# Gold Standard Act of 1900 The **Gold Standard Act of 1900** (also called the **Currency Act of 1900**) was signed by President [[William McKinley]] on **March 14, 1900**. The act formally pegged the U.S. dollar to gold at **$20.67 per troy ounce**, ended the post-Civil-War bimetallism debate that had dominated American politics from approximately 1873 through the 1896 election, and codified the McKinley-Hanna 1896 realigning election outcome into operative monetary law. The act's substantive provisions: - Established gold as the **sole monetary standard** for all U.S. currency - Pegged the dollar at **25.8 grains of gold, .900 fine** (equivalent to $20.67 per troy ounce of gold) - Authorized the Treasury to maintain gold reserves backing paper currency - Provided for redemption of paper notes and silver certificates in gold on demand - Continued silver coinage but only as subsidiary currency, not as a monetary standard The act effectively ended the **free silver** political movement that [[William Jennings Bryan]] had ridden to the 1896 Democratic presidential nomination. Bryan continued to campaign for bimetallism in the [[1900 Presidential Election]] but the issue had been substantially resolved against him; gold-standard supporters had won the political-economic argument by 1900, and the post-1900 silver-vs-gold debate became increasingly marginal. ## Right-wing relevance The Gold Standard Act is significant to right-wing political-economic analysis principally as the **1896-realignment codification**. The act is the operational legislative embodiment of the McKinley-Hanna industrial-Republican coalition's monetary-policy preference, and it remained operative as American monetary law until **FDR's 1933 abandonment of the domestic gold standard** and the 1934 Gold Reserve Act revaluation. Contemporary Austrian-school and gold-standard-advocacy political-economy traces its preferred monetary regime back to the 1900-1933 American gold-standard period — though the international gold standard would not be fully abandoned until [[Richard Nixon]]'s August 1971 closing of the gold window. The 1900 Act also represents the **legislative apex of late-19th-century classical economics** in American politics — the consolidation of the gold-standard, free-trade-leaning (with high tariffs as a notable American exception), limited-federal-government economic-policy framework that the [[Progressive Era]] and the [[New Deal]] would substantially displace. ## Connections - [[William McKinley]] — Signed the act. - [[William Jennings Bryan]] — Free-silver advocate whose 1896 and 1900 campaigns this act substantially defeated. - [[Gold Standard]] — The broader monetary regime. ## See also - [[1896 Presidential Election]] — The realigning election the act codified. - [[Cross of Gold Speech]] — Bryan's 1896 framing. --- *Filled in 2026-05-16 as part of the post-midterm-elections stub-candidate sweep.*