William Hope "Coin" Harvey 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.
Harvey in the June 1895 edition of The Bookman (New York City)
The Coin Harvey House in Huntington, West Virginia is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Free silver was a major economic policy issue in the United States in the late 19th century. Its advocates were in favor of an expansionary monetary policy featuring the unlimited coinage of silver into money on-demand, as opposed to strict adherence to the more carefully fixed money supply implicit in the gold standard. Free silver became increasingly associated with populism, unions, and the perceived struggle of ordinary Americans against the bankers, monopolists, and robber barons of the Gilded Age. Hence, it became known as the "People's Money".
Republican campaign poster of 1896 attacking free silver
"The free silver highwayman at it again" in 1896
Cartoon from Puck showing a silverite farmer and a Democratic donkey whose wagon has been destroyed by the locomotive of sound money
1896 editorial cartoon equating the free silver movement with Frankenstein's monster.