Financial History Issue 132 (Winter 2020) | Page 30

THE Pan, THE Sluice Box AND American Monetary History By Daniel C. Munson Those students of financial history with a fondness for the precision of the gold standard of money, where currency is exchangeable for a governmentally-man- dated amount of gold, tend to gloss over its shortcomings. While a gold standard system has some features that can appeal to us today—fixed exchange rates, zero inflation, no cryptic, market-gyrating pro- nouncements by central bankers—it is not without its limitations. The 19th and early-20th centuries saw the popularity of the gold standard reach high tide, when it was used in west- ern Europe, the British Commonwealth and the United States—Britain’s opinion- ated and independent son. This was also perhaps the most economically vibrant and technologically innovative period in human history, so the reliance on gold exposed its central shortcoming: namely, the inability of gold stores to expand as rapidly as the economy itself. This inability of gold stores to track economic growth and prevent occasional bouts of deflation laid the groundwork for gold’s eventual loss of governmentally sanctioned monetary status. In the United States, it didn’t happen suddenly; it was more a matter of decades of trial and error driven by political expedience. William Jennings Bryan and “Skookum” Jim Mason: Two men, unknown to one another, whose fortunes collided in the summer of 1896. The founders and framers of the US government rebelled against the British crown and its parliamentary system, but in monetary matters they followed Brit- ain’s lead. Gold coins were minted, and the US dollar was exchangeable for gold at roughly $20/troy ounce. The federal government’s first 50 years were filled with controversies, but few involved this dollar-gold connection. Reliance on gold got its first big shake-up when gold was found in large amounts in the streams flowing west out of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California in 1848, gold that then coursed through the nation’s banking system. Capital projects—many of them railroad projects—arose to meet this new supply of money. The economy soared. A big economic slump resulted in 1857 when some of those loans went bad just as gold mining output began to decline and as gold drained from US to European banks to pay for imported goods. Monetary affairs then experienced a still bigger jolt with the coming of the Civil War and the printing of unsecured “greenback” paper currency necessary to finance the war. The nation’s citizens, especially the farmers, noticed an odd— and for the farmers, fortuitous—fact: Crop prices consistently rose during the conflict, fueled by the gradual decline in value of the greenback as the war dragged 28    FINANCIAL HISTORY  |  Winter 2020  | www.MoAF.org on. Illinois farmer John Griffiths watched his son go off to fight and began working the farm by himself. “It has been a good time for making money in the North since the war began,” he later wrote. “Every- thing was so high,” he recalled, referring to crop prices denominated in greenbacks. Farmers did not forget this little bout of prosperity. The nation returned to the gold standard in the early 1870s, and as it did farm profits declined. The agricul- tural interest could have chalked up those Civil War-era profits to fewer farm work- ers and, therefore, lower supply or to a war-induced bump in demand, but many chose to attribute them to the use of the greenback. The Greenback Party coalesced in the 1870s around the idea of returning to an unsecured paper currency. Most voters still regarded paper money with suspicion, however, and the party never achieved any nation-wide success. The Greenback Party disappeared in the late-1880s, but their monetary motives survived. The Populist Party of 1892 advo- cated minting silver-based dollars—some- thing they called “bimetallism”—with the same goal in mind: increase prices through expansion of the money supply. Their platform was explicit: silver-based money should be minted and valued at 1/16th that of gold, and the aggregate money supply should be increased to the point where it