Money: Jason Goodwin traces the history of the US dollar from its origins in 1698 to its near final form in the late 1920s. The reader who perseveres with this will be rewarded with some interesting tales, but there is as much information about greenbacks readily available online writes Molly McCloskey.
'In the beginning, all the world was America." So said John Locke, as Jason Goodwin notes in Greenback. Locke was referring to untrammelled wilderness, but his phrase has an eerily modern ring and when we hear it now, we may not think first of forests but rather of the fact that more and more of the world is coming to resemble America. One of the most important players in this process has been the rather staid-looking little item that is the dollar.
Goodwin, an English journalist, follows the dollar from its origins in 1698 in Massachusetts (the first state since medieval China to issue its own paper currency) to its near-final form in the late 1920s. Along the way, he offers potted histories of such topics as steel engraving, counterfeiting, the rise of banks in the US, and the relationship between westward expansion and the images that adorned the dollar-in-progress.
Greenback begins promisingly: "This is how I spent my first dollar," Goodwin writes, describing how he bribed a train ticket salesman in India. He then offers some quirky background figures - the number of dollar bills in existence, for example, exceeds that of any other branded object in the world - and cites an interesting study by US Customs in which it was found that 78% of dollar bills from Chicago, Houston, and Miami were contaminated with cocaine.
But by about page 10, Goodwin stops having fun, and the tone he adheres to - almost unfailingly - for the remainder of his story is, unfortunately, that of a school textbook: "In 1777, a year after he had written the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson began work on a new house right on top of a hill in south Virginia . . . Monticello became in its time the most widely admired building in America."
If you persevere, you'll be rewarded with some interesting tales. The clash between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton (the so-called father of the US dollar) is well drawn, Hamilton's more hard-nosed view at odds with Jefferson's notion of "a rural republic where people used money like matchsticks in a friendly game of poker . . ."
And some of the details Goodwin includes are entertaining, such as the source of E Pluribus Unum, inscribed on all American money. The motto - meaning "Out of Many, One" - was taken from the title page of the London monthly, Gentleman's Magazine, the same magazine that reinvented itself in the 1980s as GQ. The man who lifted the slogan, Swiss-born antiquarian and portraitist Pierre Eugène Du Simitière, fared less well. After creating in his own Philadelphia digs the one-room American Museum - "a sort of wild . . . ancestor of the Smithsonian" - Du Simitière's livelihood was undermined by pirate editions of his portraits (out of one, many, it might be said), his health was ruined and he died in poverty in 1785.
Irish readers will be either horrified or delighted to learn that although no one has ever claimed, patented or sourced the actual dollar sign, the earliest known use of the symbol was by an Irish-born trader named John Fitzpatrick in 1770.
Goodwin is clearly enamoured of his subject: "Only in America can anyone still use money made 150 years ago . . . None of the other rich countries has an equivalent to the one-dollar bill, only coins." But his analysis of the psychological relationship between Americans and their money offers no new insights: " . . . the dollar seemed to do the work that class or creed did in Europe".
As Goodwin himself notes, American attitudes towards money were by no means unanimous or unambiguous. The pioneer constitutions of a number of Midwestern states, for instance, actually outlawed banks; the British weren't alone in worrying that paper money would release "unruly and uncontrollable ambitions". But Goodwin fails to elicit much drama from such contradictions.
He also makes some strange connections, backing up his brief discussion of "conspicuous consumption", for example, by reference to an NPR announcer begging listeners to send in money. He doesn't say whether NPR was raising money for a cause or for itself, but if you want to illustrate a point about American "rituals of spending and display", there are surely better places to look than NPR.
If you're very curious about the dollar's history, there is much in Goodwin's work that will interest you. But if you're looking for one of those books that enlivens some substance or object or concept to a degree you'd never dreamed possible, you may be disappointed. Better off logging on to Wheresgeorge.com, a website that allows you to follow the potentially fascinating trail of your own dollar bill as it makes its way through the world.
Molly McCloskey is a writer and critic
Greenback: The Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America. By Jason Goodwin. Hamish Hamilton, 296 pp. £14.99