In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

26 2 “I Consider It Un-American Not to Have a Mortgage” Immigrant Home Ownership in Chicago Elaine Lewinnek In a 1953 New Yorker article, E. B. White fantasizes about accompanying Senator Joseph McCarthy on a trip to Walden Pond to investigate whether Henry David Thoreau was a communist. The trip gets off to a poor start because White’s fictional McCarthy doesn’t enjoy fresh air or walking, and then McCarthy is told that Thoreau had no mortgage. “I consider it un-American not to have a mortgage,” declares the senator in E. B. White’s humor piece. “Besides, it’s probably a lie.”1 It’s a fascinating sentiment, succinctly combining ideas about debt, citizenship, and the unreliability of historical financial evidence. When White puts this comment attacking a classic American individualist into the mouth of an imagined McCarthy, he does so to make a joke and to mock McCarthy ’s witch hunts. But it wasn’t a joke when Thoreau’s own friend Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented, at Thoreau’s funeral in 1862, that Thoreau “had no ambition.” Instead of becoming a business leader—which probably would have involved going into debt— Thoreau had been content to be merely “captain of a huckleberry-party.”2 That is a remarkable thing to say at a man’s funeral. But just how un-American or unambitious was it to live a life without debt? In his fascinating study Financing the American Dream, Lendol Calder observes that Americans have a “myth of lost economic virtue.” Since the mid-nineteenth century , Americans have been declaring that we have fallen from the thrift of our grandparents , from a golden age of relatively little debt that is always imagined to be about seventy years before each speaker. But such thrift never existed, as Calder explains: “I Consider It Un-American Not to Have a Mortgage” | 27 “A river of red ink runs through American history.”3 The Pilgrims, many pioneers, and most founding fathers were all in debt, even though some of them also moralized against debt. In the wonderful phrasing of historian Daniel Boorstin, “The American dream was bought on the installment plan.”4 To Calder, this is actually an inherent part of capitalism: although moralists may be reluctant to admit it, debt disciplines workers , externally forcing Americans to budget their money in order to pay monthly bills. “What Americans did on the installment plan was to transform consumer culture into a suitable province for more work. . . . A bumper sticker sums it up accurately: ‘I owe, I owe, it’s off to work I go!’”5 Instead of reflecting hedonism, debt actually pressures consumers to go to work to pay their debts. Perhaps this is what E. B. White meant by joking that eschewing a mortgage might be anticapitalistic, almost communist. Such debt is sometimes portrayed as imposed on Americans by a manipulative capitalist system. My research into Chicago’s working-class housing between 1870 and 1930 suggests, however, that many workers used mortgages as a way to engage in smallscale business ventures that they hoped would let them find a haven from the pressures of industrial corporate capitalism. Ironically, individuals went into debt in an effort to gain some economic control, although this control frequently eluded them. My analysis begins with a brief overview of the history of debt in America, then focuses more closely on the specific case of turn-of-the-century housing debt. At first, most American debts were personal and private debts to friends, neighbors , and merchants. Few Americans borrowed formally from banks, but in the early republic paper money itself was a kind of debt, a promise that each issuing bank made to redeem paper currency for gold, although this promise was not always kept. Before government greenbacks first appeared in 1863, more than 1,500 US banks all printed their own currency, each valued slightly differently by other banks in other places. This dizzying economy, expanding into remote markets, relied on a tenuous trust but also encouraged speculation and gave us the term confidence man or con man. In her excellent narrative of America’s first banking collapse, which happened in 1809, Jane Kamensky explains that the “alchemy” of speculative paper currency “made all Americans gamblers.”6 Similarly, historian Scott Sandage explains that “nineteenth-century Americans understood that solvency and selfhood were speculative ventures.”7 Economic historians agree that in the middle of the nineteenth century one in five American households went bankrupt. In the...

Share