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.
