IN
HOCK: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great
Depression, by Wendy A. Woloson. 233 pages, illustrated. Chicago
Like
a lot of people, social hisrorian Wendy Woloson had never been in a
pawnshop, but she'd heard bad things about them. After a lot of
research, mostly in obscure 19th century archives, she
came to a different conclusion.
In
“In Hock” she concludes that American industrial capitalism (the
“second industrial revolution”) could not have occurred without
pawnbrokers.
Industrialists
depended on low-wage workers who were periodically no-wage workers as
plants laid off workers, especially in the financial panics that
swept the nation every decade or so before the New Deal tried to
control banks. There were almost no provisions for out-of-work
workers, and large classes (women, African-Americans, Irish,
children) were paid subsistence or less-than-subsistence wages when
they were working.
Only
the pawnbroker stood between them and starvation.
No
thanks did he get for it. Pawnbrokers, like their customers, were on
the fringe, and the economic powers did what they could to destroy,
or at least limit pawnbroking. Only a very few men – usually those
with personal experience of the successful municipal pawnshops of
Europe – understood the benefits of pawn lending.
“Respectable”
businessmen and bankers, much later, had to be forced to treat
customers without prejudice by regulation. There were plenty of
regulations of pawnbrokers, but there has never been a law requiring
pawnbrokers to treat all people the same.
At
a time when bankers would not deal with women, blacks, Jews or people
with shabby clothes, pawnbrokers stood ready to lend cash to all
comers. The only thing that mattered was that the pawner had
something valuable to pledge.
For
the truly destitute, even the pawnbroker was no help.
In
her lively, but sometimes repetitive book, Woloson ferrets out the
pawnbroker in popular novels and advertisements, in rapidly growing
cities, in small towns.
According
to respectable opinion, pawnbrokers served only to provide money for
drunkards to drink. A long statement by Woloson is worth quoting
because it exposes the falsehood behind the capitalist program:
“Industrial
capitalism begat wealth and poverty, winners and losers. It remained
in the winners' collective self-interest to create consensus among
the larger public that capitalism was good for all of society, that
wholesale and retail exchange were the 'normal' and 'mainstream' ways
of doing business, and that this particular economic system was the
only one befitting a modern, civilized nation. By its continued
existence, however, pawnbroking demonstrated quite clearly that the
promise of capitalism was broken for countless Americans. The true
character of emergent industrial capitalism can be found beyond the
shiny surfaces of retail show windows and the smooth pages of
ledgers, revealing life at it was actually lived by most Americans,
not simply the privileged few.
“Tellingly,
pawning remained a popular coping strategy throughout the nineteenth
century, from the very dawn of capitalism through the second
industrial revolution. The endurance of pawnbroking through radical
economic shifts and perennial boom and bust cycles was an indication
both of its ability to adapt to changing times and more important, of
Americans' enduring need for such an institution. Regardless of the
rhetoric championing capitalism as a democratizing force, it created
inequities that led pawners to their local pawnshops. Pawnbroking
could not have survived without the continued expansion of
capitalism. Yet at every turn pawners, pawnbrokers, and the
institution of pawnbroking were denigrated and demonized. Why was
this so? Counting the great number who put things in hock makes it
evident that there were many more losers than winners. What did it
say about capitalism that it generated so many pawners? The symbiosis
of pawning and capitalism warrants further examination if we are to
fully understand the living and working lives of those who came
before us and comprehend the economic exigencies of the people who
continue to struggle today.”
Woloson
ends her history in the Great Depression. The New Deal and the
postwar liberal economic system were nearly fatal to pawnshops. For a
while, it was predicted that they would fade out.
The
rise of brutal finance capitalism has created wonderful business for
pawnshops, which are doing better today than ever.
