Abstract

"“Clarke has obtained Reports”: Early Credit Rating Counterintelligence in the Ledgers of R.G. Dun & Company"

Amanda Mushal, The Citadel (amanda.mushal@citadel.edu)

In the aftermath of the Panic of 1837, a new kind of American business developed, commercial credit rating agencies that promised to protect both the public interest and individual subscribers from future financial convulsions. Recruiting correspondents from local communities, these agencies would investigate the creditworthiness of businesses that sought to purchase goods on credit, then distribute their intelligence to subscribers, thus allowing wholesalers to minimize risk in long-distance trade.

However, the agencies’ intelligence-gathering operations were, critics charged, vulnerable both to genuine error and malicious rumor-mongering. And since businesses were barred from receiving copies of their own reports, information and misinformation detrimental to an entrepreneur’s credit could circulate among subscribers without the subject’s knowledge but with real consequences for his or her ability to conduct business.

Using the nineteenth-century South Carolina ledgers of R.G. Dun & Company, this paper will analyze how the subjects of credit reports mobilized family connections, their own creditors among agency subscribers, and one branch office itself to combat negative credit reports. As frantic internal notes attest, savvy businessmen and -women leveraged their contacts to find out what was being said about them. And reports from the Charleston branch office reveal that others approached the office in an effort to shape their reports. Building on work by Rowena Olegario, Naomi Lamoreaux, and others on family credit networks, this paper will trace the connections along which counterintelligence as well as credit moved. Similarly to Scott Sandage’s analysis of a long-running suit against R.G. Dun, it will also use both the contents of the credit reports and an artifact analysis of the ledgers to analyze how the Agency responded to threats of exposure. It will thus explore how ordinary businesspeople—honest or otherwise—sought to counter the expanding control of credit agencies over American business.