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EH.NET BOOK REVIEW 
 
Published by EH.NET  (October 1997) 
 
Gretchen Ritter, _Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition 
and the Politics of Finance in America, 1865-1896_. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1997. xii + 303 pp.  $54.95 (cloth), ISBN: 
0-521-56167-1. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Larry Schweikart, Department of History, University 
of Dayton.  <[log in to unmask]>. 
 
Following in the footsteps of other professors of government who have 
employed historical methodology to examine political questions, such as 
Richard Bensel, Gretchen Ritter (University of Texas, Austin) examines 
the "money question" in American politics from the perspective of 
antimonopolists. In particular, she looks at farm and Populist movements, 
finally narrowing down her examples to Illinois, North Carolina, and 
Massachusetts. 
 
She has done a creditable job with the historical sources, especially the 
"classics," like Hicks and Hammond, although tending to omit some of the 
fairly large and growing literature on market mechanisms as integrators of 
markets, especially the work by Calomiris, Gorton, and a few others. 
Ritter correctly observes that the debates over money and banking in late 
nineteenth-century America involved far broader economic issues, although 
she does not emphasize the conflict between contracts-based approaches and 
those of the "antimonopolists," who supported contracts until they no 
longer worked to their own advantage. The difficulties that "both liberal 
and conservative scholars have in acknowledging the programmatic content" 
(p. 33) of party politics really is a result of the deification of Andrew 
Jackson as a free marketeer, both by "democrats" supportive of an activist 
state and Libertarians who oppose such a government. On the contrary, 
Jackson was a "big government" guy who opposed the BUS because it wasn't 
HIS bank. 
 
>From such a starting point, it is easy---but wrong---to conclude as Ritter 
does that the "antimonopolist program was both coherent and potentially 
plausible" (p. 61). Fortunately, Ritter does not completely fall into the 
trap, noting that the "reasons for this failure [of the antimonopolist 
vision] are complex," (ibid.) including historical timing, structural 
constraints, and other factors. She therefore attempts to construct an 
alternative to what happened, grounding it solidly in what did happen. 
Ultimately, the parties embraced governmental reforms of money and banking 
precisely because both parties had, to one degree or another, abandoned 
better market reforms such as branch banking. (The discussions of 
branching, particularly in the West and California, are some of the 
weakest parts of Ritter's otherwise cogent analysis.) 
 
Ritter also unfortunately subscribes to the oft-repeated allegation that 
the national banking system created hardships on the South and West. But a 
difference existed between an absence of money and a shortage of capital, 
and some economic historians, including Charles Calomiris, contend that 
the shortage of physical money did not equate with a shortage of working 
capital. Indeed, Ritter somewhat ignores the fact that state banks, S&Ls 
and B&Ls existed and provided a strong alternative to the national banking 
system, or that the rise in demand deposits more than offset changes in 
physical money. The concentration of assets that Ritter finds in the East 
was not at all mirrored in the West, as Lynne Doti and I have shown in our 
_Banking in the American West_ (1991).  Indeed, if anything, competition 
expanded in the West until the 1950s, even with branch banking. Ritter 
digresses with a discussion of how things "might have worked" with a brief 
look at Denmark---hardly a model of anything the much larger and more 
diverse U.S. might have to address---and concludes by noting that under 
different circumstances, the antimonopolists may have succeeded in 
instituting their system. 
 
She seems to miss the irony that so-called anti-monopolists favored 
invoking a government monopoly more powerful than any corporation; and 
ignores a growing body of research strongly critical of the entire 
antitrust movement as unproductive and ineffective in yielding greater 
competition. Likewise, by ignoring the competitive money theories proposed 
by a substantial number of free-market writers (stemming from Hayek), she 
misses the REAL alternative reform program, which would have been based on 
Scotland, not Denmark. Finally, when employing counterfactuals, it is 
worthwhile to keep in mind that the antimonopolists of the nineteenth 
century had never really experienced the ravages of inflation (produced by 
governments) that destroyed their wages. Thus, deflation consumed their 
attention. 
 
This is a provocative book, and a good contribution to the debate, but 
hardly the last word. Historians, however, should be flattered by the 
excellent approach and methodology. 
 
Larry Schweikart 
Department of History 
University of Dayton 
 
Larry Schweikart is author of _Banking in the American South from the Age 
of Jackson to Reconstruction_ (1987) and (with Lynne Pierson Doti), 
_Banking in the American West from the Gold Rush to Deregulation_ (1991). 
 
 
Copyright (c) 1997 by EH.Net and H-Net, all rights reserved. This work 
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to 
the author and the list. For other permission, please contact 
[log in to unmask] (Robert Whaples, Book Review Editor, EH.Net. 
Telephone: 910-758-4916. Fax: 910-758-6028.) 
 
 
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