Face Value: The Entwined Histories of Money & Race in America. By Michael O'Malley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012, 260 pp.)

Abstract

Controversies over banking, credit, and currency might now seem the specialized province of financial journalism, but at least from Hamilton's tenure as Secretary of the Treasury to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, such issues routinely occupied national political headlines. Historians have made sense of these debates in various ways, emphasizing rival material interests, competing political ideologies, or contrasting rhetorical appeals. For Michael O'Malley, a distinguished scholar of American cultural history at George Mason University, a slightly different dynamic animates the nineteenth-century money question. Debates about the nation's money supply pitted Americans disposed to anchor value in natural essences against Americans who accepted (or embraced) the proposition that value is produced through social negotiation. Without precisely defining them, O'Malley implies that these contrasting dispositions were/are not creeds or doctrines, but rather broad worldviews that have shaped attitudes toward (and representations of) issues far afield from currency contraction or bimetallism. Specifically, essentialist and social constructivist approaches to money mirrored and framed the discourse of race in the United States, especially between 1860 and 1896.