Cartoonist W. A. Rogers uses lumber to represent the national credit, and pictures Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan’s insistence on the unlimited coinage of silver (“free silver”) as a threat to it. The symbolism is similar to Rogers’s cartoon from the 1896 campaign, “Monkeying with a ‘Buzz-Saw.’” Both images are based on the assumption that the gold standard resulted in good national credit, which in turn produced abundant national prosperity.
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1860
