"Competitive Charity: Savings Banks and Civil Society in Post-Civil War Baltimore, 1865–1900"

As in many large Eastern cities, several savings banks were established in Baltimore in the first half of the nineteenth century under the auspices of largely Protestant merchants, landowners, and other wealthy notables interested in inculcating “thrift” in a supposedly reckless working class. The year 1867 saw the establishment of yet another savings institution, eventually named the Metropolitan Savings Bank. In contrast to Baltimore’s other savings banks, it was established under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore and its leaders were specifically drawn from the city’s Catholic elite. Using records from the Metropolitan Savings Bank and the Savings Bank of Baltimore (the city’s largest) of their transactions with local societies and civic associations, as well as newspaper reporting on other city institutions, such as the German Savings Bank, this paper examines how Baltimore’s savings banks served as a resource for the city’s Protestant and Catholic civil society, as well as for a range of fraternal and social groups set up for the benefit of the city’s African-American and European immigrant communities. Tracing the kinds of associations which were linked to different institutions, as well as their practices in accumulating resources and maintaining their longevity, sheds light on the financial side of what has sometimes been seen as a golden age of mutual aid, and the limits of mutual aid's capacity in the face of financial crises like those of 1873 and 1893.