Peace Through Money?

The launch of Peace Coin cryptocurrency was not the first time somebody thought to equate peace with money. It might, though, be the last.

While the cost of everything seems to be going up these days and people purportedly are “watching their pennies,” Americans still hate loose change – which is one reason why so many prefer paying by card or crypto to avoid cash altogether.

In the 1950s, though, credit cards remained rare and many sellers refused personal checks. People tended to pay in cash, so lots of coins jingled in pockets and pocketbooks.

To legendary public relations pioneer Wilma Soss (1900-1986), who hosted the weekly nationally syndicated radio show “Pocketbook News,” coins meant something, practically and symbolically, and could mean more. Informed by her PR career, Soss tried to advance the cause of world peace through money.

We do not mean that Soss suggested that governments pay foreign soldiers to desert or defect, as the U.S. did during the Vietnam War with its Chieu Hoi Program, or as Ukraine did at the beginning of the Russian invasion in February of this year. Rather, Soss wanted to put the word “Peace” back on U.S. coins, many of which circulated abroad, hoping that the message would truly help in getting people around the world to realize that Americans cared deeply about peace too—albeit peace through strength. Convinced of the importance of the message, she ran a pro bono PR campaign to promote the idea.

Soss was old enough to remember (and fondly) how the U.S. Mint issued Silver Peace Coins after World War I, minting them from 1921 through 1928, and for a brief time in 1934 and 1935.  The impetus was a genuine one: to commemorate the end of the Great War, the war to end all wars. 

Fervent hopes for a lasting peace were dashed by the Second World War. As the Cold War intensified in the late 1950s, Soss thought it high time for the U.S. Mint to mint peace once again.

Accordingly, in February 1958, Soss urged her radio show listeners to send her postcards if they agreed with her that the word peace should be included on U.S. currency. “Everyone wants American dollars,” she explained, “let’s show everyone Americans want Peace.” The response from her audience, which then numbered in the hundreds of thousands, was large and heartfelt.

Margaret Chase Smith, U.S. Senator from Maine and the descendant of former treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase, took notice. In March, Smith introduced a bill to put peace back on pieces of America’s metallic money.

How did Soss pull off such a coup? She had learned from the best of the best, Harry Reichenbach, one of the fathers of modern PR. She also was a skilled communicator, with a degree from Columbia’s journalism school (Class of ’25) and several years of reporting experience before she entered the PR world. By the 1950s, she had embraced a new career in shareholder activism, in addition to financial journalism. As detailed in a biography I coauthored with Bucknell’s Jan Traflet, Fearless: Wilma Soss and America’s Forgotten Investor Movement (All Seasons Press, 2022), Soss was a passionate advocate for enhanced corporate governance practices, widespread financial literacy, and many other causes, like world peace.

Impressively, Soss managed to get a peace money bill (the Chase bill) introduced into Congress. Unsurprisingly, though, it never passed.

As he left the Oval Office in January 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower explained that the nation’s leaders had fallen under the sway of a military-industrial complex geared for war, not peace. Soss eventually realized that, calling on her listeners in 1968 to pray for “peace on earth” as war raged in southeast Asia despite implementation of the hush-hush Chieu Hoi Program of pacification. 

Although she believed that “world trade is better than world war,” Soss, like many Americans, believed in peace through strength. So she could not countenance disarmament even in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the gold dollar gave way to its flimsy paper simulacrum, the only message of which, she believed, was weakness. Putting peace back on money no longer made sense to her. 

With physical coins already relatively rare and possibly soon extinct, more likely due to the adoption of central bank digital currencies than the rise of cryptocurrencies like Peace Coin, Americans should look for other ways to express their desire for world peace. Mutually beneficial trade, in dollars but also financial investments, goods, and services, remains the best way to conjoin interests in favor of peace.