The most famous spokesman for looser money and easier credit was Williams Jennings Bryan, the populist congressman from the farm state of Nebraska. He campaigned tirelessly to break the privileged status of gold and to expand the base upon which credit was created by including silver as a reserve metal. At the Democratic convention of 1896 he made one of the great speeches of American history—a wonderfully overripe flight of rhetoric delivered in that deep commanding voice of his—in which, addressing Eastern bankers, he declared, “You came to tell us that the great cities are in favor of the
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