This dissertation examines the question of how the logic of capitalism became integral to U.S. citizenship. It argues that “pecuniary pedagogies”—lessons about money and its appropriate uses—were a central feature of childhood in the nineteenth-century United States. These lessons taught young people about private property, exchange, wage labor, and capital investment while they superimposed the idea of meritocracy over the constant reality of inequality. Pecuniary pedagogies were also ubiquitous and multifarious, revealing themselves in documentary records, material objects, visual sources, and diverse forms of print culture—all of which are analyzed here. This dissertation demonstrates that such lessons played a vital role in producing a culture of capitalism that connected regions of the nation through shared learning technologies, helping to fix capitalist subjectivities in U.S. children.
“Learning the Values of a Dollar” reveals the importance of cultural factors to the consolidation of capitalism in the United States. Focusing on children of all backgrounds aged fourteen and younger, this study sheds light on how capitalism became a fundamental feature of nineteenth-century U.S. childhood whether young people were primarily workers or consumers. This suggests that experiencing the economic system itself, particularly through one’s labor, was not a necessary precondition for the subjective rationalization of capitalism’s features. Instead, in many cases, cultures of economy alone taught children to accept the dimensions of capitalism as both natural and beyond criticism.
The nineteenth century was also a time of deepening economic inequalities that were often experienced through identities defined by race and gender. This dissertation exposes one way in which such inequalities were constructed and maintained in the United States by considering pecuniary pedagogies through the lens of “capitalist citizenship.” The capitalist citizen was someone with the tools necessary for economic success (including knowledge and access to capital) and who was seen as worthy of belonging on the basis of culturally-informed understandings of correct economic behavior. This dissertation reveals that nonwhite, poor, and female children were at marked disadvantages as potential capitalist citizens. Analyzing pecuniary pedagogies reveals cultural practices that worked in tandem with the structural features of capitalism to produce and justify identity-based inequalities.