Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America, 1865-1896.(Review)

By Gretchen Ritter. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 303p. $54.95.

Gerald Berk, University of Oregon

In 1900 L. Frank Baum penned the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a parable replete with symbolism about financial politics late in the nineteenth century. The scarecrow, for example, recalled the yeoman farmer who had lost faith in his own common sense; the yellow brick road was the "hard money" path to Oz or Washington, D.C.; and the cowardly lion was 1896 Democratic presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan. Not so much a political tract as a mythic ...

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