"Immigrants, Bankers, and the Social Meaning of Money after World War I"

This paper examines changes in the use of financial services by European immigrants in the United States in the decade after World War I and their social effects. Immigrants' primary engagement with the financial system before the war had largely been through their patronage of unregulated immigrant banking firms that helped them remit cash to their communities of origin. This flow of funds was largely shunted into Liberty Loans and other forms of U.S. government finance during the war. After 1918, immigrants and their new wealth, thanks to wartime economic expansion, became appealing to a growing number of corporations and firms. Long-established, chartered banks which had previously ignored foreign-born customers began non-English-language marketing and tailoring their services to immigrants' needs. Immigrant banking firms, meanwhile, faced a new set of challenges and opportunities. The collapse of the German and Russian empires and other financial crises overturned the solid, predictable system of exchange rates that had characterized the gold standard era at its zenith. In its place, speculation on foreign exchange appealed to banking firms and their clients for motives of both profit and patriotism. Using lawsuit records, bankruptcy files, correspondence, articles from trade publications, and other sources, the paper illustrates how immigrants' engagement with the American financial system came to be based on abstract instruments and unstable systems of value rather than cold, hard cash.