Silver and Politics in Nevada

Monetary policy and politics have been inextricably intertwined in the United States since the earliest days of the Republic. Indeed, some of the most outstanding events in United States political history have involved maneuvering, dealing, and ultimately legislating on financial questions. By the 1890s, with the government over a hundred years old, the issues far from being settled became perhaps as important as they had ever been in the century-old debates. As the nineteenth century entered its last decade, however, the problems turned not solely on broad economic subjects, but on the metal coinage of the nation and its effect on the financial order. The so-called Populist Revolt of the 1880s and 1890s added fervor and color to the disputes that erupted, and turned the eyes of the country to the western region, where metals and mining had be-come, in some areas, the basis of the economy.

Nevada contained an outstanding example of the fermentthat erupted over the coinage question. There, the decline of the great Comstock lode, in combination with the most difficult features of recurring national and local economic depressions, caused a political outbreak of unusual pro-portions. After failing to bring about a desired inflation of the national currency through remonetization of silver, Nevadans turned to an extravagant-and ultimately unsuc-cessful-action: the politicians put together a new organization and called it the Silver Party of Nevada. This book represents an attempt to reconstruct the political history of the Silver party's decade in power.