Happy Birthday, Edward Atkinson.
Inspired by the ideas of Adam Smith, Richard Cobden, and John Bright , Atkinson became a leading publicist for free trade. In many ways, he can be described as the American counterpart to Bastiat . He spoke out against the inflationist ideas of William Jennings Bryan and others but, unlike some, favored the total denationalization, or privatization, of money.
Always a man of action, he campaigned for Grover Cleveland and participated in the formation of the Clevelandite National (gold) Democratic Party third party in 1896. Atkinson was appalled by the colonialist and imperialist policies of the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations in the wake of the Spanish-American War. He reacted by becoming a full-time activist in the American Anti-Imperialist League.