Financing the American Dream

A Cultural History of Consumer Credit

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by Lendol Calder

Princeton University Press

Due/Published May 2001, 400 pages, paper

ISBN 0691074550

New in paper (S01).

Calder shows that the conception of a golden age of American thrift, when citizens lived sensibly within their means and worked hard to stay out of debt is in fact a myth. Here, he presents a cultural history of the rise of consumer credit in America. He focuses on the years between 1890 and 1940, when the legal, institutional, and moral bases of today's consumer credit were established, and, in an epilogue, takes the story up to the present. He draws on a wide variety of sources--including personal diaries and letters, government and business records, newspapers, advertisements, movies, and the words of such figures as Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, and P. T. Barnum--to show that debt has always been with us. He challenges the idea that consumer credit has eroded traditional values. Instead, he argues, monthly payments have imposed strict, externally reinforced disciplines on consumers, making the culture of consumption less a playground for hedonists than an extension of what Max Weber called the "iron cage" of disciplined rationality and hard work. Throughout, Calder keeps in clear view the human face of credit relations. He re-creates the Dickensian world of nineteenth-century pawnbrokers, takes us into the dingy backstairs offices of loan sharks, into small-town shops and New York department stores, and explains who resorted to which types of credit and why. He also traces the evolving moral status of consumer credit, showing how it changed from a widespread but morally dubious practice into an almost universal and generally accepted practice by World War II.

"Americans feel ashamed about so-called consumption debt, writes Mr. Calder in prose that's as clear as a bell, because they're psychologically frozen in a 100-year-old mindset. . . . Mr. Calder's argument is so deliciously seditious that you have to wonder: What's wrong with this picture? . . . Mr. Calder's sections on pawnbrokers, door-to-door peddlers and small lenders are worth the price of admission alone."--Cynthia Crossen, The Wall Street Journal

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Credit, Consumer Culture, and the American Dream
Getting Trusted: Debt and Credit before Consumer Credit
Beautiful Credit! The Foundation of Modern Society
Debt in the Victorian Money Management Ethic
Getting the Goods: The Making of a Credit Revolution
Small-Loan Lending and the Rise of the Personal Finance Company
Hard Payments: The Rise of Installment Selling
Getting Credit: The Legitimization of Consumer Debt
From Consumptive Credit to Consumer Credit
Consumer Credit in the Great Depression
Epilogue
Notes
Index