Overview
A Tale of Two Nations is an 1894 novel by American free silver activist William Hope "Coin" Harvey. It is a roman à clef of Silverite conspiracy theories surrounding the Coinage Act of 1873 and the gold standard. The novel's hero is an idealized William Jennings Bryan. Harvey wrote the novel at about the same time as he wrote the pamphlet Coin's Financial School. A Tale of Two Nations was Harvey's second-most successful work, after Coin's Financial School, and he had it reprinted many times, with its second edition selling at least 100,000 copies, and it probably sold several hundred thousand copies overall. Harvey's writings were an instrumental part of the bimetallist movement which propelled Bryan to become the Democratic Party's nominee in the 1896 presidential election. A Tale of Two Nations is intensely Anglophobic and there is debate over the extent to which it is antisemitic.