The problem was that the financial crisis in 1873 still resonated, creating a capital shortage. Hayes and his Treasury secretary, John Sherman, a much more significant figure, chose to stabilize the currency but in a different way than Jackson had done. Jackson used silver as well as gold to back the dollar. Silver was more plentiful, both in citizens’ hands and in the ground. Backing the currency with silver would have stabilized it without making it inflexible. Hayes’s problem was a currency that had lost all confidence at a time when investment in industrialization was essential. Investors
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