Liars by Glenn Beck Read Free Book Online

the first progressive movement in America. Through twenty-first-century lenses, nothing seems very radical about the demands of the People’s Party. They called for massive public-works projects to reduce unemployment. They demanded federal relief for poverty-stricken farmers, particularly cotton farmers in the South and wheat farmers in the West. They wanted strict limits on and disclosure requirements of political campaign contributions, the registration of lobbyists, and the recording and publication of congressional committee proceedings. They urged states to adopt measures for “direct democracy,” including recall elections, referendums where citizens could decide on a law by popular vote, and initiatives where citizens could even propose a law by petition and popular vote. They wanted social initiatives, such as a national health service including all existing government medical agencies, social insurance, limited injunctions in strikes, a minimum-wage law for women, an eight-hour workday, a federal securities commission, an inheritance tax, and a constitutional amendment to allow a federal income tax.
    Eventually, the political initiatives of the People’s Party also includedwomen’s suffrage, direct election of senators, primary elections for state and federal nominations, the recall of judges, and new rights for labor unions. As I said, not very radical. But most of all, the People’s Party wanted silver.
    The gold standard—the idea that American paper currency was backed by actual stockpiles of gold—had been in place since what some called the Crime of ’73, the 1873 Fourth Coinage Act that demonetized silver. People’s Party adherents saw gold as the money of “exploitation” and “oppression” by the Eastern financial establishment. The “free coinage of silver” would inflate the currency, decreasing its value and aiding those who had fallen destitute and in debt in the Panic of 1893. Wealth would be more equitably distributed from the wealthy Eastern elites to the struggling lower classes—not to mention to the special interests such as the silver-mine owners who stood to profit handsomely.
    In Chicago’s marbled Palmer House hotel, the silver lobbyists had plotted for days in advance of 1896’s Democratic National Convention. They had found a sympathetic ear in Bryan, who promised tovoice their concerns when he addressed the delegates. The silver-mine owners of Nevada and California were particularly keen to have the federal government suddenly purchasing vast reserves of silver, which would increase the price of the metal and boost their already hefty fortunes. As the “boy orator from the Platte,” referring to his home state of Nebraska, he had been ostentatious in refusing any money from the big trusts and lobbyists. His honesty became legendary. He fashioned himself a man of the people.
    Yet Bryan and his key supporters in the Democratic Party were intimately connected with their own big-business trusts, which represented the real one percent of America at the time. Prominent among them were Senator James Jones of Arkansas, the head of the Democratic National Committee, and Richard Croker, the boss of New York City’s Tammany Hall Democratic machine. Croker hadbecome ensnared in a major corruption probe, which revealed how he and his wife had profited to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars for protecting a monopoly onthe ice trade, a booming business on the eastern seaboard. There was also John D. Clarke, a lawyer and lobbyist for the silver-mining interests, who were making millions from their mines in Nevada and California and stood to make millions more if only the U.S. government allowed its currency to be backed by silver as well as gold.
    Not all of these interests shared the progressives’ entire worldview, but they were all certainly ready to back “free silver.” They understood that