Greenback: The Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America

Rating:
Summary: Another entertaining and instructive book by J. Goodwin
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: BAD History - Light
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Milestones in the Evolution of Value Storage
Review: This is a very enjoyable work, well-written and researched, with numerous anecdotes and sidelights. I thought particularly strong the early chapters on colonial and post-revolution America. One sees in Jefferson an early version of a common type today: the person who is adamantly opposed to debt and credit instruments because he himself is hopelessly swamped in debt. Today's debt paranoiac shuns credit cards and deferred payment schemes of all stripes in favor of cash (paper dollars and checks drawn on bank accounts). But for Jefferson those very paper dollars and banks were suspect. For him, the only "real" money was metallic: gold or silver. The only stores of value in his opinion were coins or bullion or land.

This brought him into opposition to Hamilton, who wanted to inaugurate the new republic by assuming a huge load of debt (all the promises of payment represented by the wartime "Continentals"). Hamilton had a plan to set up a bank and issue paper money backed by gold reserves which didn't exist yet, but which he was confident could be built up by land sales and import duties. His plan, a risky scheme in Jefferson's opinion, was approved by Congress, and our little country began its life with a whopping 42 million dollar debt (p. 102). In spite of Jefferson's misgivings, the scheme worked so well that some twenty years later Jefferson himself was able to double the nation's land area by buying Louisiana from Napoleon.

I was disappointed that in this book, devoted as it is to various forms the dollar took over the years, no mention was made of the exact type of payment by Jefferson for Louisiana. Was it gold bullion? American gold dollars? Spanish gold dollars? Was there some of the paper money that he so despised? Was there a mortgage involved? Or a more racy installment plan (No interest and no payments until May 1808, or until the emperor conquers Russia, whichever comes first! Don't delay! Act now!)

"Greenback" then goes into satisfying detail on the banknote phenomenon, the system of the 19th century whereby banks printed notes (dollars, promises to pay) and either backed them up or did not back them up with gold in their vaults. As I understand it, the US government did not start printing such notes until the Civil War, and it did not become the sole legal printer of dollars until the 1920s. I would have liked more detail about how that latter change came about. What was the exact last day when you could use a dollar printed by a bank. Why did they wait so long to pass such a law, which seems perfectly natural to us now? Might the conversion have had anything to do with the subsequent worldwide depression? All fascinating questions for a follow-up volume which I hope will come from the febrile pen of Mr. Goodwin.