Mr. Simms: Do you have any experience? Robbie: No, sir, I have no experience but I’m a big fan of money. I like it, I use it, I have a little. I keep it in a jar on top of my refrigerator. I’d like to put more in that jar. That’s where you come in. —The Wedding Singer (1998) The exchange above comes from The Wedding Singer, a popular film starring comedian Adam Sandler, who plays the role of Robbie Hart, a down-on-his-luck wedding singer who is trying to win the heart of waitress Julia Sullivan, played by Drew Barrymore. There is one catch: Julia is engaged to the evil bond trader Glenn Gulia. Believing that the only way to defeat Glenn is to impress Julia by finding a more lucrative line of work, Robbie goes to the bank to look for a job, which leads to the encounter with Mr. Simms, the bank’s manager. While I originally intended to include this quote as a way of making fun of myself for being a political and historical sociologist who knows virtually nothing about the sociology of money, it began to take on a whole new meaning as I made my way through Feinig’s Moral Economies of Money. This is true in two respects. First, though the exchange between Robbie and Mr. Simms is meant to be funny, its humor lies in the assumption that for a struggling money user like Robbie, money is a thing apart that is subject to the control of private bankers such as Mr. Simms. Yet as Feinig argues, this dynamic is by no means given. There have in fact been numerous moments in the history of the United States where everyday people mobilized to transform the prevailing monetary system in an effort to create a more equitable society. Second, while I still know virtually nothing about the sociology of money, this book is deeply fascinating to me because, in a very real sense, it isn’t about money at all! From my perspective, this is a story about the democratic constitution of society, with money emerging as a mechanism through which this end might be achieved. Feinig convincingly argues that the extent to which this goal has been realized in the United States can be measured in terms of the extent to which money users are involved in questions regarding monetary design (i.e., questions regarding the principles that govern money creation). To say that money users are involved in questions regarding monetary design means that questions of monetary design exist as open political questions, thus allowing for them to be decided democratically through the influence of social movements and political parties who actively target the state. Moral economies of money thrive in moments when questions of monetary design are subject to democratic influence. Yet we also observe moments of monetary silencing when questions of monetary design are removed from the sphere of mass politics. As Feinig shows, the oscillation between moral economies of money and monetary silencing is readily apparent over the course of the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States. While moral economies of money thrived throughout much of the revolutionary period, they were progressively silenced following the ratification of the United States Constitution in 1789 and the rise of Jacksonian democracy in the late 1820s. The latter moment was especially notable insofar as it saw both masses and elites go to war on banks in hopes of creating an economy based on the unmediated exchange of specie in the form of gold and silver coins. The push to democratize questions of monetary design was born anew following the end of the Civil War. This is evidenced most clearly by the rise of third-party movements such as the Greenback Party and the Populist Party, both of which included proposals to increase the supply of money as part of their platforms. The moral economies of money that emerged during the postbellum period eventually came to an end following the creation of the Federal Reserve and the start of the New Deal, which institutionalized the separation between monetary and fiscal policy, reinforcing the idea that the supply of money available to the government was fixed, much like a household budget. In addition to lending empirical support to the claim that once-thriving moral economies of money were systematically silenced over time, Feinig’s account of the politics of monetary design in the United States provides us with three general lessons regarding the relationship between money and the democratic constitution of society. First, there is a dual relationship between money and society, in the sense that society shapes money as much as money shapes society. From this perspective, the politics of money creation is not a technical matter the way it is often depicted—it is very much a fight over of the kind of society in which we want to live. Second, the state is always involved in the politics of money creation, if only because it dictates which types of money can be used to pay taxes. The fact that the state guarantees that there is demand for a given currency plays an important role in defining the structure of the monetary hierarchy that prevails at any given moment. Third, the idea of money as governance has profound implications for how we think about the power of the state, in that it allows for the coordinated pursuit of public goals without being explicitly statist in orientation. There are, however, two interrelated aspects of Feinig’s narrative that warrant further consideration, both of which speak to the question of why the periodization of the narrative looked the way it did. The first aspect of the historical narrative that deserves discussion is the tripartite connection between public land, western settlement, and the American state. Following the end of the American Revolution, each of the colonies-turned-states ceded a portion of its territory to the federal government. This provided the federal government with a resource base that could be used to facilitate settlement and economic development, while simultaneously increasing federal revenue. From a policy perspective, the challenge was figuring out how to achieve the one without undermining the other. If the government set the price of public land too high, the average settler would be unable to afford the land, which would limit the potential for sustained economic development along the western frontier. If the government set the price of public land too low, it would limit the amount of revenue that could generated by public land sales—revenue that could be used to pay off the war debt. One solution was to try and make land affordable by not only lowering prices and tract sizes, but by providing various forms of government credit and debt relief. As public land historian Paul W. Gates describes in History of Public Land Law Development (1968), the experiment with credit sales was relatively short-lived, lasting from 1800 to 1820. The end of this period corresponds with the Panic of 1819, which is often described as a product of land speculation made possible by the liberalization of public land policy, including the experiment in credit sales. Debates over the terms of public land policy persisted well into the mid-nineteenth century, as did speculation-induced panics such as the Panic of 1837. While it is impossible to trace the history of public land and its relationship to booms and busts in the American economy in full, my sense is that it is difficult to fully understand the history of money and banking in the United States without understanding how the availability of large tracts of public land created a standing demand for currency and credit on the part of both small-holders and speculators alike. The second aspect of the historical narrative that deserves further consideration is the role of political parties in shaping public perceptions of money and monetary design. While both the Greenback Party and the Populist Party make an appearance in the discussion of the moral economies of money that emerged in the period following the end of the Civil War, the role of parties is potentially much bigger than this. Indeed, if one didn’t know that this was a book about money, one might think that this was a book about partisan realignment, as evidenced by the fact that each chapter from chapter 3 to chapter 6 corresponds to a moment of fundamental change in the American party system. It is striking to me that the ebb and flow of the moral economies of money seems to correspond to both the timing of economic crises tied to the distribution of public land, as well as to transitions in the structure of party competition. From this vantage point, the oscillation between moral economies of money and monetary silencing appears to be part of a more profound series of transformations in the American political economy. In much the same way that it is hard to understand the history of money and banking in the United States without attending to the politics of public land, it is hard to understand the periodic reconfiguration of the American political field without attending to how parties organized support around questions of monetary design. This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the 1890s, when the rise of the Populist Party threatened to destroy the prevailing party system. For many Populists, bimetallism was a more palpable alternative to the radicalism of the subtreasury plan. That being said, while both bimetallism and the subtreasury plan signaled the existence of a moral economy of money, it was hard to separate support for bimetallism from the move toward electoral fusion, which saw Populist candidates trying to secure major party votes by running on two tickets simultaneously. By most accounts, the Populist movement collapsed as a result of using the free silver issue as a means of securing cross-endorsement. This would suggest that the decline of the moral economies of money that arose during the Populist period was not about the money issue in and of itself, so much as it was a byproduct of changes in the political field in which the issue played out. Return to Jakob Feinig: Moral Economies of Money symposium prompt.