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i would love to send home with you, but i think the magic of it for me has been that you’re good just like you are. they really are not trying to change anybody. they’d like you to show up just as you are. and that’s that goes back to this young man’s question you know it’s that’s a good place to start just to accept one another. right where we are. and maybe we’ll get better together know but yeah and i will say that for all of you again is easy you can google map it and you are always the thing that president carter always expressed to visitors. the last thing he ever said to me is, you know, you’re always welcome. and that is true for everyone so come on to plains. time for one more question. okay. and if you will say think phil has an incredible back. i mean, honored to be moderated

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by this man. so please express your thanks to phil for, wellgood morning, eve. thank you for joining us here at southern festival books in the open room, i’m alex carroll. i’m an associate director of the science and engineering library at vanderbilt university. so if you’re visiting us from elsewhere, welcome to nashville. it’s my distinct pleasure to be joined here today by mary bridges. she’s author of dollars in dominion us bankers and the making of superpower. mary is historian of the 20th century united states and is currently in earnest. may fellow at harvard university’s belfer center. and most importantly, at least for today as far as i’m concerned, mary holds, a ph.d. in history from vanderbilt university. so, mary, thank you so much,

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being here with us today. and, you know, of course i want to talk about the book. we’re going to talk about the book. but first, i want to talk a little bit about your path to writing this book. you know, i think a lot of us, when we imagine sitting down to write a book of history right, imagine them going to be attracted to maybe writing the big ideas book, right? they want be bernard bailyn writing ideological the american revolution or maybe close to home. the right, right. the big person book like john meacham’s american lion. so how does someone land on ending up writing a book on the history of u.s. finance and making not on purpose for sure. i definitely like looking back. i have done italian gastronomy or something like i don’t know why. well, so i was i had a few different careers before i went back to graduate school to do my ph.d. and i was a business reporter for little while, and i i was going to these meetings. basically, i wanted to understand how u.s. companies got global and i found myself in

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these situation where i go to meetings and, there would be, you know, heads of smaller states and the head of the world health organization and, you know, really big deal humans. and all of a sudden like the ceo, a u.s. tech firm or an investment bank would walk through and like heads would turn waters would part and it was just this incredibly outsized power that didn’t really map to an understand doing of history. i had learned in school was organizer presidential administrations and wars and treaties and i i wanted to understand this rise of u.s. multinational roles and how u.s. companies became a major feature of u.s. global and i was a reporter and you got to follow the money. and if you do that, you’re going to have to write about.

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and so that’s that’s how i got this subject matter. and then it turns out if you’re writing about banks in this time, you also have to write about the fed. and so there was a begrudgingly became a historian of both institutions, in part because of the larger story that i wanted to about the rise of the united states great. and you. one of the things that i really love this book is right in the introduction. you really make a case that this is kind of the specific moment to think about, kind of the rise of the u.s. as a financial superpower. but you also kind of start by forwarding that there are two kind of popular accounts people might have in their head. that kind of miss some of what you think is the real backbone on in here. and so i was hoping to invite you to read a brief portion of the book where i think you make that case. thanks. and yeah, so i was trying to figure how to set up the book and how to i didn’t i don’t really self-identify a banking historian and the ways that i

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was wanting to understand banks were a little bit. i maybe a little bit different than way you’d read about it in the financial times or something like that. so i was trying to write introduction that would really bring you into a way of seeing banks that made sense to me for this time. so this is from the introduction. the of the global financial power of. the united states is often told from one of two perspectives. the first account leads with a person, perhaps a man in a sweaty wool suit. the man is banker and he steps off a steamer into, a crowded port. we can imagine a version of his story animated in cinematic detail. the camera closely tracking his moves our fictionalized hero. let’s call him fred weaves through buenos aries argentina. in the early days of world war one, the city bustles. carriages filled the tree lined streets, and the man hears languages. spanish, german, russian and

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more. he walks beyond the crowded port and architecture surprises him. the elegant buildings have columns, balustrades and arched doorways. he squints and wonders if he accidentally landed in europe. fred’s assignment is to serve as a sub accountant in a u.s. bank in buenos aires. the is a promotion from his last job in manila where he helped open the first u.s. bank in the philippines. the work in manila was a slog. his bank had rented space in the former horse stables of a chinese merchant, and the branch flooded during season when it rained. fred had to find local men with wheelbarrows to move the bank silver into the of a european competitor, buenos aires, in 1916 is a different world his new branch has hot water and an elevator the situation in europe war instability in london has left everyone wanting dollars his bosses in new york transferred him to argentina to. help the overwhelmed staff. new york should have sent a half

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dozen but no more train staff available. fred does what he can. his colleagues organize a welcome for him at the american club and next week the chamber of commerce will host a luncheon for him and the new manager, u.s. steel, who just arrived from the dollars star is rising and fred plans follow its ascent. there are receptions to attend, credits to extend, and locals to meet. so so in contrast to this character driven approach, there’s another perspective on the rise of u.s. power in the 20th century that emphasizes the roles of institutions driving u.s. imperial expansion. in this version, governments, the military and banks claim stage at close of the 19th century. u.s. politicians a new era of imperial. the nation’s tycoons are flush with the fortunes they amassed westward expansion and industrialized action. now these financiers, industrialists search for new projects farther afield in mexico, caribbean and china,

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together with politicians, the republican party. this cluster of elites keeps a tight grip on political. they rebuff populist calls for looser money, debt and free silver instead. they want sound money anchoring, the u.s. dollar to a specific quantity of gold as well as anglo-saxon exceptionalism and spreading their civilizational gospel. these twin drives for political influence and commercial expansion propel the u.s. military into new territories overseas. in the early years of the 20th century, u.s. politician advanced their vision of u.s. ascendance by claiming control over the philippines, rico, cuba and much of the caribbean. some leaders want to expand that authority over the western hemisphere and increase access to markets in asia to manage their new colonial acquisitions. u.s. officials create legal and social institutions, govern restive populations, secure access to raw materials, and

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ensure demand for u.s. exports. in doing so, they impose racialized social orders and collaborate u.s. financiers who operate, from a shared playbook of white supremacist and patriarchal scripts, a range of u.s. institutions and actors from the u.s. department of the interior to banks to banana magnates engineers join in expanding imperial power in the early 20th century and accelerating the rise of the dollar. so i go on to argue that both of these counts are missing something. the sweary banker, a suit, and the imperial institutional versions they offer important insights into a transformative moment in u.s. history during the first few decades around the turn of the century, the united states shifted from being basically a bit player in geopolitics hicks to leading a new hierarchy of international political economy. after world war one. but dollars in dominion argues that both these frameworks, the

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individualist and the neglect features of the emergence u.s. global power, they overlook the technology’s practices information systems and relationship apps that defined u.s. global. in other words, they overlook how the infrastructure of empire takes. beautiful thank you for thank for sharing that and i really. i can’t invite you enough to look and check out dollar in dominion it really that introduction just kind of whet your appetite about where dr. bridges is going to go from there. so one of the things that i really appreciate your work is that you use archival material to really kind of pick apart at those two other counter narratives that we have. right. and you really start to look at how there is what you call the infrastructure going on here, right? and this infrastructure is not predetermined and it is not some superstructure that was predestined to create a super power. but whether it’s wobbly, it’s precarious, it’s ad hoc, it’s

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chaotic. and i wonder if you can walk us a little bit about what you found in those archival materials and even the anecdote you have in here as to the origin of the manila folder that you ended up looking at. so i’m a reader. i want the kind of cool material details, but try not to bring those in at the expense of the larger storyline. but you know, this is a time period banking in general. like it’s really easy to miss the gritty of things when you just of step back and let financial abstraction dominate. talk about banking. and then at a certain point, like those details really snag you. so there were a few moments in the archives where i just we’re like something just kind latched in my head. one of so the the book, the first part of the book focuses on this incredibly rickety institution that was the first u.s. multination general bank called the international banking

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corporation, and its early work was really a british copycat project. the british were the forces in global banking were great at it. they had decades of experience. so i to learn about how abc approached work, i needed to learn a little bit about british banking too. and so there was one. there was a couple of different lions in some of the banking manuals i was reading that the first manager, british manager to the to a british bank in buenos aires got off his steamer with trunks of doubloon. so it’s just like trying to picture him like hauling his gold off a ship so there was, there were trunks of doubloons the gold coins and then trunks of ledgers because they needed the right bookkeeper materials to keep, keep track where their money was. so as much as possible, i tried to keep kind of materiality in in story because it’s not just, you know, high math it’s it’s it’s people it’s stuff.

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it’s it’s crops and one of the details that that came out that i hadn’t even realized is one of the arguments of the book is this process of international banking is really tied up with processes of making credit information and changing the way that bankers start to approach credit, because the 19th century approaches to credit are really dominated by very person to person relation based personal list accounts. that famous j.p. morgan line about founded that the foundation credit is character really plays out in banking at this time period and in the early 20th century credit increasingly becomes pieces of paper and you have to put those pieces of paper in folders and you create filing systems and you have filing cabinets in those cabinets are in new york and you have credit libraries. and so there were magazines for,

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credit professionals about this new technology of the manila folder. and so i was all of this stuff about bank u.s. bankers in the philippines and i didn’t even realize at first that part of the stuff that they were finance ing was the export of hemp, which is the material that’s going into these sturdy this new technology, the manila folder. so it’s this whole of mash up of an economy sometimes when you kind of can pull the thread of a particular detail has these ripples that help you understand. those connections. and i think i’m wondering, many of you just learned that the manila folder actually is tied to the city in the philippines. that was something that i learned when reading book. and i think one of the things that really jumps out to me, right, as you mention that we’re at this kind of moment where, you see the birth of quantification, right, where they’re moving away from this 19th century person to person. and i’m wonder if you can talk a little bit about what you find in these archival materials

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where people are beginning to figure out how do i extend credit in a place where i don’t anyone and i don’t even speak the what does that look like? what did that look like for bankers arriving in buenos aires? one of those details that i got snagged on that prompted me to choose this of the branch banks of trying understand these brick and mortar institutions was a line had read in another book that national citibank. today’s citi opened its first international branches, buenos aires and rio in 1914, in part because as the ceo was with the head of u.s. steel and u.s. steel was one of the major u.s. multinationals at this time period. and u.s. steel wanted a u.s. bank in latin america. and so the head of u.s. steel promised the head, frank van der look, the head of national citibank, that that u.s. steel company would give the bank its

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credit files and then made me picture like the feeling of filing down the street as if that paperwork would somehow explain a commercial world and help a 23 year old from indiana who never left the united states much less had a clue about how to be an international banker and, also didn’t speak spanish. how to understand sorting that community into credit worthy and credit worthy. and so that that kind of that process. what i came to understand is the paperwork wasn’t about it wasn’t really even about displacing or moving from this reputation system. it was partly a geographic expansion that all of a sudden had a lot more nodes in the system. and so you had to kind of back things up and send send duplicates to new. but interestingly, these u.s. bankers who are used to a much more paperwork bound system

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start going out in the field in the field they called it in the foreign like a like a baseball field any any place outside new york was the foreign field at first. and they advocates for less parochialism in the united states for less kind of rigidity about the paperwork. and instead they argue that other countries have different systems for credit reading and that we need to be a little bit more flexible role. and in mexico, you penalized if you report all of your earnings and taxes are punitive. it’s really common to misstate your on your paperwork and that’s not dishonest. it’s just local norms. so these foreign bankers become kind of intermediaries between these different of credit and are trying to teach people back in new york to be less less linear, less narrow minded. their quantification and paperwork, while also trying to sell their ideas about u.s. banking overseas.

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so i think one of the challenges i always have and i read these accounts, right, is it’s really easy to to view these folks as naive, right. to not kind of really retain any kind of intellectual humility. and we read these systems and they seem and they seem you’re wondering how, are they making these kinds of credit decisions based the vibe of the person that they’re talking using an interpreter? right. but then, you know, you think about our contemporary. right, and you don’t have to look very far to see similar credit decisions being made to companies like first brands, for example. you know, and going to bring down your potentially western clients, bank corp or whatever. so what parallels do you maybe see between the moments you know that where you’re capturing dollars dominions and some of the kind of credit decisions, the private credit private equity moment that you see ourselves in right now. i have no financial prediction to offer whatsoever, but i was reading about the first brands story, and this is a story of an auto parts supplier, as i understand, in ohio, which most

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people had never heard of until last week or the week before that went bankrupt, suddenly part because of some of financial machinations with invoicing and the one of the core financial that i look at in my book is particular kind of credit involved in trade, and it’s called the acceptances. and i have ended up having to go down the deep rabbit hole about banker’s acceptances and what they mean and how really just that they’re the cornerstone of how the original reserve was supposed to operate. it wasn’t even supposed to be buying. and selling treasuries, it was about these kind of invoices, basically and so it’s hard to read some of these some of these stories about ways in which invoicing gets and debt gets piled top of it. and all of things that that

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build on themselves and seem sturdy until in a very moment they don’t so a thing happened with the banker’s acceptance market when all of a sudden credits would get extended and it didn’t really matter until all a sudden it did around when there were huge problems in germany and the market for banker’s acceptances really up all of a sudden. so i, i don’t have any any insight this current moment but it is interesting to see how some of the same kind of themes back. yeah we have the benefit of knowing what’s on the other side of the trade right now when we’re looking in the past. so one of the things kind of getting back, what makes dominion so different, right, is you’re focused on infrastructure, right? and your idea that banks are creators, that banks really are infrastructure, right? they don’t just facilitate other people building, but they are infrastructure in and of themselves. so i’m wondering, you can talk a

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little bit more about what it that banks are infrastructure. you have this like this great phrase about, banks creating conditions of possibility. and i’m wondering if you could share a little bit with the audience about what you mean by that. so banks are sometimes you will hear them talked about as part of the financial and, you know, the kind of duct work for moving the dollars and, for moving for moving money and started taking that metaphor pretty seriously and realizing it is an i went on this jag reading about the theories of infrastructure, all of it. it’s it’s and its role in building cities but a really striking thing about infrastructure is it’s it’s invisible. you don’t really see it. you to take it for granted the systems that the electricity in this room that bring us water that all those systems are seem seem inevitable don’t question

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them once they exist. and it’s only really when those systems that we start to notice or to care about them or to think about the layers of political decisions and allocation resources that have helped make that possible. and i realized that that was very much exactly the same themes that were going on for banks and branch banks were a really interesting node or kind mode of technology for me to think about because i mean, i guess a little bit like the pipes you once you, you build it, own the building you invest in the furniture for the building, you have the staff that there, but there’s this sort of stickiness to a national. citibank envisioned its branches as being a long term project. it was about staying in a community for a while. and so it wasn’t just flash or kind of deal brokered a parachuting in or out instead, it was a a real investment in

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brick and mortar buildings and, knowledge creation and staff. and so in some of the same ways, it develops a bit of a durability, a material dimension that that seems quite similar to the systems and networks that water and electricity so i also realized as i was finishing this book google fiber was getting installed in front of my house and i kept on thinking about those orange pipes that were, you know, kind of powering my wi fi for writing my book and thinking about the way in which this moment that we’re living has some incredible striking elements of rewiring, rewiring different green grid of digitization of information systems and. the moment that i was looking at in the early 20th century is also one of those moments where technology changing incredibly quickly. the position of the united

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states in the world is changing and the the way that that wiring ends up having some really profound long term consequences that people can be impossible to see in the moment. and you know, as an academic librarian who runs kind of infrastructure for academic resources and academic research, it really resonated me this idea that it’s invisible until it breaks. because whenever our resources down, that’s when we hear from faculty for the first time, all right. that really resonates with me. you know, mary, you also wrote a piece for affairs that i kind of want to tie in here with this idea of thinking about infrastructure. one of the arguments you kind of forward there is that infrastructure. one of the advantages it gives is that once it in place. it’s in place. it kind of creates a real first mover advantage and it creates lock. and i’m wondering if you see parallels between the of infrastructural advantage the u.s. banking system got in the early 20th century with some of

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the major information systems we see in our part of all of our lives right. we’re thinking about social media companies, whether we’re thinking about the firms large data centers for have large language models. do you think there are parallels there. yes, i’m not sure to systematize those or how to map them, because the it’s really easy to overstate that that. it’s not the same as creating kind of determinism deterministic system where you can’t break out of chains and they’re huge moments of crisis and kind of reconfiguration of the system for the branch bank. for example, in the 19th thirties, the economic the great depression and the collapse in global trade really hammered this network and changed shape pretty dramatically. but what was really interesting is, a lot of branches closed there, a huge contraction in numbers. but in some ways that crunch

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really sparked a lot of ingenuity and and change. and so what happened is originally u.s. banks were even really designed to go and solicit customers from their environments. they were trying to map trade contacts, contacts for new yorkers. basically, it was a ploy. having branches abroad was just like a sales pitch to try to get more u.s. clients that was the that was the thinking for national citibank at the time. and then all of a sudden the depression happens and you can’t that logic doesn’t hold anymore. so either close your doors or you restrategize. and so the for example, found this wonderful memo written by the manager of of a a national citibank in in in china who in 1930s says, you know, there’s no more vacuum executives or steel

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evac can’t remember why but u.s. vacuum i think was one of the major firms there. there are no more u.s. or british executives we can squeeze we either get local and take customers seriously or we have no business here. and so the international enl division restructured and in a lot of ways started thinking about the places where they were located a lot differently. so the first mover advantage isn’t necessary only a blanket of authorization that once you’re there you you get you’re entitled to all of this stuff. but it does allow a certain of space for that kind of that kind of that kind of change and kind of reorientation and. yeah, thank you for that. well now, mary, i’m wondering if, you know, we talked the importance of getting local and we’ve talked a lot about the archival materials that we’re using for this. i’m wondering, would you want to share with the audience what some of the imagery imagery that you were able to find in the archive, what it looks like.

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sure. one of the chapters so the the book focuses on this bank, ibc at the beginning and ibc was a exception in u.s. banking history. it it really kind of shouldn’t have existed this group of industrialists gilded age tycoon of one offs got a grant a charter from the state connecticut to basically do kind of banking. they wanted as long as they did it outside of connecticut. and so they they they hung up a sign in a bridgeport insurance office and set up a headquarters in new york and and created branches overseas. and so a lot of the of that story were known. but i found i’ll just show you a had that follow the money thing in my head. and so in the archive this is a

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picture of their branch in manila and to hold the u.s. government deposits the bank had open its books to. the federal officials of the bureau of insular affairs, it was called this is the colonial government that united states puts in place the philippines after the spanish-american war and the united states takes. it takes possession of philippines. and so an had to come in and track the banks portfolio. and so this is one of those documents that i found the national archive in d.c. and just a i did i did not want to look at it. so i, i photographed and basically turned the page and hoped i’d never have deal with it again. and then covid hit and i had to get a little bit more creative about my sources. and i realized that i, i found 96% of the recipients of the loans in 1903 and 1910. and so i did an anatomy of a

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loan portfolio to follow the money. i wanted to who. so if bank is holding u.s. deposits, what’s it what’s it doing with the deposits who’s benefiting from it being there what? what’s actually american about? it’s power at all. and this this slide pops of the stories that have that us connection there’s there are a few different u.s. veterans who like to manila and decided to stay after the war and open businesses. so walter was a chicago born he enlisted in he was in the army and he decides stay in manila. and then he opens a cigar and goes on to become one of the leaders of the chamber of commerce. there’s a the sanitary steam laundry was this company. there was three for three veterans who realized that there were all these steamers coming into manila and no one to do the laundry. so they borrowed from ibc to buy

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and dust drill scale laundering equipment. ships could drop off their laundry, get it back in time to sail again. so there were all of these really interesting stories that to me made the banking come to life. and the other striking thing about it is that these guys were mostly kind of the bit compared to the larger volumes of money, which going almost entirely to european established export houses, those exporting the things like the hemp and the sugar that i talked about before. and so at the beginning in particular, these ibc are telling the u.s. government that they’re expanding beachhead for u.s. business overseas. so when in reality the money is actually going to support the established interests that had really gained a lot of land, a lot of power and a lot of kind of influence, spanish rule earlier. so it was a it was a pretty case

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of following the money for both really interesting anecdotes and an archival payoff, which is that what they’re doing in practice, really matching what the rhetoric said. and, you know, one of the things that i often think is banks really are kind of one of the most amazing social ever, right. where are this kind of black blackboard magic that makes finance happen, right? they take deposits from customers that can be recalled at any time and they hand them out as loans that are lent long. i mean somehow this all works right until it doesn’t. when we have the crises. and one of the things that i think is so fabulous about this book and why you should read it, why you should visit us for the signing right after this, is that mary gives you an actual look that black box in these really, really unique moments in u.s. so with that, we have about 10 minutes or 13 minutes remaining in the session. so i would love to invite anyone in the audience that would like

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to ask mary a question to please do so. if you would like, to ask a question. we have a microphone over on that side of the room and please make sure to ask your question into the so that everyone can hear you. please. i’ve got the microphone. okay. so now that you’ve put that to bed and we are now the early part of the 21st century, what’s crypto and dominions. i’m not tempted write that book. that is a wild of a story that i but still, it’s so interesting to me how the changes in money technologies are really making some of these same questions relevant, almost eerie to see how these keywords. i thought i was doing kind of working on a 1903 loan portfolio in obscurity. i actually relevant again. so i am i’m working on a new project that actually spins off in a in few ways from this work

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about infrastructure and about us global power through infrastructure building. i kept on running into these a few engineering firms that the bankers i was looking at kept lending to to build things like ports and railroads overseas and the projects almost never went. the railroads didn’t go they went over budget. i mean just classic but they keep showing up and. they keep doing projects again and some of those same engineers build the muscle. the tva, muscle shoals, they’re involved in some u.s. interstate con contracts, things like that. so trying to build a story organized around these moments and infrastructure building the panama canal because, i think that they’re these huge have this interesting convergence of engineering and finance and diplomas see and those three

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come together in a way kind of brings in this requires technical mastery and doesn’t lend itself very well to political protests. you know it’s so specific and granular and high and kind of an insider community. but at stake in it are larger questions about who gets access to resources. and to me, it’s many of the same from this book. in a push to a different terrain. and also that i think is incredibly timely. so i think most of us who are citizens, the united states, our encounter with the bank is to go down and cash a check or get some action from. we need the complexity that builds beyond that. i think much of it is a scam or much of an intention to at least direct in one direction when

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everything is really going on in another direction. and we depend upon few persons occasionally on the weekend who might try to interpret. but what i hear and listen to and read about is is getting more complex or conflicted, more uncertain about what’s going on who’s calling the shots? where are we headed and people just kind of throw up their hands and hope that they’re money safe in the bank or over here. things are working. but again the information that comes out flows in small trickles at most and that doesn’t help us a lot thank you yeah i’m i finished a paper about the history the fdic, the federal deposit insurance corporation and that’s a real screaming wake up call for how different a in banking history

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can be. like the idea of a bank holiday for you close all of the banks overnight. mean it is astounding. and i think i think we’ve been living in a kind of living on borrowed where we’ve stopped largely asking questions about what banks do the the 2008 financial crisis was a really big exception. but in in a lot ways that became kind of a technical cratic question and, you know, the politics money have defined american for four generations and we’ve been living in a time when that the weirdness of banks has been pretty buried the surface because the system is worked dollars really will get you very far in the world and as

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technology really pushes change in money systems, the regulatory system as we have our really outmatched, i think by what a new system needs to be able to deliver and that i guess that piece kind of technology or you know the private sector outpacing regulation is not a new story at all. but it it does seem like another moment when all of that churn is pushing up some of the political questions that underlie banking and the weirdness of banking is, again, of protruding in ways that we haven’t seen in a while. i thank you so much for coming today. speaking about this book, i’ve learned so much just learning from you and i can’t wait to read it, but can you please speak to kind of the other side of, the branch store in these local in these local places in terms of competition, what as i

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appreciate that point that you know, america’s kind of since the two bit player and you know this is all a little bit kind of shooting from the hip but as these branches opened the local banking was there any kind sense of pushback or competition from local bankers or that kind of started to recognize market and could you speak to that sort of things? so most of the places and most of the places i was looking at were u.s. bankers. the british already there, the british were already there in almost all of the places where look at u.s. bankers, and they were they were there. they were better. and their focus was not was not at all on taking local clients they were supporting british operations and british firms. and usually once were there like in like an enlarged tina. the the the managers of british

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banks would start you know they also be board members of the railroad. and so the interests sort of merged in the line between local and british banker became a little bit blurry as those institutions stay but initially some of the british bankers were horrified or at least the american bankers liked to say the british bankers were horrified of their of crass salesman techniques because the u.s. bankers, the kind of norm and protocols around u.s. banking, changed a lot in the 1920s with these sort of thrift drives and these recruitment campaigns to go to schools and, get kids to open savings accounts. the idea that every citizen needs a bank account is really a creation that time period and so the u.s. bankers abroad were

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kind of taking that playbook, trying to apply it and in that moment where the british bankers are kind of ruffled at these at these new advertising of low brow tactics, but up sort of begrudgingly coming along with it in some places. hi. thank you so much. my brother works in banking at the secondary loan market. he’s working his way up the chain and like severely overworked. so i was wondering if kind of as like in the setting, like the kind of new era of banking and, like building up these infrastructures that, you know, we still have today. was there ever or did you ever see any hints of like talking about worker protections, about having unions, the banks, about protecting bankers who are putting in a lot of work and maybe doing too much? he did not see much worker protection. you know, i don’t didn’t know

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once the bankers are kind of at their long hours very often. and there was interesting movement, i think it was around the 1920s when human resources department started getting little bit more codified and kind of regularized, where the bankers magazines have these calisthenics, you know, you need to do the exercises at your desk and, you know, help the healthy airflow in the office and, stuff like that. and there memoirs are replete with examples and complaints about how hard they are working and how their hours are so, so long. but alongside that, another theme in this time period is the draft, the war and soldiers. and so national citibank actually pretty hard to get bankers exempted from the draft because otherwise they would have no kind of staff and they’re portrayed all of bankers work and like kind of going on

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the sea and adventuring had all of the the masculine overtones and kind of language of of patriotism and of of the kind of rugged spirit required. so in some hard work was bragging rights for bankers in this time period. so no union in the engines of capitalism. there maybe have time for one more question. going once. okay. well, in that case please join me in thanking for joining us today here at of festival books. and mary and, i will be heading to the signing tent here. we will be there by noon. and so please stop by. and you can ask, i guess, any remaining questions you might have had if you didn’t want to ask in front of the audience. so thank you s

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Uploaded by TV Archive on November 9, 2025