conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled The Paranoid Style in American Politics about [the, American, York with the genre: Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: &#8220;[the author's] account stands as the most balanced and authoritative analysis we have of a formidable and apparently permanent force in American politics.&#8221; &#8212;The New York Times Book Review &#8220;the author's essays...are calm, clear, dispassionate and devastating-a joy to read.&#8221; &#8212; Harper's &#8220;the author's status theory helps us understand a political history that goes far beyond the issues of the fifties and sixties which it was invoked to explain.&#8221; &#8212; New Republic
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: &#8220;[the author's] account stands as the most balanced and authoritative analysis we have of a formidable and apparently permanent force in American politics.&#8221; &#8212;The New York Times Book Review &#8220;the author's essays...are calm, clear, dispassionate and devastating-a joy to read.&#8221; &#8212; Harper's &#8220;the author's status theory helps us understand a political history that goes far beyond the issues of the fifties and sixties which it was invoked to explain.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first two paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Paranoid Style in American Politics
  WHO today can understand without a strenuous effort of imagination the passions once aroused by the cry for free silver? Despite the pointless and long-sustained policy of silver purchases into which the federal government was forced by silver interests in 1934, the once heated issue of the bimetallic standard has been rendered obsolete by modern devices of monetary management. Yet a whole generation of Americans was embroiled from the 1870's to the 1890's in the argument over silver. To the combatants of that era, silver and gold were not merely precious metals but precious symbols, the very substance of creeds and faiths which continued long afterward to have meaning for men living on the echoes of nineteenth-century orthodoxies. In 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt took the United States "off gold," Lewis W. Douglas said, at the end of a long and anxious night: "This is the end of Western civilization." From another point of view, Senator Ashurst of Arizona, pressed by Secretary Morgenthau about his obsession with silver, replied: "My boy, I was brought up from my mother's knee on silver and I can't discuss that with you any more than you can discuss your religion with me."1
  The free-silver campaign of 1896 was one of the stormy, disruptive campaigns of our history, the first since Jackson's day when a presidential election hung on a financial issue. Sentiment for free coinage of silver was not strong enough to elect Bryan, but it was strong enough to wrest control of the Democratic party away from President Cleveland, to split the Republicans into two irreconcilable factions, and to transform the new Populist party into a single-issue satellite of Bryan and the Democrats. It was menacing enough to unite all the forces of goldbug respectability behind McKinley, and to spur an election effort without precedent in our history. In defeating silver the goldbugs were not merely defeating a reform, they were stemming a crusade.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The true center of this criminal conspiracy is, of course, London. Almost every step in Coin's argument is interlarded with a renewal of the old hostility to England, and there are times when one feels that one is back in the atmosphere of 1812. Even the foundations of our monetary system, it is argued, dated from "our revolutionary forefathers, who had a hatred of England, and an intimate knowledge of her designs on this country." Harvey had an important tactical reason for wanting to exploit this feeling. The advocates of unilateral free coinage of silver by the United States were carrying on an argument not only with gold-standard advocates but with the international bimetallists, who believed that the use of both metals in monetary standards was desirable but insisted that the United States could not uphold silver unaided without disaster. The argument of the international bimetallists was in fact one of the most formidable arguments of the opponents of unilateral free silver, and a certain frustration in dealing with it no doubt had something to do with the violent rhetoric in which Harvey put his case.
  WHILE HARVEY'S was unquestionably the most popular statement of the case for silver, it was far from the best. Indeed it was so much inferior to the speeches of such congressional advocates as Bryan and Teller and to the writings of such American bimetallists as President E. Benjamin Andrews of Brown, President Francis A. Walker of M.I.T., and the silver diplomat and propagandist S. Dana Horton that one is tempted to propound a Gresham's law of popular monetary discussion, by which the weak arguments drive the strong out of circulation. Harvey's case is not developed systematically or logically, and his sense for what is important among the issues is almost touchingly unsure. His greatest failing was his staggering gift for irrelevancy—his readiness to inject into the argument assertions that were either unnecessary to his case or incapable of substantiation. He attached, for example, the highest importance to his assertion that all the gold in the world could be incorporated into a cube of 22 feet; he portrayed Coin's goldbug auditors as being thrown almost into paroxysms by this revelation, although no one was disposed to deny that gold was a scarce commodity. He tempted the ridicule of economists by insisting that it cost $2.00 an ounce to produce silver, when silver had not brought a price of more than about $1.36 an ounce within the memory of living man—thus implying that the metal had been produced for more than a generation out of philanthropy. He made errors of fact, he distorted statutes and quotations, he invented his own confusing terminology ("redemption money"), he forced side issues or non-issues into the center of attention, he made up a monetary history that was largely fictional, and, all in all, he made himself vastly more vulnerable to his critics than his case required.2
  Harvey's implication that the United States had a smooth-working bimetallic system before the Crime of '73 and that the old American silver dollar had wide circulation in this country was also misleading. In law, as we have seen, bimetallism did exist. In fact, the standard had alternated from silver to gold because Congress failed to set a mint ratio in accord with the world market. This very alternation of standards later persuaded dogmatic gold men to insist—all too glibly—that bimetallism had been proved to be an impossibility. They failed to take into account the fact that it would not have been impossible to arrive at a mint ratio more in harmony with France's if the will to do it had been present in Congress at any time between the days of Hamilton and the Civil War. It is tempting to speculate how much strength international bimetallism might have acquired if Congress had decided soon after 1792 to rectify Hamilton's miscalculation and establish a common ratio with France.
  As for the old American silver dollar, Harvey seemed unaware that it had disappeared rapidly from circulation not long after Congress provided for its coinage. This came about because the standard American silver dollar, though lighter in weight than the Spanish silver dollar, was newer, brighter, and less abraded, and thus became more acceptable in certain kinds of foreign trade. Dealers found it profitable to export it in exchange for the Spanish dollars, which were legal tender in the United States, and which became our primary medium of silver circulation. As a consequence of the drainage of the American silver dollar, President Jefferson ordered its coinage discontinued in 1806, and this suspension remained in force for thirty years.
  However, when a delusion like that of the Crime of '73 gets to be so widely believed, it is perhaps quite as important to understand how it came about as to repeat elaborate proofs of its falsity. No doubt economic suffering and social resentments had a great deal to do with the formation and spread of the myth. But there was a soupçon of truth out of which the notion of the Crime of '73 grew: it lies in the fact that even the better-informed men in Congress could hardly have had a very keen sense in 1873 of the full implications of what they were doing when they passed the Coinage Act.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Almost every step in Coin's argument is interlarded with a renewal of the old hostility to England, and there are times when one feels that one is back in the atmosphere of 1812. Even the foundations of our monetary system, it is argued, dated from "our revolutionary forefathers, who had a hatred of England, and an intimate knowledge of her designs on this country." Harvey had an important tactical reason for wanting to exploit this feeling. The advocates of unilateral free coinage of silver by the United States were carrying on an argument not only with gold-standard advocates but with the international bimetallists, who believed that the use of both metals in monetary standards was desirable but insisted that the United States could not uphold silver unaided without disaster. The argument of the international bimetallists was in fact one of the most formidable arguments of the opponents of unilateral free silver, and a certain frustration in dealing with it no doubt had something to do with the violent rhetoric in which Harvey put his case.
  WHILE HARVEY'S was unquestionably the most popular statement of the case for silver, it was far from the best. Indeed it was so much inferior to the speeches of such congressional advocates as Bryan and Teller and to the writings of such American bimetallists as President E. Benjamin Andrews of Brown, President Francis A. Walker of M.I.T., and the silver diplomat and propagandist S. Dana Horton that one is tempted to propound a Gresham's law of popular monetary discussion, by which the weak arguments drive the strong out of circulation. Harvey's case is not developed systematically or logically, and his sense for what is important among the issues is almost touchingly unsure. His greatest failing was his staggering gift for irrelevancy—his readiness to inject into the argument assertions that were either unnecessary to his case or incapable of substantiation. He attached, for example, the highest importance to his assertion that all the gold in the world could be incorporated into a cube of 22 feet; he portrayed Coin's goldbug auditors as being thrown almost into paroxysms by this revelation, although no one was disposed to deny that gold was a scarce commodity. He tempted the ridicule of economists by insisting that it cost $2.00 an ounce to produce silver, when silver had not brought a price of more than about $1.36 an ounce within the memory of living man—thus implying that the metal had been produced for more than a generation out of philanthropy. He made errors of fact, he distorted statutes and quotations, he invented his own confusing terminology ("redemption money"), he forced side issues or non-issues into the center of attention, he made up a monetary history that was largely fictional, and, all in all, he made himself vastly more vulnerable to his critics than his case required.2
  Harvey's implication that the United States had a smooth-working bimetallic system before the Crime of '73 and that the old American silver dollar had wide circulation in this country was also misleading. In law, as we have seen, bimetallism did exist. In fact, the standard had alternated from silver to gold because Congress failed to set a mint ratio in accord with the world market. This very alternation of standards later persuaded dogmatic gold men to insist—all too glibly—that bimetallism had been proved to be an impossibility. They failed to take into account the fact that it would not have been impossible to arrive at a mint ratio more in harmony with France's if the will to do it had been present in Congress at any time between the days of Hamilton and the Civil War. It is tempting to speculate how much strength international bimetallism might have acquired if Congress had decided soon after 1792 to rectify Hamilton's miscalculation and establish a common ratio with France.
  As for the old American silver dollar, Harvey seemed unaware that it had disappeared rapidly from circulation not long after Congress provided for its coinage. This came about because the standard American silver dollar, though lighter in weight than the Spanish silver dollar, was newer, brighter, and less abraded, and thus became more acceptable in certain kinds of foreign trade. Dealers found it profitable to export it in exchange for the Spanish dollars, which were legal tender in the United States, and which became our primary medium of silver circulation. As a consequence of the drainage of the American silver dollar, President Jefferson ordered its coinage discontinued in 1806, and this suspension remained in force for thirty years.
  However, when a delusion like that of the Crime of '73 gets to be so widely believed, it is perhaps quite as important to understand how it came about as to repeat elaborate proofs of its falsity. No doubt economic suffering and social resentments had a great deal to do with the formation and spread of the myth. But there was a soupçon of truth out of which the notion of the Crime of '73 grew: it lies in the fact that even the better-informed men in Congress could hardly have had a very keen sense in 1873 of the full implications of what they were doing when they passed the Coinage Act.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last three paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Paul M. O'Leary has revived the idea of the Crime of '73 in a much modified form. He points out that Henry R. Linderman, a special assistant to John Jay Knox, the Comptroller of the Currency and an active figure in the drafting and redrafting of the Coinage Act of 1873, had become aware by November 1872, three months before the passage of the act, that forces at work in the world were about to cause a depreciation in the value of silver. Linderman, who was a strong gold-standard man, did not bring the relevant facts and their implications to the attention of the congressmen who were about to act on the measure, though he did mention them in a report to the Secretary of the Treasury. At least one person, then—and perhaps two if the Secretary of the Treasury was fully cognizant of the implications of Linderman's report—was aware of the impending decline in the value of silver and possibly aware of the future significance of stopping coinage of the old silver dollar.
  Such proposals were so commonly regarded by contemporary conservatives as a form of lunatic radicalism that it is worthwhile to notice the element of latent conservatism in this overwhelming emphasis on the monetary factor in depressions. Harvey and his fellow silverites were not trying to develop a fundamental critique of industrial capitalism; they were merely trying to make it work, and they believed that the device that would do so was essentially a simple one. This premise went unnoticed by their conservative critics, but not by the left wing of the Populist party, whose spokesmen objected to free silver on the ground, among others, that it would not go very far to alleviate the basic ills of American society.
  It is perhaps important to point out that in 1933, when the gold content of the dollar was cut to 59 per cent of its previous parity, in the hope of bringing about a proportionate rise in prices, the expedient did not work.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It is perhaps important to point out that in 1933, when the gold content of the dollar was cut to 59 per cent of its previous parity, in the hope of bringing about a proportionate rise in prices, the expedient did not work.. This premise went unnoticed by their conservative critics, but not by the left wing of the Populist party, whose spokesmen objected to free silver on the ground, among others, that it would not go very far to alleviate the basic ills of American society. Harvey and his fellow silverites were not trying to develop a fundamental critique of industrial capitalism; they were merely trying to make it work, and they believed that the device that would do so was essentially a simple one.
  Such proposals were so commonly regarded by contemporary conservatives as a form of lunatic radicalism that it is worthwhile to notice the element of latent conservatism in this overwhelming emphasis on the monetary factor in depressions. At least one person, then—and perhaps two if the Secretary of the Treasury was fully cognizant of the implications of Linderman's report—was aware of the impending decline in the value of silver and possibly aware of the future significance of stopping coinage of the old silver dollar. Linderman, who was a strong gold-standard man, did not bring the relevant facts and their implications to the attention of the congressmen who were about to act on the measure, though he did mention them in a report to the Secretary of the Treasury. Linderman, a special assistant to John Jay Knox, the Comptroller of the Currency and an active figure in the drafting and redrafting of the Coinage Act of 1873, had become aware by November 1872, three months before the passage of the act, that forces at work in the world were about to cause a depreciation in the value of silver. He points out that Henry R. O'Leary has revived the idea of the Crime of '73 in a much modified form.Paul M