I'm John Bachelore at Troy Senec, a man of iron, the turbulent life and

an improbable presidency of Grover, Cleveland 22nd and now 24th President of the United States.

It's the spring of 1893.

There's a panic, what we call a recession,

onto a depression.

What drives it, Troy, where does it begin?

At the risk of oversimplified, because it's a complicated issue,

but complicated in a way that will bore your audience to tears

to in depth about it. This goes back to the same conversation that we were having about

bimetalism. There's an injection of silver into the economy and really what you see in the panic of

1893, which is referred to in its day, by the way, as the Great Depression.

This is the biggest depression the country has seen up to that point is an instability and

an instability that plagues the country for years and a lot of it has to do with the

fact that the country being on the gold standard is obliged to keep a certain amount of gold in the bank at all times.

But as you mentioned earlier, part of the problem here is that you've got gold and silver

in the market at the same time and they're not worth the same amount. So anybody in this

set of circumstances is going to be hoarding the gold, which is more the more valuable

of the two metals. And that's what happens. You see gold being pulled from the market at the same time that the federal government is trying to hold on to gold in order to convince the world, and especially the financial class in the country, we're staying on the gold standard.

The reason that this uncertainty lingers for so long,

Cleveland is engaged in a lot of triage throughout his administration, which eventually astonishes the bleeding, but we never get to full recovery until

the McKinley administration afterwards, is because this tension runs through the middle of the

Democratic parties. The financial markets can never calm down because they

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