#counterfeiters

“The oft-repeated charge that paper money was unnatural revealed a deeper, more tangible fear. Paper posed a very real threat to the traditional class system of colonial America, an order that its self-appointed stewards liked to think of as natural. While hard currency tended to be concentrated in the hands of rich merchants, paper money was more widely distributed and changed hands more frequently. As a fluid and fickle form of wealth, paper’s dynamism undermined a static social arrangement built around fixed classes and fixed currency. An entrepreneurial class buoyed by credit clearly unnerved traditionalists, who were terrified of an economy where value had been sublimated into something spectral and slippery. Their alarm at the “ghost” of paper money had a metaphysical aspect: what they really feared was a world where appearances no longer reliably corresponded to reality, where a piece of paper could equal a pile of gold or an uncultured tradesman could become a powerful member of society. No one typified this phenomenon better than counterfeiters, who made a fortune capitalizing on the interval between appearance and reality. They were the most extreme exemplars of paper money’s corrosive effect on social conventions: men of simple origins who became rich and famous riding the coattails of an incorporeal currency.” – Ben Tarnoff, Moneymakers: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Notorious Counterfeiters