Commems Collection Classic: What If? 1878 Silver Five-Cent Coin

So in a sense the bill aimed to revive the Half Dime which had been discontinued after 1873.
https://en.numista.com/17938

Very interesting "What If?". A bit of a curious proposal since, as HondoB mentioned, the silver half-dimes had only been discontinued a few years before.

This reflected a battle between rich industrialists in the late 1800's. East Coast industrialist Joseph Wharton lobbied Congress for decades to be able to sell his nickel production out of his mines in New Jersey to the U.S. Mint. He finally succeeded in 1857 with the introduction of the 88% copper/12% nickel small cents into maistream coin production. This came about as silver was scarce and hoarded before and during the Civil War. White copper-nickel coinage was introduced in 1866.

Things began to change in 1859 when Henry Comstock was credited for a broad set of silver and gold discoveries near Virginia City, NV, leading to a series of silver and gold rushes. This eventually led to statehood for Nevada. The Comstock Lode was largest silver discovery in North America. By the 1870s, silver went from scarce to so abundant that it crashed the global price of the metal. Comstock yielded 192 million pure ounces of silver and 8.3 million ounces of gold. This was the source for the hundreds of millions of Trade and Morgan silver dollars produced in the latter part of the 19th century.

The proposal for a 5 cent silver coin pitted Wharton, an Eastern nickel industrialist who also was a founder of Bethlehem Steel and the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania against the Western silver mining interests that were both lobbying the Mint for purchases of their metals.

In the end, silver was so abundant here from the 1870s to the end of the century that silver interests were more keen to have large $ cartwheel and half $ production for their silver than the minor coinage that would require vastly smaller amounts. Wharton eventually lost the economic fight, retaining small 5c coinage production, while the western silver interest won the bulk of the economic fight at the Mint, dominating the lion's share of coinage production.

As an endnote, the Comstock gold strikes, at 8.3 million ounces, were almost as large as the 12 million ounces produced during the earlier California gold rush and much larger than the 1.25 million ounces produces during the Yukon gold rush in Alaska at the end of the 19th century.

Very interesting and thank you for sharing!