Greenback: The Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America [Hardcover]

Jason Goodwin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 7, 2003

From the author of Lords of the Horizons, the
fascinating story of a new kind of money for a
new world
Money has always been at the heart of the American experience. Paper money, invented in Boston in 1698, was a classic of American ingenuity-and American disregard for authority and tradition. With the wry and admiring eye of a modern Tocqueville, Jason Goodwin has written a biography of the dollar, giving us the story of its astonishing career through the wilds of American history.
Greenback looks at the dollar over the years as a form of art, a kind of advertising, a reflection of American attitudes, and a builder of empires. Goodwin shows us how the dollar rolled out the frontier and peopled the Plains; how it erected the great cities; how it expressed the urges of democracy and opportunity. And, above all, Goodwin introduces us to the people who championed-or ambushed-the dollar over the years: presidents, artists, pioneers, and frontiersmen; bankers, shady and upright; safecrackers, crooks, and dreamers of every stripe. It's a vast and colorful cast of characters, who all agreed on one thing: getting the money right was the key to unlocking liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Greenback delves into folklore and the development of printing, investigates wildcats and counterfeiters, explains why a buck is a buck and how Dixie got its name. Like Goodwin's Lords of the Horizons, another story of empire, Greenback brings together an array of quirky detail and surprising-often hilarious-anecdote to tell the story of America through its best-beloved product.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After a strong start, this history of American money loses its thread and ends up as an entertaining collection of trivia, personality profiles and vignettes rather than the compelling narrative promised in its opening. Still, Goodwin's flair for a colorful tale makes for rich reading, covering such odds and ends as a brothel in the Treasury Department, a prayer vigil over banking deposits, exploding printing presses and even a counterfeit scheme run from behind prison bars. Goodwin (Lords of the Horizons) makes some excellent points about the role of paper money in early U.S. history-it was the earliest symbol of the new country; it helped push colonists West; it even helped familiarize Americans with their native artists-but the significance of the stories he's chosen to include isn't always clear. After presenting a single national currency as one of the holy grails of early American banking, for instance, he glosses over the moment it finally arrives, a true turning point in American financial history. Goodwin's position as a foreign observer (he is an English journalist) occasionally trips him up: no one in America, for example, says "that will be four dollars thirty six." The cast of characters is as colorful as they come, and in the end the book makes good reading for those interested in odd and exciting tales from American financial history. But it's not the fascinating narrative take on the history of money in America that Goodwin sets out to deliver, and which the subject deserves. 30 b&w illus.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Goodwin tells the story of the world's dominant currency, the dollar, and its astonishing role in American history. We learn about the endless list of characters who shaped this country, both famous and obscure, and how they profoundly influenced its growth because they understood that money was the key to unlocking liberty and the pursuit of happiness or wealth. Paper money, invented in Boston in 1698, was known as "bills of credit," which people could use now and pay for in years ahead. Unlike Europeans, who were attached to money for its own sake, Americans used it as a medium for growth with an entrepreneurial spirit that has flowered in this country during the more than 300 years since the dollar was invented. Goodwin reports, "America's theology was a secular one. It revolved around money and liberty, promise and return, profit and loss. It revolved, in fact, around the miracle of money." Mary Whaley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (January 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805064079
• ISBN-13: 978-0805064070
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,748,960 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An entertaining collection of economic anecdotes, March 14, 2003

By 

Michael Oppenheim (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Greenback: The Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America (Hardcover)

I don't know why books on economics try to be funny, but there is an ongoing genre. John Kenneth Galbraith's Money (1975) is a classic. Aiming for the same combination of erudition and laughs, Goodwin does a fine job.

Unlike Galbraith, Goodwin confines himself to America. He hasn't written an organized account but a collection of amusing anecdotes. But they're good history, so they remind us how much of our daily behavior would seem wildly bizarre to our ancestors.

At a simple level why should we give something valuable - say a week's work - in exchange for a piece of paper? Of course, today's money is guaranteed by the U.S. government, a reliable organization. This wasn't the case for most of U.S. history. In, say 1840, you might receive an impressive certificate for ten dollars - payable in specie ("real money," i.e. coin) at Fred's bank in Lexington, Kentucky. If you lived in Lexington and knew Fred was reliable this was acceptable. Living fifty miles away in Louisville, you might not feel so comfortable. You might insist on a few extra of Fred's dollars to compensate for the risk. Far away in New York, who knew about Fred? His dollars might be worthless or accepted at a big discount.

What a mess! In fact, state regulation existed, but it was not rigorous. Readers will chuckle as Goodwin explains how bankers in a given city would assemble a chest of hard money. On the arrival of a state inspector checking that each bank had enough specie to cover its notes, the chest would be rushed from bank to bank just ahead of the inspector. The Civil War finally forced the U.S. to issue paper money, but this was regarded as an emergency measure, and for decades afterward "greenbacks" were looked upon with deep suspicion.

Switching gears, the author discusses counterfeiting. Until the nineteenth century, paper was printed with copper plates. Copper is soft, and after five thousand impressions, the plate wore out. It had to be re-engraved. This never produced the identical image, so even good bank notes showed variations which made counterfeiting a snap. The author introduces Jacob Perkins, an American genius unknown to me and most of you. Just after 1800 he invented steel engraving. This made duplicating a bill much harder, but the book collects a dozen fascinating counterfeiting capers with an explanation of the technology behind them.

Galbraith's Money is fun to read and well organized. Goodwin's Greenback is even more fun. Well organized it isn't, but in chapter after chapter he tells wonderful stories about Americans and their attitude to paper money (Jefferson and Jackson hated it; Franklin and Hamilton loved it). We forget that gold and silver coin were scarce in the U.S. until late in the nineteenth century, so even people with a moral objection were forced to use paper money.<...

15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars BAD History - Light, April 9, 2003

By 

Richard A. Mitchell "Rick Mitchell" (candia, new hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Greenback: The Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America (Hardcover)

Simply put, this is a bad book. It is poorly written and is bad history.

When the author stops digressing, he has many unimportant and trivial anecdotes about the dollar in American history.

His interpretation of American history is terrible. Just a few examples: Early in the book he cited Hawthorne, Thoreau and Twain (who lost a fortune trying to be an industrialist) to reach the conclusion that Americans did not collect and hoard money in the nineteenth century. Apparently he did not read the rest of his book which went on ad nauseum about Americans in the nineteenth century chasing and counterfeiting the dollar. In another instance he concludes that all civil rights were suspended during the civil war (not that this had anything to do with $) - completely ignoring the fact that the Supreme Court overturned Lincoln's attempt to suspend habeas corpus. Lastly (I could go on and on), he finished the book by noting that on our dollar bills are the icons that were present at the birth of our nation. This, after telling how Grant and Cleveland were on our bills! Last I looked they lived late in the next century.

I kept hoping that some pearls about the dollar would come shining through. Whatever pearls there might have been were muddied by his erroneous history and his horrible interpretations of the history he included.

I felt I wasted a good deal of time reading this book. If one wants to read the only useful part of this book, limit yourself to the chapter(s) describing the private banknotes. Nothing before or after is at all worthwhile.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Another entertaining and instructive book by J. Goodwin, August 21, 2003

By 

Manos Lingunis (San Jose, CA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Greenback: The Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America (Hardcover)

Jason Goodwin is a polarizing author, whose books are either hated or loved by his readers. As in his best-known previous book, "Lords of the Horizons", in "Greenback" he uses a lot of wonderful anecdotes to spice up his prose and keep the reader interested. As in that book, his grasp of the essence of the subject is pretty good, although one could disagree in the details.

I am one of those readers who choose to stay away from rigorous, traditional history books because I am turned off by the stuffiness and the pedantic detailed narrative that they often provide. (I came to this end after having read a good deal of them...) I believe that the history of any subject is the sum of the personal histories of the people who participated and formed those events, famous or obscure, big or small. Jason Goodwin gives us plenty of those little personal stories and thank God for that as far as I am concerned.

I found this book very enjoyable to read and rich in information, although not as exciting as "Lords of the Horizons", so I am giving it 4 stars instead of the 5 I gave that one. I hope Jason Goodwin keeps giving us those great books on his diverse subjects and full of those colorful characters, and I am looking forward to his next book of non-sterilized history.