The Story of Silver

by William L. Silber

  Pittman’s support for the administration benefited his own career as well as favoring voters back home. In 1916, while still lacking seniority, he was chosen by the Democratic leadership to fill an opening on the prestigious Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Pittman’s guile had helped his cause. He had confided to Mimosa soon after arriving in the Senate: “I am trying to establish a reputation for modesty that I can overdraw on my next term—I am still playing the game, and deceiving my associates. They commenced to believe that I am satisfied with silence and peace.”10

  The Washington press reported that President Wilson viewed the appointment “with the broadest of favor.”11 And so did Pittman. He told Mimosa, “There were seven applicants for the vacancy so I consider it a great honor for us.”12 It was more than just an honor. Pittman would become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1933 and find a new friend, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the newly elected president.

  Pittman’s path to power began during the Great War when his outspoken support for Woodrow Wilson paid dividends to Nevada mining interests. Isolationists had objected to Wilson’s aggressive stance after the sinking of the Lusitania, the British ocean liner torpedoed by a German submarine with the loss of 128 American lives. But Pittman rallied behind the president: “I would rather that we lost a few hundred men, if necessary, in cooperation with the allies at the present time, than lose millions of men in a war that we alone might have to fight. We have got to fight Germany. We will either fight Germany now or we will fight Germany later on.”13 Pittman underestimated the sacrifice, but his support facilitated America’s entry into the war in April 1917.

  Silver prices had been on a roller coaster since the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, fluctuating with supply and demand just like any other commodity. Prices sagged at the outset because it was not needed by the military, but as the expanding economy created shortages of silver-based small change like dimes and quarters, the white metal increased from 55¢ an ounce in mid-1914 to a dollar at the end of 1918, almost doubling like most raw material prices.14 Pittman contributed to the price rise by introducing legislation in the Senate to accommodate Britain’s need to borrow hundreds of millions of ounces of silver from the U.S. Treasury. After all, it was his patriotic duty to help an American ally.

  FIGURE 6. Key Pittman dressed for work.

  Britain’s unusual request was on behalf of India, a British colony at the time and still on a silver standard like its Asian neighbor, China. India was having difficulty redeeming its currency, the rupee, with the white metal, and the U.K. worried that a suspension of convertibility would lead to unrest or rebellion, impairing the war effort. The British ambassador asked the Treasury Department to melt 350 million silver dollars held in its vaults and lend the bullion to India. The legislation, known as the Pittman Act, authorized the sale at the prevailing price of a dollar per ounce of pure silver, and the Treasury’s Bureau of the Mint delivered as promised.15 The Philadelphia and San Francisco branch mints handled most of the order, shoveling silver dollars into furnaces by the thousands and molding the liquid metal into bullion bars, which were shipped to the Calcutta mint.16

  The Pittman Act pleased almost everyone—Britain, India, and especially America’s miners—because the legislation also required the U.S. Treasury to replenish its inventory of coins by purchasing domestically produced silver at that same one dollar per ounce, irrespective of the free market price. Congressman Edward Platt of New York warned that this repurchase clause was “a plain case of holdup by the silverites.”17 He was right. When the war ended and demand for silver declined, the world market price dropped below a dollar and American silver mines sold to the U.S. Treasury rather than on the open market. U.S. producers, including small mining companies in the West and industrial giants like the American Smelting and Refining Company, reaped a handsome subsidy between mid-1920, when the free market price fell below a dollar, and mid-1923, when the Treasury completed its purchases under the Act.18 The legislation could have been labelled Made in Nevada.

  Two prices for silver prevailed in the United States during this period, a free market price averaging 68.8¢ and the fixed $1 price in the Pittman Act for domestic production.19 Metal dealers like Handy & Harman advertised the subsidy by posting two quotes for silver, one for U.S. production and the other for imports.20 Representative L.T. McFadden of Pennsylvania introduced congressional legislation to repeal the repurchase clause of the Pittman Act to eliminate the boondoggle.21 The New-York Tribune headlined an editorial called “Doing Something for Silver” and recommended that “the ‘joker’ in the Pittman measure should be eliminated at the next session of Congress.”22

  Key Pittman never doubted the wisdom of the act that bore his name: “I am confident the future of silver is safe. The Pittman Act will never be repealed. What little opposition there was … to the purchase of domestic silver at $1 an ounce … was dying out as a result of intelligent opposition on the part of engineers and mining men all over the country.”23 Pittman had the votes of other senators from western mining states to prevent a repeal so the subsidy to American producers remained. He also thought it marked the beginning of a new era for the white metal: “Foreign demand with domestic consumption would be ample … for many years as soon as conditions in Europe return to normal.”24 His forecast of a bright future for silver makes British Prime Minister Lloyd George’s prediction, “Germany is unable to wage war,” look good.25

  The fingerprints of the Pittman Act faded with the expiration of Treasury purchases. The act’s support of India’s silver standard may have helped the British war effort, but it failed to retain India as a permanent customer of American mines. In mid-1926 a royal commission appointed by King George V recommended that India switch the backing of its currency to gold.26 The announcement caused a 10% decline in silver.27 The white metal then averaged 56¢ an ounce until the Great Crash in October 1929, when a new round of selling ultimately cut the price in half.28

  The Pittman Act failed to boost the price of silver permanently but became a model for future manipulations of the white metal. The two-tier pricing strategy subsidized American mines with relatively little spillover elsewhere, making it an attractive political tool. President Roosevelt would adopt that approach during his first year in office, but his efforts forced China, the last major country on the silver standard, to reject the white metal, and Japan would capitalize on China’s misfortune.

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  FDR PROMOTES SILVER

  IN A CAMPAIGN SPEECH ON OCTOBER 20, 1932, IN PITTSBURGH’S triple-tiered Forbes Field, with thousands cheering as though the Pirates had won the National League pennant, Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “If the nation is living within its income, its credit is good. … But if, like a spendthrift, it throws discretion to the winds … and continues to pile up deficits, it is on the road to bankruptcy.”1 Marriner Eccles, a Utah banker who would soon become chairman of the Federal Reserve System, America’s central bank, suggested that the conservative rhetoric in Roosevelt’s speeches read like “a giant misprint” in which FDR delivered Hoover’s lines.2 Eccles had nothing to worry about, of course. What Roosevelt said and what he did often had little in common, especially when it came to America’s money.

  The Democratic Party nominated New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt as their presidential candidate at the convention in Chicago at the end of June 1932, but it was hardly a landslide despite his having the most committed delegates at the outset. It took four ballots to overcome determined opposition, including from the party’s 1928 presidential nominee, former New York Governor Al Smith, who refused to join the bandwagon even after the final vote. When a member of the Democratic National Committee asked Smith to make the nomination unanimous, he folded his arms in front of him like a petulant teenager and said, “I won’t do it. I won’t do it. I won’t do it.”3 Roosevelt was considered weak, a “feather duster,” according to syndicated columnist Heywood Broun.4 Another re
porter wrote, “The Democrats have nominated nobody quite like him since Franklin Pierce.”5

  A young Chicago lawyer at the convention, Leon Despres, recalled decades later, “Nobody could work up much enthusiasm for Roosevelt,” he was a “flip-flopper” on the League of Nations, Prohibition, and “sound money.”6 Sound money was a code word for the prevailing gold standard in the United States, permitting Americans to exchange dollar bills for gold at a fixed price of $20.67 per ounce at the U.S. Treasury. The gold standard insured that America’s paper money retained its value, keeping consumer prices in check by restraining the supply of money and credit. But the Great Depression was more than a speck on the horizon in mid-1932, and America’s problem was too little money and credit, not too much; deflation rather than inflation. Since the Great Crash in 1929, consumer prices had declined by more than 20%, the money supply had declined by almost 30%, and one in four workers was unemployed.7 A shortage of money, the ancient scourge that had made silver the preferred circulating medium for thousands of years, had cursed business activity in the 1930s. No wonder restoring the monetary status of silver dominated remedies to cure the economy.

  Delegates to the Democratic convention had placed the resurrection of silver in the party platform, third in the list of seventeen solemn promises to implement after the election: “We advocate … A sound currency to be preserved at all hazards and an international monetary conference called on the invitation of our government to consider the rehabilitation of silver and related questions.”8 Roosevelt later elaborated on this point in a nationally broadcast radio address, the first of many talks delivered as though he were a guest in American living rooms. “The United States could well afford to take the lead … to determine what can be done to restore the purchasing power of that half of the world’s inhabitants who are on a silver basis. … Nothing could do more to create stable relations in which trade could once more be resumed.”9

  Roosevelt’s reference to “half of the world’s inhabitants” using silver probably was an exaggeration, but it echoed the words of Winston Churchill, who was a member of the British Parliament at the time and had practiced finance as chancellor of the Exchequer, the rough equivalent of America’s secretary of the Treasury. Churchill blamed the worldwide depression on money, anticipating the thesis of American economist Milton Friedman: “I believe something has gone wrong with the monetary system. It no longer affords men and nations an adequate means of exchanging what they are capable of producing.” 10 He continued by focusing on the white metal: “Silver is the money of all Asia. Silver is the money of a billion human beings, and it ought not to be treated with as little regard as if it were a sack of potatoes. … Surely we would do well to consider more carefully the part it has to play in our world housekeeping.” Roosevelt and Churchill would become close allies in battling Hitler, but even in 1932 they shared much, including an aristocratic upbringing, an attachment to the sea (Churchill was first lord of the Admiralty during the Great War and Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the Navy), and an affinity for the white metal.

  Silver had plunged in price to an all-time low of 24.25¢ an ounce in 1932, not quite as cheap as Churchill’s sack of potatoes but an embarrassing value for what had once been a proud monetary metal.11 Rehabilitating silver in the United States would reverse the price decline by adding to the demand for bullion in at least two ways.12 Purchases of the white metal by the Treasury to create silver dollars would increase demand directly and would also add to the circulating currency in America, expanding the economy and increasing demand indirectly. In January 1932 liberal Democratic senator Burton Wheeler of Montana combined those two ideas with a page from American history that made Roosevelt blush at its audacity.

  Wheeler sponsored a bill in the Senate to raise the price of silver to $1.29 per ounce that the press headlined as “Wheeler to Offer a 16–1 Silver Bill,” a reference to the legal price ratio of gold to silver before the Crime of 1873, when sixteen ounces of silver were worth an ounce of gold.13 Wheeler wanted to restore 16 to 1, just like William Jennings Bryan, and recalled having taken Bryan’s side during a high school debate in 1896, saying, “I had been for the remonetization of silver ever since.”14

  Senator Wheeler wanted to create more circulating currency in the United States to counter the deflation and, according to the New York Times, claimed, “Such a law would double the volume of world primary money and within a year the world price of wheat, cotton, and all agricultural products would be more than trebled.”15 Wheeler never substantiated those estimates nor did he highlight the upheaval of moving from the existing price ratio of 85 to 1 to Bryan’s 16 to 1. The prospect of an uncertain increase in currency and uncontrolled inflation scared most members of Congress. The chairman of the House Committee on Coinage, Weights and Measures, Brooklyn congressman Andrew Somers said, “Any man who stood up and said remonetize silver at 16 to 1 was looked upon as being something of an idiot.”16

  FDR did not want to be called an idiot and had no intention of remonetizing silver at 16 to 1 or any other fixed ratio. He had pledged during the campaign to maintain a “sound currency,” a euphemism for the gold standard, and committed only to calling an international conference “to consider the rehabilitation of silver and related questions.” But none of that bothered his fellow Democrat Burton Wheeler. He was already called a crackpot for running in 1924 as the vice-presidential candidate on the Progressive Party ticket headed by Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette. They were endorsed by the Socialist Party of America. Wheeler’s 16 to 1 bill came to a vote in the Senate in January 1933, after FDR was elected but before he took office. The bill was defeated by a vote of 56 to 18, but Wheeler did not give up.17 He would reintroduce his 16 to 1 proposal in the new Senate, a month after Roosevelt took office, and the more favorable reception would force a reluctant FDR to compromise.

  A day after he was inaugurated on Saturday, March 4, 1933, Roosevelt announced a bank holiday throughout the country, which, despite its festive name, imposed drastic restrictions on Americans. The holiday suspended all banking operations in the U.S. for ten days, and banks were ordered specifically not to permit withdrawals or transfers of “any gold or silver coin, or bullion or currency.”18 This was Roosevelt’s opening remedy to cure the bank insolvencies that had swallowed the life savings of millions of Americans since the beginning of the Great Depression. FDR gave his first “fireside chat” on Sunday, March 5, 1933, to explain the extraordinary measures so that everyone understood them, “even the bankers,” quipped humorist Will Rogers.19 The stock markets were closed during the bank holiday, preventing investors from registering their response, but silver bullion continued to trade. The white metal jumped by more than 8% on Monday, March 6, a significant reaction to the president’s initiatives.20 It was just the beginning.

  April is the cruelest month according to the poet T.S. Eliot, but not for the silver bloc in Congress in 1933.21 The economic depression had given FDR a landslide victory in November 1932 and had also swept Republicans from office, creating large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate willing to try the untried to fix the economy. With the prices of wheat, corn, and cotton at depressed levels, inflation was now the solution, not the problem, and Wheeler was no longer on the lunatic fringe. He knew that coining silver at Bryan’s favorite price ratio would be “somewhat inflationary” but said it would be “far better than cutting the gold content of the dollar, or going to paper money, as some were advocating.”22 Wheeler added, “[T]here wasn’t enough gold to form an adequate base for our money.”23

  Wheeler dismissed Roosevelt’s continued opposition to “16 to 1.” He would often battle FDR going forward, derailing the president’s attempt at packing the Supreme Court in 1937 and siding with the isolationist “America First” movement to maintain U.S. neutrality in mid-1941.24 Wheeler’s fight to remonetize silver in 1933 was just the first skirmish in a long war. He attached his proposal as an amendment to Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjus
tment Act hoping the president would swallow “16 to 1” along with the administration’s most important farm support legislation.25 But when the amendment came to a vote on Monday, April 17, Arkansas Democrat Joseph Robinson, the Senate majority leader, announced that “President Roosevelt does not approve of any of the amendments pending.”26 The president’s opposition persuaded at least ten pro-silver senators, including Nevada’s Key Pittman, to abandon Wheeler, sending the amendment to defeat by a vote of 43 against and 33 in favor.27

  It was just a temporary setback for the white metal. Inflationary sentiment dominated in the House of Representatives and now, with 33 favorable Senate votes compared with only 18 supporters four months earlier, in January 1933, the contagion had spread to the upper chamber despite Roosevelt’s arm twisting. On Tuesday, April 18, a day after Wheeler went to defeat, Democratic Senator Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, who had campaigned for William Jennings Bryan in 1896, proposed an alternative inflation plan for the same farm bill. He had been worried all along about the collapse in agricultural prices, saying, “We’ve got a surplus of everything but money.”28 The Thomas Amendment gave the president various options, including the right to reduce the gold content of the dollar and to establish “machinery for the remonetization of silver at any ratio he may determine.”29

  Roosevelt remained opposed despite the flexibility, but Senate leaders warned that the new amendment would pass over his objections. FDR met with Thomas at the White House on the afternoon of April 18 and flattered the Oklahoma senator into withdrawing his amendment temporarily to give the administration a “breathing spell.”30