A History of Financial Panics in the U.S.

Enlarge Image Image Gallery With a historian’s keen observations and a storyteller’s nose for character and incident, Nelson captures the entire sweep of America’s financial history in all its utter irrationality. Cover Courtesy Alfred A. Knopf

From the merchant William Duer’s attempts to speculate on post–Revolutionary War debt, to an ill-conceived 1815 plan to sell English coats to Americans on credit, to the debt-fueled railroad expansion that precipitated the Panic of 1857, A Nation of Deadbeats (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), by Scott Reynolds Nelson, offers a crash course in the history of financial panics in the U.S. — and a concise explanation of the first principles that caused them all. The following excerpt comes from the preface, “A Republic of Deadbeats.”   

After his first divorce but before he became respectable, my father was a repo man. He did not look the part, which made him all the more effective. He alternately wore a long mustache or a shaggy beard and owned bell-bottoms that were black, blue, and cherry red. His imitation-silk shirts were festooned with city maps, or cartoon characters, or sailing ships. Dad sang in the car, at the top of his lungs, mostly obscure show tunes. His white Dodge Dart had “Mach 1” racing stripes that he had lifted from a souped-up Ford Mustang. The “deadbeats” saw him coming, that’s for sure, but they did not understand his profession until he walked into their homes and took away their televisions.

A deadbeat, Dad told me, “was a guy whose mouth wrote a check his ass could not cash.” They might be rich or poor, young or old, male or female, black or white, but “deadbeat” was written all over them, and my dad could read it. Florida’s Orange, Seminole, and Volusia Counties had plenty of them. And when Dad was working for Woolco, the department store, Woolco got its goods back. Woolco lent appliances to people on the installment plan, and when they failed to pay, ignored the letters and phone calls, refused to answer the door, my father would come by. He often posed as a meter reader or someone with a broken-down car. If he saw a random object lying abandoned in the yard, he would pick it up and bring it to the door as if he were returning it. He was warm and funny, charming, but pushy. He did not carry a gun, but he was fearless under pressure and impervious to verbal abuse. He was earnest about the return of the goods. If the door opened, he was inside; if he was inside, he shortly had his hands on the appliance; the rest was bookkeeping.