WACHT AND HIS FIVE MINUTES WORK TOKEN

One of the various "less well traveled" numismatic paths that I have taken a great liking to of late have been scrip issued and used by the various branches of Giovanni DeBernardi's Labor Exchange. The Labor Exchange movement was a progressive collective movement in the 1890s that spread throughout primarily agricultural and rural areas of the United States and used the concept of bartering goods for labor, a direct response to the bimetallism question and the Panic of 1893. The Labor Exchange largely died out by c. 1905, but left behind a number of numismatic artifacts behind, primarily in the form of standardized series of paper scrip denominated in hours of labor and fractions thereof.

A recent listing on eBay intrigued me considerably, an aluminum token good for 5 minutes of work. The token was ostensibly associated to the Labor Exchange, so I bid and subsequently won the piece. The token is an aluminum piece 21mm in diameter and has a delightful representation of the globe on both sides. The obverse legend reads MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE FOR FIVE MINUTES WORK ***** and has a map of the Western Hemisphere while the reverse reads MAY BE REDEEMED ON RETURN TO GABRIEL Z. WACHT * and has a map of the Eastern Hemisphere.

I have been researching this piece to get further details on Wacht as well as if it really was a part of the Labor Exchange, but have only come up with some rather intriguing but unfortunately non-definitive tidbits. Gabriel Zacharias Wacht was born sometime in 1833 most likely in Stockholm, Sweden and emigrated to the US, apparently to Northampton County, PA. He also served in the Civil War, joining in Jan.25, 1865 then mustered out on July 27, 1865. Details are sketchy, but he seems to have moved around a bit, before settling in San Francisco in the late nineteenth century, then finally in Sawtelle, then an independent city near Los Angeles.

Sometime in the 1880s, he joined the Free Love movement headed by Moses Harman centered in Valley Falls, KS. Harman was a freethinker and suffragist who desired to see women's emancipation from sexual slavery and published a radical underground newspaper called, Lucifer the Light-bearer. Wacht, then living in Boston, wrote a letter of support in the 3 December 1886 issue of Lucifer indicating his desire to enter into a marriage along the lines of the Free Love model. By 1891 Wacht moved to San Francisco where he himself wrote a pamphlet, Catechism on the Science of a Universal Religion, which was distributed through Harman's publishing houses (I have not been able to locate a copy, unfortunately). Wacht made a living as a watchmaker in San Francisco at least according to 1891 and 1892 city directories. In 1910, Wacht was very much still a part of the Free Love movement and even placed the following personal ad in a 1910 issue of The Humanitarian Review:

It is not known if he found his companion; Wacht died on 30 December 1911 and is buried in Los Angeles.

One fascinating postscript to the Wacht story comes in the form of an article in the Madera, Cal. Tribune on 12 March 1923 headlined "Big Mystery for Devil Dogs." The newspaper had received a query from some U. S. Marines - "Devil Dogs" - stationed in San Francisco. One of the Marines, Sgt. Harry Ervin, found a "small medal" in the stomach of a shark that was harpooned off the coast of Mazatlan in Mexico in 1914. While the article does not mention what the medal was made of, it does describe it:

The very last paragraph says it all and the questions remain as valid now as they did in 1923:

At least one other Wacht medal or token is known. In the "Mavericks" column of the April 1971 TAMS Journal, the following piece is described:

The reverse legend likely is supposed to read EVIDENCE OF CLAIM TO ONE HOUR'S SERVICE given the similarity to the medal found in 1914 and the token I recently bought off of eBay.

Given Wacht's association with the social progressive movements of the nineteenth century, there is a possibility he had some sort of association with the Labor Exchange. More research is certainly required into this wonderful token. I would love to hear from other collectors and researchers who might have more information on Wacht or similar tokens.

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