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rupee circulation and for an adequate reserve behind the paper currency" (Leavens 1939, p. 145). The amount needed was greater than could be supplied out of current production. To accommodate Great Britain, the United States agreed to provide silver out of its ample monetary reserves. To authorize this sale and to accommodate the domestic silver bloc, the Pittman Act was passed in 1918. The act was named for Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, who was perhaps the most persistent advocate of "doing something for silver" from his first term as senator, beginning in 1913, to his death in 1940. To satisfy the silver bloc, the silver from the monetary reserves was to be replaced with purchases from domestic production, at a guaranteed price of $1.00 an ounce, when excess production became available.

The wartime inflation plus high wartime demand for silver, for both monetary and nonmonetary purposes, had raised the market price from 70 cents an ounce in 1914 to 97 cents in 1918 and to more than a dollar in 1919. "In 1920, the price dropped below a dollar an ounce. The Director of the Mint immediately began the purchase of silver bullion at the stipulated price of a dollar per fine ounce" (Leavens 1939, p. 147). All in all, the mint purchased some 200 million ounces of silver over the next three years at a price to American producers of $1.00 an ounce, while the market price was falling to less than 70 cents—a subsidy to the producers totaling roughly $16 million.

The pressure to "do something" for silver continued after the completion of the Pittman Act purchases, but it did not become vigorous again until 1930, when the Great Depression produced a sharp decline in the price of silver—from 58 cents an ounce in 1928 to 38 cents in 1930 and 25 cents in late 1932 and early 1933.

The silver bloc promptly revived all the earlier favorite remedies: calling an international conference, buying and stockpiling silver at a price above the market price, enacting the free and unlimited coinage of silver at 16 to 1. None came to fruition during the Hoover administration, but they promptly reemerged with the election of FDR.*

The explanation for the continued pressure is straightforward. As T. J. Kreps noted in a 1934 article: "Since silver is produced in the seven western states—Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Montana, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico—the silver senators control one-seventh of the votes in the Senate. This, under its rule of cloture, gives them a considerable strategic importance. Consequently more than twenty bills on silver were recently pending in Congress. Tho the silver states have an aggregate population less than that of New Jersey, and tho the silver industry in 1929 employed less than 3,000 persons, the political leadership of the United States may soon find it expedient, in order to secure adequate political support for measures of far greater national importance, to 'do something for silver'" (p. 246).

New Deal Action for Silver

The Democratic platform on which Roosevelt was elected in 1932 pledged a "sound currency to be preserved at all hazards," but it went on to add "and an international monetary conference called on the invitation of our Government to consider the rehabilitation of silver and related questions." The Republican platform also favored an international conference but, in a separate plank, pledged to "continue to uphold the gold standard"—shades of difference that had persisted since the direct confrontation on the silver issue in 1896. In a campaign speech at Butte, Montana, the heart of silver country, Roosevelt declared that "silver must be restored as monetary metal, and the Democratic pledge on the subject must be kept" and that "he would call immediately after his inauguration an international monetary conference to consider the rehabilitation of silver" (New York Times, Sept. 20, 1932, p. 1).

The Democratic landslide in 1932 greatly strengthened the political power of the silver bloc, especially in the Senate. Before the election, the fourteen senators from the seven states producing the bulk