Customer Reviews

The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance 1865-1879

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The fact that you're reading this review can only mean one of two things: 1) you're an upper-classman or graduate student reluctantly forced to read Unger's book; or 2) you're an economist or historian manqué with a deep and unique curiosity about early American finance. I, for one, am the latter.

The essence of Irwin Unger's "The Greenback Era" - the 1965 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history - is that the motivations of the hard and soft money supporters of the post Civil War period are more nuanced than Charles Beard and other leading American historians would have you believe. The author rejects what he calls the duality and economic determinism of the old school. That is, that economic self-interest was the sole motivator in determining how one felt about the federal issue of paper legal tender (the Greenbacks) and that those motivations ultimately split the nation into mutually exclusive groups: East vs. West, debtor vs. creditor, agrarian vs. industrialist. Unger demonstrates that many groups held positions counter to what their economic self-interest would suggest, such as Western farmers whose deep-seated hostility to "rag money" dated back to the Jacksonian Era and held firm even as they suffered the brunt of the credit squeeze during the depression of the 1870s.

The book is well written and quite informative, although a bit anti-climatic (if such a term is appropriate to describe a treatise on post bellum national finance). The book traces the ideological battle between the forces in favor of hard money (resumption to gold) and those in favor of maintaining the Greenbacks from the period immediately following the Civil War to the resumption of the gold standard on 1 January 1879. Unger would have been well-advised to include a concluding chapter that put the debate and its denouement into historical and economic perspective, especially as it related to the Silver question, which in many ways was the robust progeny of the Greenback debate. As it is, "The Greenback Era" just seems to end with the resumption of gold payments with nary a thought or reflection on what it all meant.