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Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America, 1865-1896. By Gretchen Ritter Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,1997. 312 pp. Appendices, bibliography, and index. Cloth, $59.95. ISBN 0521561671; paper, $19.95. ISBN 0521653924.
Reviewed by Howard Bodenhorn
In Goldbugs and Greenbacks, Gretchen Ritter expresses a concern that too much history is written by "winners" who connect the dots to inevitable conclusions. This, she argues, has at least been the case in histories of agrarianism. John Hicks' The Populist Revolt (1961), for instance, portrays the failure of agrarianism as the inevitable outcome of anachronistic and wrong-headed protests. Traditional tales present agrarians attempting to build hopeless little dikes to stem the tide of onrushing economic modernity. Ritter rejects this view, arguing instead that the defeat of the agrarian program was neither foreordained nor historically inevitable. Rather, the agrarian or antimonopolist program, as it evolved between 1865 and William Jennings Bryan's abandonment of the silverites in 1900, represented a legitimate economic alternative, a different but equally plausible vision of the future.
Antimonopolism had three basic tenets: a distinction between producers (laborers) and non-producers (financiers); a fear of political and economic corruption; and a sense that financiers corrupted politics and fostered economic exploitation (pp. 5-6). By highlighting this "producerist" aspect of the agrarian monetary program, Ritter emphasizes a fundamental debate in American history dating back to Alexander Hamilton's plan for a national bank, namely, the uneasy connection between the private and...