In the disputed election of 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes was elected president. He was a hard-money man who did not wish to see an inflation of the currency with too much silver being struck. However, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time as his efforts to kill the new coinage of silver dollars in 1878 was a failure. He vetoed the original Bland-Allison bill, but it took Congress only a few hours to override the objections. In an ironic note, the first silver dollar struck went to Hayes and it is presently on display at the Hayes museum in Ohio.
Hayes was also president when the famous Goloid pattern coins were made, especially the Stella or $4 gold piece. One of the compromises made to elect Hayes in the 1876 election had been the granting of more Congressional power to Democrats, especially those from the recently-defeated South. In particular, Alexander H. Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy, was a Georgia Congressman who wielded great influence as a result of this political arrangement.
Through some unknown means, Stephens and a man named Dr. William Wheeler Hubbell became good friends. Ordinarily this would be of no interest to numismatists, but Hubbell had strange ideas about the coinage. He believed that the world’s economic problems derived from the rivalry between gold and silver; if one created an alloy containing both gold and silver, all these problems would be solved. Hubbell’s ideas were ridiculed by Mint officials, but the White House was
