Book Reviews Banks or No Banks: The Money Issue in Western Politics, 1832-1865. By WILLIAM GERALD SHADE. (Detroit: Wayne State
Uni- versity Press, 1972. 328p.; maps, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $15.95.) Banks or No Banks develops a new thesis from which to view the banking con- troversies of the mid-nineteenth century and the role of the bank issue in state politics. Mr. Shade looks at the social roots and pro- poses a broad social interpretation of the sig- nificance of the issue. He also tries to ac- count for mass political behavior by demon- strating that party, not section, was the most important determinant of attitudes on the bank issue and that ethnoreligious factors, not class or occupation, were prime determi- nants of party affiliation. The controversy over banking was both real and symbolic; how it was resolved af- fected the economic system, the status of ethnoreligous groups, as well as the domin- ance of certain value systems. That is, the controversy was not, as historians have long viewed the matter, a struggle between the haves and the have-nots. Rather, the author interprets the struggle as one between those that were Yankee-Protestant, commercially orientated who believed the government could legislate economic progress and moral reforms and those that were agrarian orien- tated, southern, or foreign who felt society could develop best without governmental in- tervention. Opposition to banks became a focal point for resisting the swift changes that were bringing about an industrial and urban society. Mr. Shade has done an impressive amount of research especially in manuscripts and Northwest newspapers of the day. From these he has culled the general feeling of the times and the specific position of the two major political parties on the bank issue. He fills a needed gap with the state-by-state study giving new depth to the banking con- |
troversy and further revealing the com- plexity of the economic issues of the times. Each of the five states of the old Northwest- Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan-are examined separately. Each chapter has an introductory part delineating the issue and a summary section which draws generalizations and conclusions from the experience in the five states. The nine chapters divide the thirty-three year time frame into logical segments: (1) the bipartisan effort to respond to the de- mand for banks and capital in the 1830's, (2) the polarization of partisan positions after the Panic of 1837, (3) the hard-money revul- sion against banks as a result of the depres- sion, (4) the rise of free banking in the early 1850's (5) the nationalization of free banking in the 1860's, and (6) the key role westerners played in the national currency legislation. The book is arranged in a way that facilitates use as a reference tool. Information on any one state can be easily found and followed throughout the book. The author, however, does not start devel- oping his thesis until the last half of the book, beginning with the late 1840's. By de- tailed quantitative voting analysis for the state of Illinois, and to a much lesser extent for other states, he shows the relation be- tween the values of the various subcultures and the responses to the leading economic issue of the times. Mr. Shade makes a valuable contribution to scholarship by continuing his analysis of the banking issue past the 1850's. He has put in writing what a few banking historians have only recently begun to realize. This is that the banking controversy not only con- tinued to be of local importance throughout the 1850's, but also that the experience of the states with free banking, without a national bank, greatly affected the form in which the Federal Government again began to regu- late the currency and banking system of the country. The creation of the national bank- 235 |