Andrew Dickson White

Fiat Money Inflation in France: How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended Andrew Dickson White

Publisher Marketing: As far back as just before our Civil War I made, in France and elsewhere, a large collection of documents which had appeared during the French Revolution, including newspapers, reports, speeches, pamphlets, illustrative material of every sort, and, especially, specimens of nearly all the Revolutionary issues of paper money, -from notes of ten thousand livres to those of one sou. Upon this material, mainly, was based a course of lectures then given to my students, first at the University of Michigan and later at Cornell University, and among these lectures, one on "Paper Money Inflation in France." This was given simply because it showed one important line of facts in that great struggle; and I recall, as if it were yesterday, my feeling of regret at being obliged to bestow so much care and labor upon a subject to all appearance so utterly devoid of practical value. I am sure that it never occurred, either to my Michigan students or to myself, that it could ever have any bearing on our own country. It certainly never entered into our minds that any such folly as that exhibited in those French documents of the eighteenth century could ever find supporters in the United States of the nineteenth. Contributor Bio:  White, Andrew Dickson Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918) did more than any other American to impress upon late nineteenth- and twentieth century thought the idea that science and religion are enemies locked in combat on an almost military scale. In 1849, he entered Geneva College and later enrolled in Yale. After graduating, White joined the University of Michigan as a lecturer in history. He returned to New York and won election to the state senate. Finally, White went on to become the first president and cofounder of Cornell University. He also is the author of books, including Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason and a 1906 autobiography.