Evening star., 1939-01-22


At long last the silver program seems
about to face radical revision. Western
silver Senators are privately quoted as
being agreeable to the discontinuance of
purchases of foreign silver, provided
that domestic subsidy for silver mining
is continued.
Among silver Senators mentioned as
now favoring change in the Silver
Purchase Act are Senators Pittman,
King, Thomas of Oklahoma and McCar-
ran. The latter has just introduced a
bill calling for cessation of Treasury
purchases of foreign silver and the pur-
chase of domestic newly-mined silver at
81 an ounce. Senator Townsend OF
Delaware has offered Senate joint
resolution to suspend the purchase of
gressional committee investigates the
program, and more recently, has intro
duced a bill to reverse the silver pro-
gram, forbidding the Treasury 70 ac-
quire any more silver and authorizing it
instead to sell hundreds Of millions of
ounces from its present holdings.
Thus there are various signs that
policy which was adopted contrary to
the universal advice of economists and
other disinterested persons, which has
caused bad feeling toward the United
States and ridicule abroad, which has
failed to accomplish any Of It's professed
objectives and which in the failing has
cost the American people over billion
dollars may soon be ended or at least
greatly modified.
Speculation, Initiation and Log Rolling.
How came such a wasteful and pur-
poseless program into being? The an
swer would seem to be that the program
resulted from combination of domestic
and foreign producer and speculator pro-
paganda, imitation sentiment and old
fashioned political log-rolling. If the
silver program now fails of complete
abandonment, any surviving fragment of
it will doubtless be due to only one of
these three. factors: Logrolling.
1t is amazing to 60 over the record of
recent years and read some of the state
ments of advocates of our silver pro-
gram. That they made such statements,
however, is less surprising than that
Congress passed the laws they wanted.
To quote all the silver advocates would
require book Even to list them would
be beyond the scope of this article.
Suffice it here to cite few passages
In 1898, after the silver program had
been subjected to years of biting criti-
cism, President Roosevelt wrote of hav-
ing established "sounder currency by
our new gold and silver legislation of
1884" Whatever It's origins, therefore,
the silver program is in this surprising
statement claimed as New Deal policy.
1888 Proclamation First Step.
While the Silver Purchase Act is the
most Objectionable feature of the pro-
gram because it involves the deliberate
purchase of great quantities of unneeded
foreign silver, and has made possible its
purchase at an artificially high price,
the original Government act in silvers
favor was the Presidents proclamation
of December, 1885, calling for the ac-
QUESTION of all newly mined silver at so
per cent above the then speculatively
high market price of silver.
This proclamation called for a "re-
turn" of 64a cents per ounce. Owing to
circumstances arising out of the admin
istration's subsequent policy Of boosting
the price of foreign silver-and owing
also to the White House efforts of the
Treasury general counsel, the late Her
man Oliphant-the return" or price was
by proclamation later raised to about
77h cents
An additional proclamation was is
sued in August, 1884, nationalizing all
silver then speculatively held here. This
was in accordance with the urgings of
Father Coughlin, Senator Elmer Thomas,
the Committee for the Nation and un-
organized spectators.
Abroad the. American silver program
has always been appreciated for what it
is: A billion-dolla camoufage for a
very much smaller domestic subsidy On
the occasion of the 1884 proclamation
mentioned above, the Times of India
editorially commented: For sheer eco
nomic nonsense the preamble to the
silver declaration is hard to beat" The
staid and ultra conservative London
Economist guardedly observed that:
The Presidents economic advice must
surely have originated in bedlan," and
1t counseled the President on the un-