William Hope "Coin" Harvey (August 16, 1851 – February 11, 1936) was an American lawyer, author, politician, and health resort owner best remembered as a prominent public intellectual advancing the idea of monetary bimetallism. His enthusiasm for the use of silver as legal tender was later incorporated into the platforms of both the People's Party and the Democratic Party in the early 1890s. Harvey was also the founder of the short-lived Liberty Party and that party's nominee for President of the United States in 1932.
Biography
Early years
William Hope Harvey was born on August 16, 1851, on a farm near the small town of Buffalo, Virginia (later West Virginia). He was the fifth of six children born to Robert and Anna Harvey. His father, Robert Trigg Harvey, was a Virginian of Scottish and English ancestry, and his mother, who had Virginian ancestors traceable to colonial times, was descended from French ancestors who had long since peopled the territory around nearby Gallipolis, Ohio.
Harvey attended the Buffalo Academy from 1865 to 1867 after receiving his education in the neighborhood public schools. At the end of his time there, still just 16 years old, he taught school for three months before enrolling at Marshall College in Guyandotte, Virginia. He remained there only three months before leaving to briefly teach school again. This ended his formal education, although he continued to study law, ultimately managing to gain admission to the West Virginia state bar.
Legal career
After gaining his license to practice law, Harvey opened up a law practice in Barboursville, West Virginia, which proved to be a relatively successful operation. He had a good court appearance being slender, five foot ten, erect bearing and penetrating blue eyes. He was soon practicing law in Illinois and Ohio.
Early in his career, he took a case that no other attorney would. He defended a white man who married an African American woman, which was against the law in West Virginia. To close his defense Harvey asked, "Can anyone in this courtroom prove that this man has not a drop of colored blood in his veins." The case was dismissed.
Three years after opening his law practice, Harvey moved to Huntington, West Virginia, and became law partners with his brother Thomas. Then in 1873 he moved forty miles to Gallipolis. Here he met Anna Halliday and they were married June 26, 1876. Later that year they moved to Cleveland. While they were living there they had two children.
In 1879 the family moved to Chicago where they had a third child. Finally in 1881 the Harveys returned to Gallipolis, where W.H. worked as an attorney for several wholesale firms in the area. Harvey left the legal profession in 1884, ostensibly for reasons of health, and moved west to Colorado to work as a miner and buy and sell real estate.
Populist political activist
It was during his time in Colorado that Harvey became exposed to the idea that the demonetization of silver through passage of the Coinage Act of 1873 had extremely deleterious economic effects on the American economy, including the multiyear Long Depression of 1873 to 1879, the Depression of 1882 to 1885, recessions in 1887 and 1890, and the Panic of 1893. This entire era was marked by general deflation, tight money supply, mass bankruptcies, and unemployment, which many attributed to a lack of sufficient circulating currency to support the needs of industry and commerce.
Harvey became a leading advocate of a return to the unlimited coinage of silver into money, and in 1894 authored a popular pamphlet to advance this policy, Coin's Financial School, which became an important ideological document of the nascent Populist movement. The massive circulation of this work made Harvey a public figure as one of the leading free silver advocates in America.
Other populist writings followed, including the books A Tale of Two Nations (1894), The Money of the People (1895), The Patriots of America (1895) and a sequel to his popular 1894 work, Coin on Money, Trusts, and Imperialism (1899). Harvey also appeared in public debates, assuming a leading place as public advocate for the idea of a return to bimetallism.
In 1895 Harvey formed his own political organization, an agitational society known as the Patriots of America. The Chicago-based organization was dedicated to advancing the ideas of direct legislation and free coinage of silver through the supplying of inserts and stereographic plates on the topic to newspapers around the country.