by David Wolman
As world-changing of an invention as coinage was, it was proving to be a less than ideal form of money.
BACK AT JIM’S GRILL IN BOWMAN, Pastor Guest admits without hesitation that he and his wife benefit from modern electronic conveniences. “We have a savings account, and we have a credit card, yes we do. But we try not to use it because we don’t want to go into debt,” he says. People want cash, though, because it has a measure of freedom. “If you have something I want, and if I have cash, we can transact right now.”
Like many people and institutions, Guest believes the writing is on the wall as far as cash is concerned, in light of the sweep of technological advances over the past half century. “Money’s destiny is to become digital” was how a 2002 study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development put it.9 Guest thinks it will happen sooner than most people realize. Indeed, if you follow a script of end-time events that includes the Beast’s takeover of buying and selling, an end to cash has to happen.
Guest isn’t frightened, though. “God knows what he’s doing. Those who have the Lord in their hearts have nothing to fear.” But he does worry for others. He doesn’t say so, but considering the Bible and the cinderblock-size reference book he gave me yesterday, I’m pretty sure this includes me.
We finish our coffee and head toward the register to settle up. On the beam next to the counter is an antique sign that reads: “Beware of pickpockets and loose women.”
“Thank you, Chris. That was real nice,” says Guest, handing a $10 bill to owner Chris White. “Now here,” Guest says to me, gesturing to the register, “they only take cash. No credit cards.”
Guest is the kind of gracious host who would never have let me pay, which is good because I can’t. When I first set out to explore physical money’s role in our lives, I decided to give this inquiry a personal twist by attempting to avoid cash for an entire year. In so doing, I hoped to glimpse just how feasible or unrealistic it would be to completely do away with it.
I ask White why he refuses to accept plastic. He looks me straight in the eye for an awkwardly extended moment, perhaps wondering if I’m a covert operative with the IRS.
“It’s just easy,” he finally says. “Simple. We like to keep things simple’round here.” White proceeds to make change as if on autopilot.
“Chris also took the course a while back,” Guest says. “The one on the Revelation that I teach at Elberton Christian School, about the Mark of the Beast and the steps.”
“Oh.” I look back over to White. “Well then, there’s that reason too . . . ” I say, trailing off so as to indicate that I’ve been briefed about electronic money’s role as precursor to the coming carnage.
White gives a single nod. “Yes, there is.”
“And those credit card companies want to pinch the pot, too,” says Guest. “Taking a percentage of your business.”
“That there’s another reason,” says White. “Now we are up to three.”
We thank him for breakfast, and as we head out the door, Guest tells me White sometimes gives out copies of Steps Toward the Mark of the Beast. “I meant to bring him a few more today. I don’t charge nothing for it.”
PAPER MONEY WAS REBORN in Europe in the seventeenth century. Coins and precious metals of specific weight were still the “it” form of money, but some goldsmiths were about to change that. People would head down to the local goldsmith to have their gold or silver fashioned into jewelry or, if they were down on their luck, have their jewelry fashioned into gold coins or bars—a centuries-old foreshadowing of today’s depressing “We Buy Gold!” ads on late-night cable, and the popular History Channel reality show Pawn Stars.
When you give a goldsmith your gold or silver goods, he gives you a receipt as evidence that he’s got your money and you’ll soon get it back. That slip of paper represents an amount of gold. Provided you have ample trust in the goldsmith, and the butcher does too, there’s no reason you can’t exchange “goldsmith notes” for lamb chops.10 Goldsmiths soon realized that as long as people weren’t checking up daily on their deposited gold, they could hand out—issue—more paper than what numerically corresponded to the stock of gold in their charge. Voila: modern banking was born.
The next leap in the evolution of cash came in colonial-era America, when paper money went from being backed by coins or bullion to being backed by a government’s promise to eventually pay out in coins, or pay out in something. In a way, this development marked the second coming of the Yuan banknotes, but with a crucial difference: in China the ruling authority, the issuer, concealed the fact that the paper no longer represented a corresponding stash of coins or bullion. With modern money, no one pretends.
Before independence, America’s disparate colonial economies struggled with a very material financial hang-up: there just wasn’t enough money to go around. The colonists were importing many of their needed goods from Europe, so the pennies and shillings that made it into their purses were soon traveling back across the Atlantic. Colonial governments attempted to solve this problem by using tobacco, nails, and animal pelts for currency, assigning them a set amount of shillings or pennies so that they could intermix with the existing system.
The most successful ad hoc currency was wampum, a particular kind of bead made from the shells of ocean critters. But eventually the value of this currency, like that of other alternative currencies of the day, was undermined by oversupply and counterfeiting.11 (That’s right: counterfeit wampum. They were produced by dyeing like-shaped shells with berry juice, mimicking the purple color of the real thing.)
It was a crew of Puritans from Boston who first put their faith in paper. Initially, the Massachusetts Bay Colony tried to issue colonial coinage. The pieces themselves, struck in 1652, were made from a mash-up of poor-quality silver and were soon outlawed by the Brits. Less than a decade later the colonists tried again. They were forced to, really, because they owed money to the crown to help fund Britain’s war against France, yet lacked any currency with which to pay up. They called the paper “bills of credit.” The local government essentially said to the people: Here, just use this. It’s real money. We’ll sort out redeem-ability later. Due to a combination of faith in government and, probably more so, no better option, the people began using the new currency.
Cash similar to what we have today had finally arrived. Country to country, it still varied: some issuances were from private banks, some were from state-chartered banks; some were certificates of deposit, others were bills of credit or promissory notes from the government—as in, We promise that this will be valuable someday, as long as you never ask if today is that day. There were endless debates, from prairie farmlands to the floor of Congress, about whether this paper was real money or just a smoke-and-mirrors scheme destined to end badly. In the United States that dispute, between the fear of paper and the advantages of national currency, would rage for more than a century, and it is even front and center in the Constitution.
During the Continental Congress, the founding fathers deliberately forbid the nascent federal government from issuing “bills of credit.” Paper money, one delegate noted, was “as alarming as the Mark of the Beast.” The federal government was, however, granted authority “to coin money, regulate the value thereof . . . and fit the standard of weights and measure.”12
But paper issued by the federal government would get its chance, thanks to the Civil War and its economic fallout. To foot the bill of the Union Army’s campaign, the government had to issue $450 million in greenbacks (about $8.1 billion in 2011 dollars). They may have been unconstitutional, but they worked, making it possible to buy equipment and pay soldiers. War has a habit of quieting concerns about the currency’s backing.
The end of the war, however, brought with it inflation and renewed attention to the constitutionality of paper money. It was Salmon P. Chase (P for Portland, not paper), who, first as the secretary of the Treasury Department, made the greenbacks possible. Then, as a Supreme Court
justice less than a decade later, he made one of history’s most famous flip-flops, ruling that currency notes were illegal. He made this determination despite the fact that the face printed on them was none other than his own.
A reshuffled Supreme Court—two new justices were appointed by President Ulysses Grant the same day of that initial verdict against paper money—would quickly reverse the ruling. Two subsequent decisions in what became known as the Legal Tender Cases sealed the deal: the Constitution may not explicitly grant the federal government power to issue bills of credit, but it had the implicit right to do so because governing over a country, or at least this one, would be flat-out impossible without it.13
Before the advent of a single circulating national currency, though, thousands of private banks issued their own notes, sometimes backed by bullion or coinage in a safe, but just as often backed by nothing at all. This was a monetary free-for-all, and—considering the greenback’s universal acceptability now—it’s strange to imagine how, less than 150 years ago, money in America was a smorgasbord. Countless varieties of paper money circulated throughout the land, most issued by unchartered “Wildcat” banks, and much of it of questionable authenticity and unstable value.
Even during that chaotic time, however, the paper’s value always depended, at least in theory, on the idea that you could exchange it for a weight of gold or silver. The conviction that precious metals are value incarnate was still as strong as it had been 2,000 years prior. It was inconceivable that currency could have value without this link to metals—that currency value might be fluid. That too would soon change, during what was the final stage in this metamorphosis from ancient money to the cash in your wallet.
The first step was in 1933, when President Franklin Roosevelt called in the public’s gold supply as part of a radical effort to rebuild the economy during the Great Depression. Then in 1944, representatives of the major economies of the free world anointed the U.S. dollar to become the de facto currency of the globe—to replace gold, sort of. The dollar would still be locked at an exchange value to gold of $35 an ounce. Bizarre as it may sound, a small group of men sitting around a table determined that a 1-ounce nugget of gold would be worth, not $34 or $36.75, but $35. Other world currencies, instead of having their own correspondence to gold, would fix their value to the dollar, and wouldn’t be allowed to change their exchange rates without special permission from the newly minted International Monetary Fund.
The rub was that this postwar agreement gave other countries the right to exchange their stashes of dollars for gold. By the early 1970s this policy, even if rarely acted upon, was becoming an increasingly obvious absurdity, as foreign banks held an amount of dollars equal to three times the amount of gold the U.S. owned.14 The situation aggravated foreign governments because a war- and deficit-weakened U.S. economy also hurt the dollar, and that in turn dragged down other countries’ currencies and economies. Most prominent among the ticked off was France, which converted billions of dollars into gold, hoping other countries would follow suit and force the U.S. to get its financial house in order.
But others didn’t follow suit. Instead, on August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon severed the last remaining connective tissue between a material substance and national currencies. Nobody could exchange greenbacks for gold anymore. The number of dollars required to buy an ounce of gold would from here on out be determined by the markets, just like it is for oil, sod, dental equipment, and tulips. Currencies would be measured against each other, like untethered balloons carried on a breeze.
The dollar, meanwhile, remained the anchor currency of the world: the one ring that kinda rules them all. Other governments hold on to dollars and use them for paying debts, and in the aisles of the global supermarket of goods, most items are priced in U.S. dollars.
This is what’s so weird about commentators in the U.S. proudly declaring that the dollar is the most stable currency in the world, as if this were because of American economic policy today, when it’s really just the result of negotiations a few generations ago that made it the backbone of the whole system. The greenback is stable because the U.S. economy is huge and the United States is a terrific republic—OK. But it’s also stable because everyone else’s well-being depends on it, and on belief in its stability. That may be changing, though.
As for paper money itself, the end of the gold standard meant that cash had become a total abstraction. Its value now comes from fiat, government mandate. It’s a Latin word meaning let there be. In God we better trust.
HEADING EAST on rural Highway 172, Guest and I discuss failed currencies of old. The currency of the Confederate States of America is one of history’s most potent examples, certainly in this part of the country. Those promises to “pay the bearer” were first issued by the Confederacy in 1861 to fund the South’s Civil War effort. As the war dragged on and the conflict began tipping in the North’s favor, people understandably began to lose confidence in the Confederacy’s ability to pay its debts. The rapidly increasing amount of paper added into circulation didn’t help—all told, the banknote runs had a face value of $1.7 billion—and the currency eventually lost nearly all of its value, compounding the economic hardship of the defeated South. “They just printed all that money, but there was no backing, so it collapsed,” says Guest. “It’s now worth more as a collectible.”
Guest’s account reminds me of a story I once saw online. A routine presentation by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to the Senate Finance Committee ended with a Tourette’s-like outburst of existentialism, undermining in one fell swoop the entire economic system as we know it. Pausing midway through a sentence about the prospect of raising a key interest rate, the chairman was seized by an unearthly force.
“You know what? It doesn’t matter,” Bernanke said. “None of this—this so-called ‘money’—really matters at all. It’s just an illusion.” Brandishing a handful of greenbacks, he set them on the table between him and the microphone. “Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless.” Then he pulled out a lighter and lit them on fire.15
Thank God for The Onion. Bernanke, of course, would never say such things, and he probably doesn’t carry a lighter, let alone big wads of cash. Still, you don’t have to be Ron Paul to hear whispers of truth in this tale. “The money we use now is a lie,” says Guest, as we drive past chicken farms and the river where he used to swim as a boy. “When the dollar collapses, a lot of people will be holding useless paper because they exchanged things of value—food, land, shelter—for nothing.” I’m less pessimistic than Guest about the fate of the dollar, humanity, and, for that matter, non-Christians. But I am curious about paper’s long-term place in all of this.
To further contemplate the biblical implications of cash’s last stand, Guest and I decided to drive to a spot on the edge of the bucolic community of Dewey Rose. This part of Georgia is blessed with massive granite deposits, and chances are, most of the more expensive kitchen countertops in Atlanta, if not much of the region, came from here. That same gray stone was also used to make the weirdest monument in America: the Georgia Guidestones.
We turn right onto Guidestones Road and park in the small gravel lot. No one else is here. Thirty years ago an enigmatic religious group decided that a set of post-apocalyptic commandments, etched into huge granite slabs and arranged with astronomically significant exactitude, belonged right here, by the side of Highway 77.
The Guidestones have been nicknamed “American Stonehenge,” although my first impression upon arriving at this hedgerow-enclosed square of desolate hilltop is less awe and more disorientation. It could be a gaudy mausoleum for local hero Ty Cobb, or possibly a misplaced war memorial—not ground zero for a freaky Ten Commandments redux. Yet here it is.a
Four light-gray slabs, each almost 20 feet tall and a foot-and-a-half wide, stand symmetrically around a central, narrower stone, making the shape of an “X” if you were looking down from your spaceship. The ston
es are positioned to track the sun’s migration across the sky, and at noon every day the sun shines down through a tiny hole drilled through a capstone, 9 feet 8 inches by 6 feet 6 inches, with a message in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sanskrit, Babylonian cuneiform, and classical Greek etched into each of its sides.
The text is a sometimes innocuous, sometimes cryptic, sometimes eugenicist collection of ten instructions, elegantly engraved into the eight long walls of granite. The same message is repeated in the world’s most widely spoken languages. Dewey Rose hasn’t been flooded with Indian tourists over the past few decades, but the Hindi is here for them when they get here.
Hands jammed in his pockets and wool hat pulled over his ears to defend against the frigid wind, Guest reads aloud:
“‘Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.’ Well gee,” he says. “How are you going to do that? It sort of makes you think about Hitler. Let’s see. ‘Guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity.’” Pretty much the same deal. “And this one here,” continues Guest. “‘Unite humanity with a living new language.’ Maybe that is a return to Babel, which God ended, remember?” Another commandment calls for an international court, a concept suggestive of the one-world government that believers who share Guest’s faith say is part of the Antichrist’s grand scheme.
Guest has visited this spot maybe a dozen times. He even held a church service here once. “I wanted to show everyone what others believe. It gets you thinking about the radical ways that people want to change the world, ways that are foretold by the Scripture. A lot of folks are going to fall for that,” he says, pointing up at the strange directives for shaping a New World Order.
