My response to May's response to my review of his biography of Albert Gallatin

My response to May's response to my review of his biography of Albert Gallatin

I recently reviewed Gregory May’s biography of Albert Gallatin, Jefferson’s Treasure, on EH.NET here: http://eh.net/book_reviews/jeffersons-treasure-how-albert-gallatin-saved-the-new-nation-from-debt/ As anticipated, he has responded, as is his right. Rather than provide his book with more publicity than it deserves, I rebut his response here on my blog, where only interested parties are likely to find it.

As Deidre McCloskey explains in her excellent Economical Writing, if an author has to inform a reviewer what his or her book is really about, the author has already lost readers. May seems not to have understood a point that I made clear in my review, i.e., that my assessment would have been quite different if written for a different audience, e.g. political historians. He at least concedes that he has written a political biography, i.e., a work not usually of interest to economic historians, which was the thesis of my review for EH.NET (to wit, an audience of economic historians).

May also seems to have misunderstood my critique of his generalizations about early US bond ownership, which was not that some rich city dudes did not own bonds but that they were far from the only people to own them and that it is not clear that they owned a disproportionate share of them given their relative wealth. He also fails to see the importance of the fact that the bonds were actively traded, i.e., that ownership was not static but in fact changed frequently.

Ditto May’s complaint about the whiskey tax. My claim was not that the whiskey tax was solely to prevent distortion of the domestic economy, only that May failed to mention that fact, which is a highly pertinent one to economic and policy historians.

May’s book contains no bibliography, rendering it bloody difficult indeed to know for certain what he did or did not cite someplace in the book. My complaint about missing Freeman’s Affairs of Honor refers to specific passages where it should have been, but was not, cited. Moreover, it was meant as only one of numerous examples where the best sources were missed.

May’s complaint about my summoning of charivari again misses my point, which was that economic historians and other readers not conversant with “rough music” might think the Federalists who serenaded Gallatin one night were acting in an unusual way when in fact they were not. The fact that such tactics were employed primarily on “not important persons” only reinforces the notion that in fact Gallatin was not important at that time, that he was more infamous than famous, at least according to Federalists.

If May had read books like Bill White’s America’s Fiscal Constitution or Robert Hormats’ The Price of Liberty, he would know that the United States did NOT, in fact, “embrace … debt finance” long ago but did so only recently, basically since Bush II according to White. That is an important point because it means there is still time to revert to our superior Hamiltonian (and Gallatinian, etc.) fiscal constitution, which allowed for deficit financing only in wartime, with the debt paid down in nominal and real terms during periods of peacetime prosperity.

So I stand by my original conviction that May’s biography is well-written but that it contains little new and is not astute enough economically to be of much interest to economic or policy historians.