Digging into today’s #stampoftheday – a 4-cent stamp, issued on Jun 8, 1959, that commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Comstock Lode in Nevada – I unearthed a story that starts with mining, continues to bitter fights over national economic policy, and ends with an infamous trial in which a leading political figure took issue with scientific knowledge.
Start with the mining. The Comstock Lode was a major deposit of silver ore located under the eastern slope of Mount Davidson, a peak in the Virginia Range in Virginia City, Nevada (then western Utah Territory). It was named after Henry Comstock, an illiterate miner who had been hired to look after the cabin of two veterans of the California Gold Rush who died before silver was discovered on the land, which he claimed as his after they died.
After the discovery was made public in 1859, it sparked a silver rush of prospectors to the area, scrambling to stake their claims. The discovery caused considerable excitement and led to the largest influx of miners since the California Gold Rush in 1849. Mining camps soon thrived in the vicinity, which became bustling commercial centers, including Virginia City and Gold Hill. Over the next two decades, nearly seven million tons of silver was mined. The silver (and gold) the Comstock Lode were crucial to the Union’s financial wellbeing during the Civil War. In fact, Abraham Lincoln allowed Nevada to become a state, despite the fact that it did not have enough people to meet statehood requirements, to ensure the North had access to these riches.
The Comstock Lode and several subsequent discoveries generated immense fortunes that helped spur the growth of Nevada and San Francisco. The mining boom also spurred major advances in mining technology that it spurred, such as square set timbering and a process for extracting silver from ore. Nevertheless, the state’s silver mines declined after 1874, although underground mining in the state continued sporadically into the 1920s.
Despite the decline, silver became the heart of bitter and seminal disputes over American monetary policy. The gold standard, which the United States had effectively been on since 1873, limited the money supply but eased trade with other nations, such as the United Kingdom, whose currency was also based on gold. Many Americans, however, believed that bimetallism (making both gold and silver legal tender) would expand the money supply, make it easier to get credit, and foster economic growth. The financial Panic of 1893 intensified the debates, and when Democratic President Grover Cleveland continued to support the gold standard against the will of much of his party, activists became determined to take over the Democratic Party organization and nominate a silver-supporting candidate in 1896.
The issue came to a head at the Democratic convention in 1896, when William Jennings Bryan, who had been a U.S. Representative from Nebraska, gave one of the most famous speeches in American history. He concluded: “If they say bimetallism is good but we cannot have it till some nation helps us, we reply that, instead of having a gold standard because England has, we shall restore bimetallism, and then let England have bimetallism because the United States [has it]. If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold 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 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.”
Bryan’s address helped catapult him to the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination as well as the nomination of the nascent left-leaning Populist Party. Bryan lost to Ohio Governor William McKinley, who was strongly backed by leading business interests. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, which started in 1898, he became a fierce opponent of American imperialism. He was the Democratic nominee for president in 1900 and again in 1908 but lost both races. As US Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, he helped win Congressional approval of several progressive. However, he and Wilson clashed over U.S. neutrality in World War I and Bryan resigned in 1915 after Wilson sent Germany a note of protest in response to the sinking of Lusitania by a German U-boat.
After leaving office, Bryan retained some of his influence within the Democratic Party, but he increasingly devoted himself to religious matters and anti-evolution activism. He opposed Darwinism on religious and humanitarian grounds, most famously in the famed Scopes Monkey Trial, when he was brought in to argue for the prosecution against Clarence Darrow, who argued for the defense. Bryan’s summation (distributed to reporters but not read in court) is striking in light of the current battles over whether and when to listen to scientists.
“Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endanger its cargo. In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen on a single plane, the earth’s surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times as bloody as it was before; but science does not teach brotherly love. Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future. If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene. His teachings, and His teachings alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world.”
Bryan, by the way, won the case but saw the verdict tossed out on a technicality. And, for the most part, he arguably lost the battle for public opinion (though there still are creationists who are aligned with his views.)
Amazing isn’t it, what you can unearth when you dig deep and mine seemingly innocuous stamps for insights?
Stay safe, be well, fight for justice and work for peace.