The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879
by Irwin Unger
Summary
Irwin Unger's first major book examines the fight over American money in the years right after the Civil War, when the country had to decide what to do with the greenbacks, the paper currency the Union government had issued to pay for the war without backing it in gold. Unger follows farmers, bankers, workers and politicians as they argued over whether to keep greenbacks in circulation, retire them, or return the country to the gold standard, a debate that ran from the war's end in 1865 through the Specie Resumption Act of 1875, which returned the country to gold backed currency in 1879.
Unger treats the fight as more than an argument about economics, tracing how moral conviction and religious belief shaped positions that look, from a distance, like simple self interest: hard money advocates who saw honest currency as a matter of national character, and greenback and soft money supporters, often debtors and farmers, who saw inflation as basic fairness to people the gold standard left behind. He follows the political fallout across the postwar decades, as both major parties split internally over the question and third party greenback movements gathered real support among farmers hurt by falling prices.
Unger, who earned his doctorate at Columbia and went on to build a career studying the Gilded Age and later American social history, reads a subject most readers find dry, the mechanics of money and credit, as a genuine window into the moral imagination of an entire postwar generation. Reading the book means following that argument in real depth, government meeting by government meeting, and it suits a reader who wants Reconstruction era politics understood through its economics rather than only through the more familiar story of the South.
Historical Context & Significance
The Greenback Era won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for History, a striking result for a first book on a subject as unglamorous as postwar currency policy. No finalists were published that year; the practice began only in 1980.
The prize established Unger, who had earned his doctorate at Columbia University in 1958, as a serious historian of the Gilded Age early in his career, and he went on to write extensively about American social and political history, including several books co written with his wife Debi Unger, most notably on the 1960s. The Greenback Era remains a standard reference for historians of Reconstruction era monetary policy, credited with reading a technical financial debate as genuine political and moral history rather than dry economics.