Papers presented by Atiba Pertilla since 2019

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

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

Abstract:

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.

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2023 Detroit, MI, United States

"Staking Financial Citizenship: Immigrants and Retail Banking in the United States, 1910s–1930s"

Abstract:

Scholars have examined consumption, employment, and entrepreneurship as economic fields in which the assimilation of U.S. immigrants took place in the decades leading up to and including the 1920s quota acts, but have paid less attention to the realm of personal finance. Focusing on the period between World War I and the Great Depression, this paper uses trade magazines, ethnic newspapers, oral histories, and other sources to examine pertinent ideological shifts within both the banking sector and ethnic communities that led to increasing immigrant engagement with retail banking. Seeking more customers in a context of growing prosperity, bank officials increasingly derided the U.S. postal savings system, only recently established in 1911 to encourage the incorporation of immigrants into the financial system, as an encroachment on private enterprise. The formal banking sector (i.e., state- and federally-chartered institutions), largely controlled by “native-stock” Americans, moved from antipathy toward immigrants to embracing them through culturally-relevant marketing and the provision of desirable services (such as facilitating remittances). Simultaneously, white European immigrants in particular took advantage of this shift to reconceptualize their claims to belonging at a time of rising nativism. Building on their participation in explicitly patriotic financial events like the Liberty Loan campaigns, immigrant communities pointed to their patronage of formal financial institutions rather than postal savings or informal “immigrant banks” as an index of their assimilation. I argue that this emphasis on “financial citizenship” provided immigrants with a strategy to move away from staking claims to political participation as “free laborers”—and thus potential competitors for jobs and other economic resources with “native-stock” Americans. For the banking sector, however, the unanticipated consequence of this reconceptualization came when immigrant communities leveraged their financial citizenship to call for unprecedented federal intervention in the wake of its Great Depression collapse.

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2023 Detroit, MI, United States

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2022 Mexico City

"Revisiting the German-Jewish 'Business Elite'"

Abstract:

Histories of Wall Street have tended to posit a sharp division between New York’s “Gentile” (or “Yankee,” or “WASP”) banking firms, largely founded by men of English Christian descent, such as J.P. Morgan & Co., and those firms established by Jewish immigrants from Germany and their descendants, such as Goldman Sachs. Dating back to Barry Supple’s 1957 article on 19th-century German-Jewish financiers, these histories have argued marriage ties, cultural affinities with Germany, and religious identity helped create a “tightly knit” “business elite.” Emphasis on “Gentile” vs. “Jewish” difference has obscured how economic rather than cultural or religious ties to Germany created conditions under which German-Jewish firms succeeded. This paper examines what was German about Wall Street’s “German-Jewish” banking firms and why it mattered, contrasting the firms’ success with both New York’s German-Christian bankers who stumbled after the Civil War and Jewish businessmen descended from colonial-era immigrants who lacked international networks. The paper concludes that the firms’ German ties became obscure because the firms downplayed these connections due to pervasive hostile sentiment after World War I and then later revulsion toward Germany after the Holocaust. This has had the effect of elevating the firms’ Jewish roots, and their success in the face of prevalent anti-Semitism, into a predetermined distinguishing feature, serving to reify a distinction which played little role in shaping the actual development of American corporate finance.

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2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

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

Abstract:

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.

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2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

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