{"id":33140,"date":"2017-07-31T01:00:22","date_gmt":"2017-07-31T05:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33140"},"modified":"2017-07-21T08:56:12","modified_gmt":"2017-07-21T12:56:12","slug":"qotd-naming-mount-mckinley-as-an-amusing-up-yours-gesture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/07\/31\/qotd-naming-mount-mckinley-as-an-amusing-up-yours-gesture\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Naming Mount McKinley as an amusing “up yours” gesture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just one thing makes me regret the change. \u201cMount McKinley\u201d was originally named as a amusing \u201cup yours\u201d gesture with which I have enormous sympathy.<\/p>\n

The story told by the prospector who pinned the moniker on the mountain is that he had crossed paths in the wilds of Alaska with two advocates of \u201cfree silver.\u201d This was a political craze that, like the Dreyfus Affair or the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, took over an entire civilization for a while, but now defies easy explanation. The \u201csilverites\u201d were Western populists and farmers who wanted silver to be accepted as currency and minted into coin \u201cfreely\u201d by the government, as gold then was \u2014 but at a face price far above silver\u2019s market value. This would have expanded the money supply explosively, letting the chronically indebted off the hook.<\/p>\n

Most economists now regard the silverites as having had a ridiculous answer to real problems with a gold standard. But the important point is that the prospector, Frank Dickey, ran into classic monetary cranks of a type that still exists. And he had done so in a unique situation which permitted no immediate escape. One shudders upon envisioning such a hell.<\/p>\n

Dickey got so tired of his companions\u2019 laborious tirades \u2014 one imagines them arguing with him long, long after he had stopped arguing back \u2014 that when they ran across an impressive mountain, he immediately decided to name it after the new presidential nominee McKinley, Great Satan of the silverites. As the Secretary of the Interior\u2019s Order No. 3337 points out, William McKinley never visited or had any other connection with the mountain, or with Alaska. He was, for Dickey\u2019s purposes, a punchline.<\/p>\n

Colby Cosh, “Mount McKinley was a most amusing ‘up yours’ aimed at monetary cranks”, National Post<\/em><\/a>, 2015-09-01.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just one thing makes me regret the change. \u201cMount McKinley\u201d was originally named as a amusing \u201cup yours\u201d gesture with which I have enormous sympathy. The story told by the prospector who pinned the moniker on the mountain is that he had crossed paths in the wilds of Alaska with two advocates of \u201cfree silver.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,7,57,41,13],"tags":[125,563],"class_list":["post-33140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-history","category-humour","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-alaska","tag-money"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Cw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33140"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33141,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33140\/revisions\/33141"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}