The political career of the dollar (1862-1913)

Faculty Colloquium

Presenter: Roy Kreitner (Professor, Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University)

Discussant: Noam Maggor (Senior Lecturer, School of History, Queen Mary University of London)

In the last third of the nineteenth century, the nature of American money was a searing political issue, deciding elections, creating and breaking up political parties, mobilizing masses. Often, and especially in the years leading up to the election of 1896, it was the political issue. But then, almost suddenly, money fell off the political table. By 1913 when the Federal Reserve Act established a modern, independent central bank and realigned the monetary system, money had become bipartisan; contention over money had, in fact, morphed into polite discussion of banking reform. Historians of various stripes agree widely that the money question fell from prominence after the presidential election of 1896. There is no agreement, however, on how the dominant dispute in popular politics lost its force as a mobilizing issue. More importantly, there is precious little accounting for the implications of the change for American political economy more generally.

The Political Career of the Dollar sets out to answer the question of how money could go from central stage and fever pitch to non-partisan technocratic reform within a generation, and to explore the meaning of such a shift not only for money, but for the shape of American capitalism writ large. In moving the discussion of money from popular politics to a rarefied realm of expertise, much more than monetary policy was at stake. Shifting monetary politics transformed the role of law, and with it conceptions of democracy and self-government. Money did not become non-political. Instead, it transformed politics to establish the sovereignty of the economic.