| Reading Guide for Week 7 | |
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This week we will focus on banking and currency. This essay by Mihm was an advance taste of his 2007 book, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States. Especially from 1832 when President Andrew Jackson opted to eliminate the U.S. National Bank, unregulated state “banks” issued their own paper currency. The result was that there were hundreds of different currencies circulating in the United States, whose value was uncertain, wildly fluctuating, and often depreciating. If you lived in Connecticut, and someone tried to pay you with a banknote from Arkansas, what was the real value of that banknote? How could you get information about the soundness of that bank, and the current value of that banknote? Mihm focuses on a worst-case scenario: the rampant presence of counterfeit currency. Was there even an actual bank that had issued a particular banknote? An advance taste of her 2013 book, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis, Lepler’s essay focuses on the so-called “Panic of 1837” which actually sparked several years of severe economic downturn across the United States. The “economy” was in such turmoil that nine states (including Indiana) went bankrupt, unable and unwilling to pay off their loans from British creditors. On the ground — in communities and households — the suffering was acute. Meanwhile, taking credit for apparent prosperity proved much easier than assuming blame for apparent failure, at a time when many patriarchal American men were failing. How to explain failure? Given many Americans’ limited understanding of their own relationship to what “the economy” was and how it worked, they struggled to explain the sudden sharp and sustained downturn in “the economy.” What was happening? Who were the villains? Who might be the saviors? |