, the bearcat of the Nebraska ranches, had roared with his ears
back, and the land was in a tumult. "Coin's Financial School" had
already taught the people that the "gold-bugs" owned the country and
that the people could save themselves from eternal serfdom only by
changing the color of their money. Bryan told the westerners that the
East was the "enemy's country" and that the gold standard was a game by
which the East was robbing the West, and the only way the people of
the West could save themselves was to move East and clip bonds or else
change the color of the money!

This is the way it looked to me as a working man, and I hope my good
friend Bryan will pardon me for writing of his "great paramount issue"
in a joking way. For after all it was a joke, a harmless joke--because
we didn't adopt it. I got excited by the threatened "remedy" and went
into politics. While the tin trade was on strike, crazy propagandists
from everywhere poured into Elwood and began teaching the men
bi-metalism, communism, bolshevism and anarchy. A communist propagandist
is like a disease germ; he doesn't belong in healthy bodies. If he gets
in he can't increase and is soon thrown out again. But let a strike
weaken the body of workers, and the germs swarm in and start their
scarlet fever.

As soon as the strike was won, I threw myself into the task of
combatting the rising tide of class hatred led by Bryan, representing
agrarians in a fight against bankers and industrialists. I was chairman
of the mill workers' Sound Money Club. Bryan was running for president
on a platform declaring that the laboring man should "not be crucified
upon a cross of gold." No laboring man wanted to be. I was on the same
side of the fence with Bryan when it came to the crucifixion question,
but on the opposite side of the fence regarding the gold question. Of
course I knew little about finance, and could not answer the Nebraskan.
But had he advocated the free and unlimited coinage of pig-iron I could
have talked him into a gasping hysteria. For, we mill fellows figured
that this was exactly what Bryan's money theory amounted to. His farmer
friends had borrowed gold money from the bankers, spent it in drought
years plowing land that produced nothing, and then found themselves
unable to pay it back. They wanted to call silver and paper cash and pay
the debt with this new kind of money. He wanted a money system by which
a farmer could borrow money to put in his crop