decline in a currency’s value, and it started to become popular in the 1930s.
There was no such word in the 1890s, during the first severe depression.
However, that decade saw a resurgence of Silverite narratives. Their opponents
in the 1890s thought that bimetallism was a dishonest attempt to avoid national
shame for default.
In April 1895, the Atlanta Constitution reported on the idea of returning to
bimetallism at 16 to 1, an idea that had started going viral:
Representative Hepburn is in town, having spent a month or so traveling in
Iowa since the adjournment of congress. He says that he has visited every
county in his district, and various other sections of the state, and has found
that everybody is crazy on the silver question. It is the only topic they will
talk about. Whenever two men get together, whether it is at the postoffice or
at the street corner, in the railway station, or the corner grocery, or while
riding on the cars, they discuss nothing else, and the sentiment is almost
unanimous in both parties that the United States government should
immediately declare in favor of the free and unlimited coinage of silver
regardless of the policy of the European nations.6
Belief in bimetallism took on strong geographic and social-class dimensions.
Eastern intellectuals favored the gold standard, while westerners, who were more
likely to be farmers, favored bimetallism. Supporters of the gold standard tended
to appreciate symphony performances, while Silverites liked to watch boxing
matches. By some accounts, Silverites tended to be hypermasculine and
warmongering. In 1897 the New York Times asked, “Is there something in the
silver creed that brings out the natural savagery of its sectaries and makes them
delight in the barbarous principles and rough ways of early man?”7
The debate began to take on strong emotional significance. One observer
begged the easterners not to ridicule the Silverites out west:
Some of the Eastern people either misunderstand the character and force of
the silver sentiment in the West, or purposely deceive themselves about it.
Such epithets as “Western lunatics,” “Knaves of the prairies,” “lazy shifters,”
“mining camp robbers,” “deadbeats,” “repudiationists,” and “anarchists,”
have no other effect than to cause irritation and anger.8
This same observer was amazed by the strong differences in ideas, given that

most of the westerners had migrated there from the East. He went on to describe
the emotionally charged constellation of ideas that the western Silverites seemed
to share, particularly their resentment of the monetary experts who believed that
any change in the US monetary standard would require delicate international
negotiation. Ultimately, he underestimated the power of geographically local
idea epidemics.
The contagion of the bimetallism concept was not confined to the United
States. The International Bimetallism Conference in London in 1894 noted that a
long slow deflation caused by the gold standard had produced depression in
agriculture across much of the world.9 The conference report said that the United
States suffered more than other countries, and no other major country saw such a
swelling of popular support for bimetallism.
The condescending attitude of eastern intellectuals in the United States was
surely noted, and resented, at the height of the bimetallist controversy. We can
see how other narratives played on this resentment. Coin’s Financial School, by
lawyer William Hope Harvey, was published in 1894, in the middle of the 1890s
depression. It presented an argument in favor of bimetallism. One wonders how
a book on such an arcane and technical issue could have become a best seller in
the United States. It is widely reputed to have sold a million copies when the US
population was only a little over 20% of today’s population. But the book is
presented in an engaging way, in the form of a fictional dialogue with numerous
pictures. The story follows a young man (perhaps in his early teens, based on the
pictures) named Coin, a “little financier” lecturing in favor of bimetallism to an
audience of argumentative men, including newspaper reporters. They report
Coin’s first lecture in newspapers, and his insolence angers establishment men,
professors, and bankers, who show up for his second lecture in numbers. A
“Professor Laughlin, head of the school of political economy in the Chicago
University,” a real person with fictional lines in the book, tries to embarrass
young Coin by questioning him about the facts of the gold standard, but young
Coin proves that he knows the facts even better than Professor Laughlin does.10
In Harvey’s book, we see one of the key elements in the contagion of the
bimetallism narrative: a good story about an intelligent young man who gets the
better of snooty intellectuals and professionals.