William Hope Harvey
William Hope Harvey, widely known as "Coin" Harvey, was an influential financial reformer and publicist born in the mid-19th century in Virginia, later part of West Virginia. As the fourth son in a family with Southern loyalties during the Civil War, he experienced early life shaped by regional tensions. Harvey pursued a career in law but became best known for his role in promoting the free silver movement in the United States. His seminal work, "Coin's Financial School," published in 1894, presented a compelling argument for the remonetization of silver, which resonated with many in the economically distressed Midwest during a period of deflation. The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies and became a foundational text for the Populist and free-silver movements.
Despite his initial success, Harvey's fortunes waned after the defeat of the pro-silver candidate William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 election. Following this, he retreated to Arkansas, where he attempted to establish a resort and construct a pyramid intended to preserve his writings. His later years included a brief presidential candidacy and criticism of Roosevelt's silver policies. Harvey's legacy is marked by his powerful public speaking and the ability to articulate the frustrations of those opposing the financial elite of his time, making him a notable figure in the history of American economic thought and political movements.
William Hope Harvey
- William Hope Harvey
- Born: August 16, 1851
- Died: February 11, 1936
Financial reformer and publicist, known as “Coin” Harvey, was born in the Virginia hamlet of Buffalo (later a part of West Virginia), the fifth of six children and the fourth of five sons of Robert Trigg Harvey and Anna Maria DeLimbroux (Hope) Harvey. Robert Harvey was a Virginian of Scotch-English ancestry; Anna Harvey originally came from Kentucky, but had both Virginian and French forebears. During the Civil War, Unionist sympathies in the area quickly led to the formation of the state of West Virginia; the Harveys, who had one son fighting with Robert E. Lee, had southern loyalties and wanted to stay out of the local fray; they moved their family out of the town of Buffalo to a nearby farm, and the youngest children went to a country school.
After the war William Harvey attended the Buffalo Academy for two years, put in a brief stint at the age of sixteen as a schoolteacher, and completed his formal education with three months of secondary instruction at nearby Marshall College. After reading law, he was admitted to the bar in 1870 and set up a practice at Barboursville, West Virginia; a few years later he joined an older brother in his practice in the new railroad town of Huntington Village, West Virginia.
Harvey was a wanderer, however, and by 1875 had begun a series of moves that were to take him through several Midwestern towns and cities and eventually to Colorado’s silver-mining district, where in the early 1880s he managed the Silver Bell mine for three years. His wife, Anna (Halliday) Harvey, whom he had married in Gallipolis, Ohio, in 1876, and his children—Mary Hope, Robert Halliday, Thomas William, and Annette—spent the winters in California while Harvey struggled to produce a profit in the face of steadily falling silver prices. Next he tried real estate development—along with the practice of law—in Pueblo and Denver and in Ogden, Utah, while on the side he promoted an “elixir of life” and built Colorado’s Mineral Palace, an exhibition hall.
In May 1893 the Harveys moved to Chicago, where he established the Coin Publishing Company to promote the remonetization of silver. His activities were subsidized in part through the American Bimetallic League, a silver mine owners’ group, for which he acted as Midwest lobbyist. The financial panic of that year had led Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, which had mandated government purchase of four and a half million ounces of silver each month in order to prevent a run on the Treasury’s gold reserves. Bimetallism had become an emotional political issue in the 1870s. A long-term deflationary trend that had driven prices down for the last thirty years of the nineteenth century was making it difficult for debtors to repay their loans—especially farmers, who flocked to the Populist standard seeking relief from mortgage debt. Silver advocates argued that coining silver would increase the money supply and bring the economy into balance.
In June 1894 Harvey published from the Chicago office of the American Bimetallic League Coin’s Financial School, a 155-page volume that was destined to become the bible of the Populist and free-silver movements. The twenty-five-cent book consisted of a series of fictitious lectures given by Coin, a young financier, at Chicago’s Art Institute in May 1894, and attended by some of the better-known gold standard advocates of the day. Coin demonstrates with brilliance and simplicity that the country’s economic problems could be solved by the free and unlimited coinage of silver at a ratio of sixteen to one with gold. Chicago’s financiers listen humbly, ask questions, and finally nod agreement.
Distributed by the silver lobby, Coin’s Financial School sold at least 650,000 copies and, perhaps, as many as a million; some of its readers thought that Coin’s encounter with Chicago’s best and brightest had been real. A voluminous anti-Coin literature attacking Harvey’s arguments quickly developed; Professor J. Laurence Laughlin of the University of Chicago, who had been bested by the fictitious Coin, and other adversaries debated Harvey publicly, but could not compete with the talented publicist and lobbyist in attracting a following. Harvey followed up his first success with the publication of a novel, A Tale of Two Nations (1894), that elaborated on his conspiracy theory of financial history and blamed Jewish-British banking circles for America’s financial woes.
Harvey dabbled in free-silver politics as well. In 1894 he joined the Illinois Populist party, supporting the anti-Socialist, free-silver, right wing. The next year he promoted the Patriots of America, a semisecret organization whose purported aim was to purify politics. During the campaign of 1896, Harvey, by then a member of the executive board of the National Silver party, campaigned tirelessly for William Jennings Bryan, nominee of the Democratic and Populist parties. With the defeat of Bryan and the demise of the silver question, Harvey’s fortunes declined.
In his anger at the downfall of bimetallism, Harvey resigned as chairman of the ways and means committee of the Democratic National Committee in 1900 and retired to a remote corner of northwestern Arkansas, where he tried to develop a vacation resort, joined the good-roads movement, and founded another little press to continue publishing his polemics. Convinced that civilization as he knew it was doomed, he began construction of a 130-foot pyramid in Monte Ne, Arkansas, to house his writings and other twentieth-century relics; only the “foyer,” an amphitheater of irregular seats, was completed, but it attracted thousands of tourists yearly to hear lectures and buy his books.
In 1932 Harvey received 800 votes as the Liberty party candidate for president without campaigning; four years later he criticized President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s silver purchase policy as too cautious. After his death from peritonitis at the age of eighty-four, he was buried at the base of his pyramid. He was survived by his second wife, May Ellston Leake Harvey, having divorced his first wife in 1929.
As a publicist and lobbyist Harvey was a genius. His economic notions may have been na]ve, but he provided a discontented public with a pseudoscientific explanation for its financial woes that proved powerful enough to bolster a political revolt. His was the voice of a discontented Midwest rising up against the Eastern establishment.
Harvey’s best known books are Coin’s Financial School (1894) and A Tale of Two Nations (1894); among his other writings are Coin’s Financial School up to Date (1895); the Patriots of America (1895); and Coin on Money, Trusts, and Imperialism (1899). The literature created by the reaction to Coin’s Financial School can be sampled in J. L. Laughlin, Facts About Money (1895); H. White, Coin’s Financial Fool (1895); and W. Fisher, “ ‘Coin’ and His Critics,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, January 1896. Harvey left no papers. Biographical accounts can be found in J. P. Nichols, “Bryan’s Benefactor: Coin Harvey and His World,” Ohio Historical Quarterly, October 1958; R. Hofstadter, “Free Silver and the Mind of ‘Coin’ Harvey,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1952); and L. Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (1976). See also the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 2 (1958). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, February 12, 1936.