Q. David Bowers
"Upon opening the vault containing the silver dollars, which had been stored in 1890, under the joint seal of a representative of the Mint Bureau and the superintendent of the mint, it was found that nearly all the bags, by reason of the dampness of the vault, had so rotted as to be little else than a mass of shreds. It was impracticable to verify the number of dollars by weight, as is usual in the case of new coins, on account of their weight and slimy condition, thus rendering it necessary to count them on a counting machine, a slow and tedious work. The count of these dollars is still in progress, under a representative of the Mint Bureau and representatives of the retiring and present superintendent, and will in all probability be completed by the end of December.
"There is not only a lack of vault room in the Philadelphia Mint, but some of the vaults are so located that they are difficult of access, inconvenient, and ill-adapted for the storage of coin. The fact of their being situated below the level of the street renders them damp, so much so, that if coin be stored in them for any length of time the result will be mildewed and rotten bags, thus entailing much time and expense to count the coin whenever it becomes necessary to do so .... "
Much Said, Little Known
A letter of Mr. George Sealy, published in the Galveston Daily News, October 22, 1894, reflected on the "silver question," the burning political issue of the day;'
"You can stand on the corner of any street on the Strand and ask the first 100 men of all grades of intelligence who pass to explain what 'free silver' means, and 90 will tell you honestly that they know nothing about it. Yet the words 'free silver' sound welL A few of them say they are not opposed to accepting some of it if offered to them for nothing." (Also see below.)
The Year 1894 in History
The Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act went into effect on August 27 and reduced import duties by about 20%, and levied a 2% tax on personal incomes in excess of $4,000 annually, a rarefied level which only a few Americans attained in an era when many factory workers made $10 to $20 a week, many even less. The financial slump of 1893 continued, and unemployment and business failures were rife.
On January 8, a conflagration destroyed many of the abandoned buildings on the Chicago site of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. The so-called "Chinese problem" or "yellow peril" persisted, and on August 17, the U.S. Senate ratified another Chinese Exclusion Treaty. Prejudice was endemic in many American cities, with recent immigrants from various nations being targeted.
The decade of the 1890s saw many strikes by labor unions. During 1895, an estimated 750,000 workers walked off their jobs in a quest for higher wages, shorter hours, or both. Coxey's Army, a rag-tag group of unemployed laborers, traveled from Ohio to Washington, D.C. to present a petition to Congress, but were unsuccessful in doing so. Coxey and his followers received much publicity and earned themselves a place in history books. On June 18, 1894, Congress passed an act establishing the first Monday of every September as Labor Day.
Milton S. Hershey marketed his Hershey Bar, launching a family fortune that would make Hershey, Pennsylvania known as "Chocolate Town, U.S.A.," and, among other things, finance in the twentieth century a medical school for the Pennsylvania State University. Bavarian physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovered the x-ray, leading to a revolution in medical treatment, although at first the power and danger of x-rays were not fully known.
Popular songs and melodies of the day included Humoresque, Sidewalks of New York, and I've Been Working on the Railroad (first called the Levee Song). Englishman Rudyard Kipling, who for the time being was in residence in Brattleboro, Vermont (during a four-year stint), Vermont, saw his Jungle Book published. William Sydney Porter (who later used the nom de plume O. Henry) published The Iconoclast, changing its name to The Rolling Stone with the April 28 issue.
William Hope Harvey's book, Coin's Financial School, achieved sales of 300,000 copies and was one of many trea-tises advocating the free coinage of silver as the savior of the American economic system. In June, the Democratic Silver Convention was held in Omaha, Nebraska, with 1,000 at-tendees, who listened to William Jennings Bryan extol the virtues of unlimited government purchases of silver and the adoption of a 16-to-1 ratio of silver to gold value. Throughout the United States, the "silver question" was the burning political issue of the day, although very few understood its intricacies. Bryan ran for the Senate in November, but lost. He kept busy, however, in his new post as editor of the Omaha World-Herald and as a popular speaker on the Chautauqua circuit.