Counterfeit Detectors: The Literary Origins of the US Secret Service

Abstract This article examines the US Secret Service, a federal agency created during the Civil War to protect the greenback against counterfeiters, and its literary origins. It explores an overlooked chapter in the history of American crime and detective fiction, one that has special relevance today with the rise of cryptocurrencies. The author argues that Secret Service agents who turned authors, as well as professional writers enlisted to support the agency, between 1865 and 1920 developed a unique version of the detective narrative with a particular ideological function: to discredit counterfeiting as a politically subversive act and to legitimize the configurations of political and economic power consolidated by the federal government in the decades following the Civil War. Cast as a literary detective, the Secret Service agent is interchangeable with any other agent, ubiquitous across space and time, and possesses unimpeachable integrity—and so embodies the very attributes that gave the greenback its value as a fiat currency. The Secret Service narrative transforms detective fiction into a celebration of a nationalism that links patriotic sentiments to recently created symbols of federal authority and redefines popular sovereignty as a passive, sympathetic identification with dutiful federal agents, who collectively stand before the reader as the personification of an implacable and alienated state power.