Against the "Beardians"

The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865-1879

Irwin Unger, 1964

Irwin Unger (1927-2021) was an economic historian at New York University who won a Pulitzer Prize for this book. He began it by announcing, “Differences over currency and the related subject of banking have expressed basic American social and political antagonisms.” Unger credited Charles Beard with developing this theme but criticizes the dualism of “Capitalist versus farmer, debtor versus creditor, East versus West, conservative versus radical, hard money versus soft money—these appear as successive guises of the same inherent division,” he said. “Although their names may vary, [they] always remain essentially the same.”

He explained, “Primarily this dualism may be defined as a contest between wealth in the form of land and wealth seeking outlets in commerce and industry.” This is incredibly important — if it’s a story about wealth vs. Wealth, that’s a lot different from wealth vs. poverty. Unger said, “most men tried to strike a balance between their pocket books and their duty. This mixture of ethics and interest…must be recognized if we hope to understand the events of these years.” Good, but did all people share this ambivalence equally, or were some more “ethical” and others more “interested?” We’re moving toward the Gilded Age, after all.

Cf. Hesseltine, “Four American Tradtions” http://www.jstor.org/stable/2204591

Unger repeated the consensus claim that “rural anti-bankism of the 1860’s and 1870’s was tinged with anti-Semitism,” but in his footnote gave both the Richard Hofstadter/Oscar Handlin side of the argument and the Norman Pollack/John Higham response. Cf. Pollack, “The Myth of Populism Anti-Semitism.” http://www.jstor.org/stable/1847185

I tend to agree with Unger’s conclusion that the Civil War did not “divide American history into an older rural-agrarian and a newer urban-industrial phase,” but not for the reasons he cited. Unger saw a continuity in traditions (Calvinism, agrarianism) that I think were already undergoing huge changes before the war. I’m more comfortable with accounts that see these changes as some of the causes of the Civil War, than with a story of old (and especially of ignorant old) traditions continuing to drive social and political thought almost to the twentieth century. I’m sure there was some of that, but I don’t see how this focus really complicates the dualism Unger criticized in the “Beardians.”