that we believe that the right to coin money and issue money is a function of government. We believe it. We believe it is a part of sovereignty and can no more with safety be delegated to private individuals than can the power to make penal statutes or levy laws for taxation,” spoke Bryan. [. . .]
“Those who are opposed to this proposition tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank and that the government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with [Thomas] Jefferson rather than with them, and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of the government and that the banks should go out of the governing business.” [Well, that didn’t happen did it?!]
The full text of William Jenning Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech can be found here.
Like the inflated mortgages that were sold to the unsuspecting homeowners and investors worldwide at the turn of the 21st Century, the fiat money scheme is just as unstable and there is a huge movement a foot to rethink what is real value.
Are your pension funds gone and you just don’t know it yet? Where should your hard earn investment funds really be? Do those mutual funds, 401ks, stocks and bonds really have any value – or are they manufactured and destroyed like the paper dollar at the whim of the Federal Reserve and other banking interests? Will the next bank collapse eliminate your pension, savings and entire net worth as it did in Cyprus? Do you have any control over your financial future?
SoundMoneyCampaign.com is a dedicated advocate of honest money, this means money that is determined by the free markets, not governments, and not central banks.
The United States Dollar is the world reserve currency, medium of exchange, and for all intents and purposes, the world’s money. However it is not sound money, it is manipulated, devalued, and ultimately is nothing more than a piece of paper that represents debt. The U.S. Dollar originally became the world reserve currency because of its tie to gold, however in 1971 under President Nixon, the dollar’s last tie to gold was severed. Since then we have seen a loss of purchasing power due to inflation.
In 1971 it took 36 cents for a gallon of regular gasoline, 53 cents for a dozen eggs, and $1.18 for a gallon of milk. It is important to understand that the dollar has no inherent value, it is just a medium of exchange in order to get the goods and services you want, so in order for this much destruction to happen to a medium of exchange, you have to realize that it is not the goods and services that are rising, but the value of the dollar that is falling.
World citizens have been conditioned to believe that money comes from the government or central banks. Our goal with SoundMoneyCampaign.com is to help educate as many people as possible about what money actually is, its purpose, and why we need to end the central banking scheme that has enslaved humanity. Click here to learn more about SoundMoneyCampaign.com.
HISTORY
In 1787 the United States Constitution established gold and silver as the legal tender of the United States at a floating exchange rate.
Then in 1792, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton proposed price fixing the silver to gold exchange rate at 15:1, as well as establishing the mint for the public services of free coinage and currency regulation “in order not to abridge the quantity of circulating medium.” With its acceptance, Sec.11 of the Coinage Act of 1792 established: “That the proportional value of gold to silver in all coins which shall by law be current as money within the United States, shall be as fifteen to one, according to quantity in weight, of pure gold or pure silver;” the proportion had slipped by 1834 to sixteen to one. Bimetallism was effectively abandoned by the Coinage Act of 1873, but not formally outlawed as legal currency until the early 20th century.
The merits of the system were the subject of debate in the late 19th century. If the market forces of supply and demand for either metal caused its bullion value to exceed its nominal currency value, it tends to disappear from circulation by hoarding or melting down.
Political debate
In the United States, bimetallism became a center of political conflict toward the end of the 19th century. During the Civil War, to finance the war the U.S. switched from bimetallism to a fiat money currency.
After the war, in 1873, the government passed the Fourth Coinage Act and soon resumption of specie payments began without the free and unlimited coinage of silver. This put the U.S. on a mono-metallic gold standard. This angered the proponents of monetary silver, known as the silverites. They referred to this act as “The Crime of ’73,” as it was judged to have inhibited inflation. The Panic of 1893 was a severe nationwide depression that brought the money issue to the fore. The “silverites” argued that using silver would inflate the money supply and mean more cash for everyone, which they equated with prosperity. The gold advocates said silver would permanently depress the economy, but that sound money produced by a gold standard would restore prosperity.
The Republican Party nominated William McKinley on a platform supporting the gold standard which was favored by financial interests on the East Coast. McKinley won the election as the McKinley campaign was effective at persuading voters that poor economic progress and unemployment would be exacerbated by adoption of the Bryan platform. The direct link to gold was abandoned in 1934 in FDR’s New Deal program and later the link was broken by Nixon when he closed the gold window.
Economic analysis
In 1992, economist Milton Friedman concluded that abandonment of the bimetallic standard in 1873 led to greater price instability than would have occurred otherwise, and thus resulted in long-term harm to the US economy. His retrospective analysis led him to write that the act of 1873 “… was a mistake that had highly adverse consequences.” Source: Wikipedia
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Until that point, those who defended silver were ineffective against their pro-gold counterparts. Although silver-supporting delegates controlled the outcome of the platform, they needed someone to explain to them and to their gold opponents why silver should be adopted as part of the Party’s platform. Although Bryan did not say anything new from his previous political speeches, he was able to articulate the feelings of Americans from the South and West who believed that the gold standard had harmed their financial interests and cultural values. Bryan and others thought that under a bimetallic system, the economic ills that afflicted farmers, miners, and industrial workers could be alleviated.