Silver Dollar Blog - Analyzing the Pittman Act of 1918

On March 14th, 1900 the gold standard act was passed. The act stated that gold would be the only standard for redeeming paper money. This act also confirmed the nation's commitment to the gold standard by assigning gold a specific dollar value. Now gold would be the single monetary standard unit of value and would consist of 25.8 grains of gold nine-tenths fine.

Skip forward to 1904 when silver reserves were extremely low as was the demand for the Silver Dollar. By 1904 when the last amount of silver bullion purchased under the Sherman Act was depleted the coinage of the silver dollar ended. But the history of the Morgan Silver Dollar didn't just end right there... No it was brought back to life for just one more year in 1921. The Pittman act of 1918 directed that not more than 350,000,000 standard silver dollars would be converted into bullion and sold or used for subsidiary silver coinage. Wow! Think of all those silver dollars that would have been melted down....  A total of 270,232,722 silver dollars were melted and 259,121,554 of those melted dollars was sold to the United Kingdom at $1 per troy ounce. Why did we sell that much silver bullion to the United Kingdom? Because India didn't believe their banknotes issued by the British government would be redeemable during the world war which caused a run on the British supply of metal. The Pittman act which was introduced by Key Pittman of Nevada introduced the bill mainly as a relief effort for the British government.

Another aspect to the Pittman Act was the authorization of coinage replacement for every silver dollar melted. Thus why the  1921 Morgan Silver Dollar was minted for one final year ! One small problem all the coinage dies had been destroyed in 1910 so Morgan created an new master die for the dollar.  The 1921 peace dollar was also minted on the same year to commemorate the resulting peace after the world war.