"Rethinking the Problem of Agricultural Credit: Trade Associations, Farmers' Cooperatives, and the U.S. Government, 1913-1923"

Many historians have demonstrated the significance of private business associations in U.S. state building, and the role of the U.S. government in expanding credit markets. This paper engages with both these strands of literature by examining the role of trade associations and of cooperative marketing associations in the institutional transformation of credit distribution during and after WWI. Specifically, it asks how financial reformers contributed to legitimizing cooperative business entities previously limited by anti-trust law and analyses the role of business coordination in facilitating credit in the early 1920s. Using archival material from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the National Archives, I concentrate on two cases where the credit policy of Federal institutions depended on private business organisations. First, I examine how financial reformers associated with the Federal Reserve Board used trade associations in their efforts to transform domestic commercial credit practices in the aim of developing an open acceptance market. Second, I examine how cooperative marketing associations became a key institutional feature of what contemporaries portrayed as a secondary discount system for intermediate agricultural credit. Together, these examples show that Federal agencies reinforced the legitimacy of business cooperation and directly influenced the distribution of market power between small producers and corporate distributors.