In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression (review)

In this fascinating study, Wendy Woloson has secured a commanding grasp of what many of us might consider the brass ring of social history. She’s taken a ubiquitous institution, one hidden in plain sight, and fruitfully explored its centrality to one of the most significant long-term economic developments in modern history. For Woloson, the pawnshop was not a parasitic institution that preyed on the poor—a lender of last resort that gouged its customers while forcing them to part with treasured mementoes. That was a carefully crafted image that had little to do with the reality of pawning. Instead, pawning represented a rational survival strategy for many and was essential to the success of industrial capitalism in the United States. In what she describes as a synergistic relationship, industries churned out more and more consumer goods that could be pawned, while many of the workers who fashioned those goods earned wages so low that pawning became a regular means of making ends meet. While a thorough exploration of that economic role is central to Woloson’s analysis, the unsavory image of pawnshops also permits various forays into topics as diverse as anti-Semitism in America, crime and law enforcement, and the legitimization of pawning by the turn of the century thanks to the rise of semiphilanthropic “loan societies” in major metropolitan areas.

Eschewing a chronological organization for chapters on specific subjects like the negative stereotype of the pawnbroker and the relationship between pawning and criminal activity, the meat of Woloson’s argument can be found in two chapters that examine both the reality of pawning and the role that pawnshops played in “The Economies of Everyday Life” (the title of chapter four). On one level, this analysis is quite similar to arguments surrounding early modern European poor relief and the rise of capitalism, which seems only fitting since European pawn shops arose as part of a loose system of social welfare. As such, both in Europe and the United States pawning served as only one part of an economy of makeshifts. Similarly, pawning, like poor relief, influenced the operations of the expanding capitalist labor market. In the case of poor relief, some have argued that it sustained a pool of available labor during slack periods, ensuring a renewed stream of employees once better times returned. For 19th-century American workers and immigrants, pawning sustained families between meager paychecks, during emergencies, and upon first arrival in a new city. Woloson likens pawning to using an ATM; pawners hocked all sorts of “valuables” whenever they needed cash quickly, usually returning to the pawnshop to retrieve these items once a salary had been paid. Indeed, Woloson estimates that approximately 90% of all items pawned were redeemed by their owners, only to be pawned again when a new need arose. In this environment, pawnbrokers became neighborhood fixtures; they survived by issuing loans that relied on both their assessment of the pawner’s trustworthiness (more easily assessed with repeat customers) as well as the potential value of a whole host of objects, just in case the loan should go unpaid and the pawned object become subject to resale at auction. Pawnbrokers were not the heartless “shylocks” of popular imagination; they were shrewd business owners who served an important function in the transition to and operation of industrial capitalism.

That negative image of the pawnbroker is related not only to anti-Semitism, but also to the other economic function of pawning, one with far more complex ramifications. As part of a new market culture that promoted consumption, pawnshops filtered commodities lower down the socioeconomic scale by supplying goods for secondary and tertiary markets in used items. At the same time, however, they challenged the new conviction that linked personal worth to the ownership of consumer goods, giving struggling individuals a means of divesting themselves of items that were supposed to define them (or at the very least embody...