Thinking about the huge and growing chasm between Main Street and Wall Street recently led me to think about a similar chasm in our nation’s history — one that generated enormous populist anger at the end of the 19th century. The issue then in a technical sense involved gold and silver, but came down to whether the government should put more money into circulation in a way that would help the indebted farmers (we were still very much an agiculture-based nation in those days) and cash-strapped workers, or whether to pursue tough monetary policies that helped the big money classes even then identified with Wall Street.
It was a rich-few versus the many not-rich issue that in several important technical respects is very different from what’s happening now. Today the government is following a print-it-as-fast-as-possible approach with respect to money that in the late 1800s would have helped bail out the poor and indebted (at least temporarily) while undermining the interests of the credit-giving rich. But because of all manner of changes and quirks in our financial system since then, present-day monetizing has not bailed out the non-rich. Rather, new money has trickled up to the Wall Street rich and the markets they control.
This being so, the great exponent of “free silver” (inflation that bails our the poor), William Jennings Bryan, would not seem to be a particularly relevant spokesman for today’s American Main Street stressed and angry crowd. And his “Cross of Gold” speech, delivered at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1896, would not seem particularly relevant to contemporary listeners.
Just read the very famous last bit of this speech that follows, however, and see how by merely replacing the words “gold standard” in that speech with the words “Wall Street banker standard” [that I’ve added in brackets], makes it seem very relevant indeed. Then, perhaps, contemplate how the populism, the help the non-rich Main Street ethic, that once characterized Democratic Party policies, has been so fulsomely replaced by an undated version of the old help-the-rich Republican Party policies of a century ago.
Railed Bryan on that hot July Democratic Convention day in 1896: “If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard [the Wall Street banker standard] as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard [A Wall Street banker standard] by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold [A cross of Wall Street banker greed].”