CRIME OF 1873

CRIME OF 1873 refers to the omission of the standard silver dollar from the coinage law of 12 February 1873. The sixty-seven sections of the law constituted a virtual codification of the then extant laws relating to the mints and coinage. Section seventeen of the act provided that "no coins, either gold, silver or minor coinage shall hereafter be issued from the mint other than of the denominations, standards, and weights herein set forth." Section fifteen listed the denominations of silver coins the mint would issue, but did not list the standard silver dollar. The omission of the silver dollar from this list became, for more than two decades after 1876, the Crime of 1873.

The movement for the free coinage of silver began about 1876, when decreased use of silver as a monetary metal and increased production caused the price of silver to decline. The leaders of the movement defended the bimetallic standard and charged that the demonetization of silver was the result of a conspiracy entered into by British and American financial interests to secure in a surreptitious manner the adoption of the gold standard in the United States. The "silverites" clung tenaciously to the plot theory in spite of the fact that the act of 1873 was simply a legal recognition of the existing fact that the silver dollar had not been in circulation for decades. In addition, the act had been considered in five sessions of Congress and discussed frequently by Treasury officials. Nevertheless, for two decades millions of people thought that a crime had been committed and voted their convictions at every opportunity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nugent, Walter T. Money and American Society, 1865–1880. New York: Free Press, 1968.

Riter, Gretchen. Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Weinstein, Allen. Prelude to Populism: Origins of the Silver Issue, 1867–1878. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970.

George L.Anderson/c. p.