| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Gretchen Ritter. Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xii, 303. $54.95.

In this book, Gretchen Ritter presents a political scientist's perspective on the politics of money in the late nineteenth century, arguing that this issue can provide new understandings of the nature of American politics and possibilities for democratic change. Although she organizes her work mostly chronologically, Ritter provides frequent overviews and previews, beginning with two chapters that survey the money issue and party politics over the three decades between 1865 and 1896. She then circles back, in the next two chapters, to review the creation of the greenbacks and the national banking system during the Civil War and to look in depth at the political struggle over greenbacks in the 1870s, including state-level studies for North Carolina, Illinois, and Massachusetts. Moving quickly over the 1880s, she then devotes two chapters to the currency issue in the 1890s, with case studies of the same three states, and concludes with another overview of money, banking, and politics. 1

Ritter's four central chronological chapters, those on the 1870s and the 1890s, are based on extensive research into the periodical and pamphlet literature produced by the politics of those decades, supplemented by works by historians. Her treatment of currency issues is clear and makes extensive use of primary sources. (It should be noted that historians have also treated those topics at length within the past three decades.) She gives relatively little attention to the Bland-Allison Act (1878) and provides only a few passing references to the significance of ethnicity for understanding Gilded Age politics, despite the wealth of works by historians on that topic. . . .

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