Joshua R. Greenberg. Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 264 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-5224-8, $34.95 (cloth).

Abstract

War II, Christian businessmen such as J. Howard Pew embraced the industrial-military complex, aligning fundamentalist businessman with the needs of national defense. AlthoughKristin DuMez’s Jesus and John Wayne more clearly links militarist, fundamentalist masculinity to twenty-first-century evangelicalism,5 Hammond deserves credit for locating this ideology in the prewar period, correcting those who define it as simply a backlash to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. If LeTourneau illustrates fundamentalists’ fight to preserve U.S. capitalism, Hammond uses Club Aluminum president Herbert J. Taylor to demonstrate how Christian businessmen (“laymen”) shaped evangelicalism. While Rotarians may know that Taylor created the “Four-Way Test” in a bid to save Club Aluminum in the 1930s, few people understand the degree to which his philanthropy shaped modern evangelicalism, including organizations such as Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, Young Life, and Fuller Theological Seminary. If Billy Graham was the face of modern evangelicalism, Hammond argues that Taylor, as a chief donor and the founding treasurer of the National Association of Evangelicals, steered its fiscal wisdom and salvation. Although I am not completely convinced Le Tourneau and Taylor were more important than twentieth-century ministers such as R. J. Rushdoony or Harold Ockenga, Hammond is right to direct our attention to the overlooked roles of businessmen in shaping modern evangelicalism, helping us understand the deep, intertwining roots of conservative politics, free market economics, and fundamentalism.