Excellent essay! William F. Buckley once said that the average voter in Massachusetts would rather be ruled by the first hundred names in the Boston phone book than by the first hundred names in the Harvard faculty directory. And yet that's an oversimplification. Massachusetts voters kept returning the blue-blooded Kennedys to office. Politics is often unpredictable.
"The free-silver proposals of William Jennings Bryan would have wrecked the economy." I'm curious about this statement. First, let me confess that I know little about economic theory and practice. I've had one course in economics and that was in high school in the late 50s (!). I'm now reading Brands' excellent biography of Andrew Jackson. He mentions that lack of liquidity was a problem on the frontier in early America. I also remember something that a friend (retired economic officer in the State Dept.) once told me. Referring to the fact that during the Civil War, probably half the paper currency in circulation was counterfeit, he said that it might actually have been good because it increased liquidity.
Bryan's proposal was, in effect, to take the US off the de facto gold standard and to dramatically expand the money supply. This would have created enormous inflation (which was the point of the plan: to let debtors repay with cheaper dollars) and deranged all manner of financial obligations and expectations. At this time the US still depended on foreign investment, which would have shunned America for being an unreliable business partner. With the economy coming out of a recent depression and still tenuous, the effects would indeed have been dire.
Excellent essay. Thanks for helping to ground us all with important reminders that we all ought to remain students who need the lessons inherent in the lives of others. THANK YOU! Bill Rusen
Excellent essay! William F. Buckley once said that the average voter in Massachusetts would rather be ruled by the first hundred names in the Boston phone book than by the first hundred names in the Harvard faculty directory. And yet that's an oversimplification. Massachusetts voters kept returning the blue-blooded Kennedys to office. Politics is often unpredictable.
"The free-silver proposals of William Jennings Bryan would have wrecked the economy." I'm curious about this statement. First, let me confess that I know little about economic theory and practice. I've had one course in economics and that was in high school in the late 50s (!). I'm now reading Brands' excellent biography of Andrew Jackson. He mentions that lack of liquidity was a problem on the frontier in early America. I also remember something that a friend (retired economic officer in the State Dept.) once told me. Referring to the fact that during the Civil War, probably half the paper currency in circulation was counterfeit, he said that it might actually have been good because it increased liquidity.
Bryan's proposal was, in effect, to take the US off the de facto gold standard and to dramatically expand the money supply. This would have created enormous inflation (which was the point of the plan: to let debtors repay with cheaper dollars) and deranged all manner of financial obligations and expectations. At this time the US still depended on foreign investment, which would have shunned America for being an unreliable business partner. With the economy coming out of a recent depression and still tenuous, the effects would indeed have been dire.
Excellent essay. Thanks for helping to ground us all with important reminders that we all ought to remain students who need the lessons inherent in the lives of others. THANK YOU! Bill Rusen