Counterfeiters and Con Artists: Money, Literature, and Subjectivity

On 26 November 2007, a 31-year-old man named Alexander D. Smith tried to open an account at an Aiken, South Carolina bank with what the Associated Press described as a $1 million bill. Smith’s only problem, as he soon discovered, was that no real $1 million bill exists for which his bogus bill could possibly pass. The AP’s report of Smith’s million-dollar gamble got a funny face-lift on ABC News’ website where it appeared under the title, “Stupid Criminal Tries to Cash $1 Million Bill.”¹ But readers of the report were left to ponder a more serious question: is it possible to counterfeit something that has no authentic counterpart? Alexander Smith’s failure to forge an entirely new denomination of US currency not only illustrates the interdependence between counterfeit and authentic moneys, it demonstrates in the broadest (and boldest) of strokes that in order to be successful, counterfeiters must operate within and thereby reconstitute the very discourses of value they seek to exploit—discourses that lend confidence to the authenticity they sanction. Otherwise, they would not be counterfeiters, just “stupid criminals.”

The commerce between discourses of authenticity and the confidence games played by counterfeiters, both literal and literary, is the subject of two recent studies. Stephen Mihm’s A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (2007) explores how the monetary politics of the US and the practices of counterfeiters shaped one another during the antebellum period. In this historical account, Mihm describes how expansion-minded capitalists flooded the American market with paper money whose value was contingent upon the public’s trust, and how counterfeiters profited from the era’s mania for speculation by forging banknotes not unlike (or exactly like) those commissioned by their capitalist counterparts. Mary McAleer Balkun’s The American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture (2006), by contrast, takes a cultural studies approach to the process of self-making in a burgeoning commodity culture—a process that Balkun calls “counterfeiting.” Using American literary texts published between 1880 and 1930 to examine the commodified self within the consumer culture that antebellum expansion made possible, Balkun shows that the self-made individual is a lot like the forged notes examined by Mihm because the cultural currency of this figure is similarly constructed within and constrained by the era’s prevailing discourse of authenticity. As Balkun phrases it, the identity of the person who recreates the self “is in almost every case a direct imitation of something considered ‘real’ within a specific context” (13).

Although Mihm and Balkun examine counterfeiting from different perspectives, they are in fact describing two sides of the same coin. While Balkun may subordinate the monetary symbolism of her “counterfeit” to retain the functional polyvalence of the term, Mihm’s analysis of the evolution of counterfeiting in America shows that the very concept of authenticity Balkun critiques is inseparable from the epistemologies of value that give money its currency—epistemologies that counterfeiters helped to reshape. Taken together, these two studies suggest that the currency of cultural counterfeits is overdetermined by the self-same political economic discourses that give money—and by extension counterfeit money—its currency.

The hinge upon which both Mihm’s argument and the critical repositioning I am proposing in this essay turn is Mihm’s theorem that confidence, not merely similitude, is what allows counterfeit money to circulate at face value. Counterfeit money may depend upon its resemblance to authentic currency in order to circulate successfully, but without confidence in the currency it imitates—currency that acquires its value by fiat—the counterfeit remains worthless. Mihm explains how the confidence that contemporary Americans have in fiat money emerged alongside the public’s faith in the sovereignty of the federal government during the Civil War. Such confidence is therefore a relatively new phenomenon—one that we take for granted. For antebellum-era Americans, however, questions of monetary value and authenticity were complex issues to negotiate. Expansion of a nascent market economy led to the translocalization of commerce, and the emergence of...