Abstract

"Staking Financial Citizenship: Immigrants and Retail Banking in the United States, 1910s–1930s"

Atiba Pertilla, German Historical Institute (akpertilla@gmail.com)

Scholars have examined consumption, employment, and entrepreneurship as economic fields in which the assimilation of U.S. immigrants took place in the decades leading up to and including the 1920s quota acts, but have paid less attention to the realm of personal finance. Focusing on the period between World War I and the Great Depression, this paper uses trade magazines, ethnic newspapers, oral histories, and other sources to examine pertinent ideological shifts within both the banking sector and ethnic communities that led to increasing immigrant engagement with retail banking. Seeking more customers in a context of growing prosperity, bank officials increasingly derided the U.S. postal savings system, only recently established in 1911 to encourage the incorporation of immigrants into the financial system, as an encroachment on private enterprise. The formal banking sector (i.e., state- and federally-chartered institutions), largely controlled by “native-stock” Americans, moved from antipathy toward immigrants to embracing them through culturally-relevant marketing and the provision of desirable services (such as facilitating remittances). Simultaneously, white European immigrants in particular took advantage of this shift to reconceptualize their claims to belonging at a time of rising nativism. Building on their participation in explicitly patriotic financial events like the Liberty Loan campaigns, immigrant communities pointed to their patronage of formal financial institutions rather than postal savings or informal “immigrant banks” as an index of their assimilation. I argue that this emphasis on “financial citizenship” provided immigrants with a strategy to move away from staking claims to political participation as “free laborers”—and thus potential competitors for jobs and other economic resources with “native-stock” Americans. For the banking sector, however, the unanticipated consequence of this reconceptualization came when immigrant communities leveraged their financial citizenship to call for unprecedented federal intervention in the wake of its Great Depression collapse.