One of the most hotly contested presidential elections occurred in 1896. That year populist Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, squared off against Republican, William McKinley. Bryan ran what amounted to a one issue campaign. His proposal was that silver should converted in unlimited quantities into coinage, mostly silver dollars, under the assumption that 16 parts of silver were equal in value to 1 part of gold. According to Bryan the benefits would be that farmers and laborers would end up with higher crop prices and wages. All of this was in the wake of a fairly short but quite nasty economic recession that was called the Panic of 1893.
During that time President Grover Cleveland, who was a Democrat, had faced major challenges in combating the recession. The recovery had been slow, which it often is under those conditions, and Cleveland had been forced to make deals with men, like J.P. Morgan, who was the perfect example of a "greedy capitalist" in the minds of many people.
Bryan's 16 to 1 slogan and economic plan came under a lot of criticism from business interests and many of the more educated people. The great fear was it would lead to massive inflation that would devalue the U.S. dollar at a time when America was emerging as a world power. These fears, combined with a substantial Republican war chest, resulted in a flood of political buttons, studs, cards, tokens and pamphlets. Among the largest of these political trinkets were the so-called "Bryan Dollars."
The Bryan Dollars, which might be more accurately called "anti-Bryan Dollars, are classified into two broad classes. The most often seen are the satirical pieces which were of base metal. These pieces often featured grotesque reproduction of the
Morgan dollar design. The joke was a
Morgan dollar really needed to be huge to be equal in value to a gold dollar. The slogans often made fun of Bryan's supporters. There are many varieties of these. The quality of the execution of the images ranges from fairly decent to lumps of lead with something almost unrecognizable on them. Here is one of the better examples with a Bryan caricature on it.
One of the more polite ways of saying the same was expressed on the "Comparative Bryan Dollars." These pieces were made of coin silver. The message was that silver dollar really needed to be this large to be worth a dollar. Most of these pieces were made by the Gorham Silver company. A much smaller number were issued by Tiffany & Co., the famous jewelry store. There were also other firms that made smaller numbers of these pieces.
This Tiffany piece is rather scarce. Most Tiffany pieces have a blank reverse, but this one has a design on the reverse which includes a circled that is the size of a
Morgan silver dollar. The idea was to show how little a silver dollar was really worth in comparison to its stated face value. The rule of thumb in those days was that a silver dollar contained 47 cents worth of silver. Voters were advised "to trust Bryan for the other 53 cents."
Posted 06/14/2016 12:50 pm
