In the summer of 1893 financial panic struck Colorado. The price of silver, in a protracted downward spiral since the conclusion of the Civil War, finally crashed. With economic and political turmoil come angry responses, as people search for scape-goats to explain their new and unexpected poverty. And in Gilded Age Colorado, one of those angry responses was the rise of antisemitism in politics. Ideological antisemitism was overt at a key moment of economic and political dislocation and a powerful tool of exclusion and control among some prominent Populists, Democrats, and other allies of the silver cause in Colorado at that time. Specifically, antisemitism was an important theme in the political discourse of those groups during the 1898 gubernatorial campaign of Jewish industrialist Simon Guggenheim.