"Banking on the Future: The Making of the American Bankers’ Association, 1873-1913"

After the Panic of 1873, a coalition of East Coast and Midwestern bankers formed the first US interregional professional association of national and private banks and trust companies. Yet the crisis was just one among manifold reasons that bankers organized the American Bankers’ Association (ABA) to facilitate inter-bank negotiations. Bankers’ correspondence on other concerns in the wake of the panic – the resumption of specie payment and the reduction of taxation and postage – also helped to shape a new, democratic vision of US banking in which ABA served the entire United States, equally.
Building on recent histories of nineteenth-century US political economy (e.g. Sharron Murphy, Noam Maggor, Mary Bridges, Nicolas Barreyre, etc.), my paper will reconstruct US “financial infrastructure” between the Panic of 1873 and the Federal Reserve act in 1913. In particular, it will contend that ABA envisioned a future for US banking that was neither narrowly sectional nor merely improvisational. Like the many trade associations of the period, ABA articulated a clear, prescriptive agenda, but few, if any, managed to influence and coordinate national policy to the extent that ABA did.
Through ABA’s convention proceedings and publications, I argue that US bankers imagined a future in which technical advance, labor-saving methods, and currency reform would allow specie, in any denomination, to flow effortlessly between Europe, the Atlantic seaboard, and the Midwestern periphery. While such an imaginary might be expected in a period rife with forward-looking associations, political-economic expansion, and a sectionalist banking system, the measures ABA undertook to realize this future are noteworthy. In the years leading up to 1913, ABA successfully lobbied lawmakers, devised standards, developed protocols for the training of managers and clerks, and improved the security of capital flows by hiring the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to police robbers and frauds. My analysis of ABA as a financial infrastructure shows how US bankers challenged sectionalist biases to build the underpinnings of US political economy’s twentieth-century coalescence and ascension.