Glory M. Liu traces how Americans have read, interpreted, and instrumentalized Adam Smith's ideas from the founding era to the present, showing that his popular image as champion of unfettered capitalism is a historical invention. Liu, a political scientist, examines how each generation of Americans has constructed its own Adam Smith to serve contemporary purposes. The founders read Smith as a critic of mercantilism relevant to their revolt against Britain. Antebellum Americans debated whether Smith supported or opposed slavery. Progressive Era reformers claimed Smith for critiques of monopoly and inequality. Cold War conservatives transformed Smith into an icon of free-market capitalism opposing Soviet planning. Liu demonstrates that Smith's actual writings, which emphasized moral philosophy, sympathy, and the limits of self-interest, support none of these appropriations fully. She shows how selective quotation and decontextualized interpretation created the Smith invoked in contemporary economic debates. The book illuminates how classic texts function in political argument, becoming screens onto which subsequent generations project their own concerns rather than sources of stable meaning. Liu challenges readers to return to Smith's actual writings while recognizing that such returns are themselves historically conditioned. The result is both intellectual history and a meditation on how ideas travel through time and acquire meanings their authors could not have anticipated.