In Face Value, Michael O'Malley argues that the evolution of American discourses over race and money are connected in a manner that economists and historians have previously disregarded. Debates about money, specifically the acceptable forms of money, “have always also been debates about the problem of racial difference in a free democratic society (pp. 4–5).” Paper money enthusiasts, “wanted to see both economic value and social worth as socially created things (p. 6).” For them, racial equality could be achieved by societal declaration. Proponents of hard money (notably gold) typically, “yearned instead for a world in which there was no difference between value and price, between social worth and economic worth (p. 6).” They held that racial inequality was, “a natural fact (p. 6).” Face Value explores this debate from the colonial era to the present reemergence of “goldbugs.”

Chapter 1 ties the establishment of racial slavery to the colonial shortage of specie. O'Malley draws from slave narratives to examine the adoption of slavery over alternative sources of labor, such as wage labor or indentured servitude. The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, for example, is presented as evidence of, “a clear awareness, in 1766, of wage labor's superiority to slavery as a money-making proposition (p. 13).” However, the thirteen colonies’ lack of gold and silver led to a confusing array of money, from wampum to paper notes, that complicated exchange and, “threated to make meaning itself, the meaning of differences between people and things, vanish or collapse (p. 30).” In this uncertain and changing world, race served as a “bottom line (p. 42)” and a form of stability. The slaves themselves became, “a form of money, a store of value, black flesh made coin (p. 37).”

Chapter 2 focuses on the unstable monetary environment of the antebellum era and the widespread use of counterfeit money. O'Malley contrasts the 1833 British Slavery Abolition Act to slavery's entrenchment in the South during the same time period. In the British Empire, the pound sterling served as the “ultimate, stable, established standard of value for all commerce (p. 76).” In the absence of a comparable monetary form in the United States and the attendant proliferation of uncertain paper money, “Americans banked on slaves” (p. 48). Slaves themselves “took the place of gold” (p. 74). Any threat to slavery in the United States was also a threat to financial stability: “abolishing slavery in the United States would abolish the foundation of real credit and the psychic capital that underlay the chaotic monetary system, the ‘gold standard’ of white supremacy” (p. 76). The presence of an American central bank might have severed this connection between finance and race which “suggests that had Americans established a central bank like the Bank of England, they might have abolished slavery as England did, by compensating slave owners” (p. 7).

Chapter 3 explores the Civil War's dramatic impact on the nation's financial and monetary systems. O'Malley posits that “linking the race debate to the money debate helps explain why Reconstruction failed” (p. 83). To finance war spending, the federal government issued fiat money. These greenbacks “encouraged central control over the money supply” (p. 105). They “depreciated—caused inflation—but they also led to remarkable economic growth” (p. 105). Opinions over greenbacks and the possibility of postbellum resumption were closely tied to views on the role of the newly freed slaves in the American economy. “Greenback philosophy suggested that African Americans could earn their place in a society of producers, while gold bug essentialism either granted them this status or denied it” (p. 119).

Chapter 4 documents the intense debates over the bimetallic and gold standards of the late nineteenth century. A free African American population, an influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, and the rise of mass production promoted social mobility and the “self-made man.” This rise in diversity and an accompanying “crisis of subjectivity” caused an obsession with gold: “Using gold money allowed a fantasy of natural stability and true value in exchange” (p. 160). The United States’ official return to the gold standard “marked the triumph of a white supremacist consensus, and a new emphasis on eugenic solutions to social problems” (p. 7).

Chapter 5 and the Epilogue consider money in a post-Federal Reserve world and note that, “as the United States left the gold standard it also began to erode the ferocious white supremacist consensus established at the end of the nineteenth century” (pp. 7–8). Although money was no longer backed by gold, race and gold remain tied in the American consciousness. O'Malley notes that, it is, “not surprising that the election of the first African American president in 2008 should coincide with a wild rise in gold prices and the revival of political arguments for the gold standard among his opponents” (p. 172).

Economic historians will enjoy O'Malley's compilation of literary and other non-traditional sources that include references to money. Questions of monetary form were discussed in political tracts, autobiographies, fiction, and even minstrel shows. O'Malley not only documents this phenomenon, but carefully places each work in historical context and discusses the underlying meaning. Chapter 3, for example, devotes multiple pages to the popular 1863 song, “How Are You Greenbacks!” Economic historians may be surprised by some of aspects of his analysis. He states that there was not a correlation between slave price and age (p. 75) and further faults economists for “treat[ing] the marketplace as something governed by laws which operate apart from what people may think and believe” (p. 40).