The 1896 presidential election famously presented voters with the choice between bimetallist Democratic (and Populist) nominee William Jennings Bryan and Republican nominee William McKinley, defender of the gold standard. Wyatt Wells narrates the course of events that led to this political contest through an examination of the era’s economic, business, electoral, and legislative developments.

Having conducted research in federal government publications and the manuscript collections of leading political and business figures of the period, Wells states in chapter one (the introduction) that “historians have too often downplayed the choice between gold and silver,” which they portray “as symbolic of other concerns” (3). In chapter two, Wells deftly outlines the late nineteenth-century economic background of deflation, industrial concentration, market integration, and financial centralization. He covers the global emergence of the gold standard after 1870 and describes how the era’s economic changes were a trial for many American farmers. Chapter three addresses the rise of the Farmers’ Alliance and the growing influence of Silverites, demonstrated by the First National Silver Convention held in St. Louis in 1889. Wells notes that the inflationary pro-silver movement offered a “less radical response to the concerns that animated the Alliance.” He adds that “for that reason, its appeal was broader” (65). Wells relates how the near failure of Barings Bank of London in 1890, due to its incautious investments in Argentina, caused European investors to decrease their American securities purchases, reducing capital inflows and yielding balance-of-payments deficits over the following years. Silverites managed to pass the Silver Purchase Act of 1890, yet this law failed to raise the price of silver, leaving the pro-silver factions of both the Democratic and Republican Parties dissatisfied.

Chapters four and five cover Democrat Grover Cleveland’s election and second presidential term. In 1892, the Farmers’ Alliance launched the Populist Party and entered electoral politics. The Populists were the only party that espoused silver during that year’s presidential election, which aided their strong showing, especially in the Rocky Mountains. The winner of the election, however, was Cleveland, for whom, Wells states, compromise on the currency issue was a non-starter: “the gold standard was a matter of principle [to Cleveland], and he could not imagine that anyone had a legitimate grievance against it” (102). But then, Cleveland had to contend with the Panic of 1893. He decided to halt federal government silver purchases, which would demonstrate to foreign investors that America was committed to the gold standard. Cleveland successfully pushed for repeal of the Silver Purchase Act in 1893, producing an angry divide between Democrats from the South and West and those from the Northeast. Wells details how events during 1894 only exacerbated internal conflict within the Democratic Party. Cleveland sent the U.S. Army to quell the Pullman Strike in Chicago, inflaming that dispute and alienating his party’s urban reformers. Cleveland also failed to secure tariff reforms that the southern and western wings of the party wanted.

Wells argues that reorganizations of railroads led by investment bankers such as J. Pierpont Morgan and Jacob H. Schiff in the mid-1890s helped stimulate economic recovery. Yet deficits in the balance of payments and federal budget had depleted the nation’s gold reserve. In desperation, the Cleveland administration turned to Morgan for help. The so-called Jupiter of Wall Street formulated a plan in conjunction with the Rothschilds’ American operations that shored up the U.S. Treasury’s gold reserve. This affair outraged Silverites. “The country had seemed on the verge of running out of gold and adopting silver by default,” Wells writes. “At the last moment, an international syndicate of bankers had provided desperately needed gold—and earned a hefty profit in the process” (185). The conflict over silver and gold culminated in the “Battle of the Standards,” the subject of chapter six. “Silver,” Wells states, “offered Democratic politicians an issue with which to revitalize their party” (211). The Democrats’ embrace of silver in the 1896 presidential campaign secured the Populist nomination for Bryan as well. Wells recounts the course of the 1896 contest and McKinley’s ultimate victory. Bryan’s campaign suffered from failing to connect with workers, “assuming an identity of interests without delving deeply into their concerns,” while Republicans had stressed that devaluation meant reduced purchasing power (241).

Chapter seven addresses the McKinley administration. During his initial years in office, McKinley judiciously held off on taking action to reinforce the gold standard. More auspicious political circumstances for legislation emerged following the 1898 election. Rising prosperity and higher gold production had placed advocates of the gold standard in a stronger position. Wells observes that when Congress made the gold standard official in 1900, “the result was anticlimactic” (270).

This book intersects with the large literature on Populism, although Wells engages with only a few frequently cited works. He is closer to Richard Hofstadter’s position on the conspiracy-minded nature of Populism than most recent accounts. Wells contends that historians have overemphasized the urban and labor elements of Populism. He describes the Populists as less sophisticated about financial matters than Lawrence Goodwyn (1976) and Charles Postel (2007) have, singling out the sub-treasury plan as “impractical and potentially dangerous” (273). The larger argument that this book makes about politics during the era, however, is that “books on the Alliance and the Populists fill shelves, but sources on Silverites are thin” (67). Wells offers readers little sense of the people who were pro-silver, but he chronicles the money question’s rise to national prominence in the 1890s. Wells’s point about historians’ neglect of Silverites is a meaningful one that this book helps to rectify.