In 1926 William Hope “Coin” Harvey began constructing a “pyramid” in the Arkansas Ozarks, with the intention of single-handedly preserving a record of the dying American civilization’s proudest creations in a concrete time capsule. Less than fifty years later, the remains of his monument—more of an obelisk than a pyramid—was eroding under the surface of a man-made lake. The remains of Harvey lie in a mausoleum nearby; they, too, would be drowned had they not been moved further up the bank of Beaver Lake by a local contractor at the behest of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The futility of Harvey’s final work echoes the fruitlessness of the project for which he was most known: bimetallism and the return of free silver, a monetary system based on silver as well as gold.
Harvey was many things: a lawyer, a businessman, a mine owner, a real estate developer. But at his core he was a political thinker whose pamphlets reached hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of readers during the late nineteenth-century fight over fiat currency. He was a visionary, a crank, a failure, a polemicist who thought of himself as a prophet. His commitment to a political ideology that a century later has fallen almost entirely out of public consciousness pulled him away from his responsibilities to his family and his business ventures; now he is all but unknown.
Born in Virginia in 1851, Harvey was practicing law in West Virginia by the age of twenty. He moved to Gallipolis, Ohio, a few years later and began a restless and elusive search for a home and purpose. He met his wife Anna there in 1875, and he spent their life together making clear that he did not consider her part of that home or purpose. The family moved to Cleveland, then Chicago, and back to Gallipolis before Harvey moved his wife and children to Colorado, where he would become the superintendent of production at a silver mine. It was the 1880s, and silver’s value was falling. The supply had exploded due to new silver mines in the American West, just as various European states—and the United States itself—had moved away from silver coinage in the previous decade. If this was the genesis of Harvey’s allegiance to free silver, it was a hard lesson indeed. Harvey turned from mining to real estate in the West, buying land, building houses, and promoting festivals with some success and at least one catastrophic failure before moving the family back to Chicago in 1893 with what he claimed “was then a considerable fortune.” It was here that his political career and the project for which he would be known for the rest of his life began in earnest.