Prelude to Populism: Origins of the Silver Issue, 1867-78 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS183 of rhetoric. If it contains little that is new, perhaps it could be said to benefit from the fact that its field of vision is more narrow than that of other New South studies. Leonard P. Curry University of Louisville Prelude to Populism: Origins of the Silver Issue, 1867-78. By Allen Weinstein. (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1970. Pp. 433, $10.00.) This volume is the third in a series of brilliant restudies of the post Civil War monetary problems in the United States. The three authors have worked independently, and on occasion Professor Weinstein has found reason to dissent from the earlier findings, but together they give us a much altered conception of this critical era and its money problems. This work of Professor Allen Weinstein is notable for the thoroughness of the research and the detail of the presentation. The bibliography and the documentation show that the standard resources of Washington were reinforced with materials from regional and state levels. These local and background studies have produced some rather surprising results . Some fourteen critical congressional votes are tabulated, showing both region and party in the aye-nay vote registered. A mere first inspection of the inconsistencies and reversal shows that the traditional historical interpretations are inadequate, and that any new statement must take account of extreme complexity. The author has struggled, not always successfully, to reduce all this to order. Two pieces of fiction, which have cluttered historical narrative, are given what we may hope is final treatment. The "Crime of 73" is examined as a myth, and even the original mythmakers are idientified. The silver mining "bonanza kings" are named, their activities studied, and their larger interests examined; the drive for remonitization of silver did not originate with them but with urban theorists in the field of money—who are also identified. The Congressional debate on silver began with discussion of the provisions of the Resumption Act of 1875, relative to the replacement of fractional currency with newly minted silver coins. The argument was whether the silver should be used to reduce or to supplement the greenbacks. This is the general nature of the debate, as Professor Weinstein relates it, up to and through the Compromise of 1878. Silver could not then and cannot now be thought of as an issue in itself , but only in relation to the bitterly debated issue of resumption or inflation. The extreme inflationists would move totally to a paper money, with the amount increased by the payment of the national debt in paper; the opposite extreme would retire all paper, and return to a Jackson's ideal of specie only. Between the two, there was almost an infinite number of proposals, including the many in which silver was involved. Some inflationists favored, and some opposed bimetalism; Greenback- 184CIVIL WAR HISTORY ers tended to oppose silver or support it most mildly. Resumption had come to be a kind of Repulican orthodoxy, and Republicans debated which money policy would best advance the cause of resumption. There is no doubt that the Senate contrived compromise represented Republican orthodoxy, or that the almost solid support (with Hayes dissenting ) was a vote for immediate resumption of specie payments rather than for inflation. There were present some interest conflicts. Weinstein has tested the traditional ones usually mentioned; they include the urban-rural, eastwest , banker-farmer, industrial-commercial, and even the north-south. It would not be correct to say that they have no meaning, but the lines of division are blurred and exceptions exist in almost every case. The scattering of the tabulated votes in Congress confirms the author's study of the regions and their local spokesmen. The money issue, he insists, is not one of economic interest or class, but of ethics, the effort to establish honesty in fiscal policy and politics. Only in this most indirect argument can the title of the book find justification . Certainly the Populists were heirs to the Greenbackers, who hardly showed in this crisis, rather than the heirs of bimetalists who sought specie payments. If the Prelude is the development of ethical and moral judgments, and their use in political argument, then the Prelude is the...