3 - The Credit Men

Summary

This chapter focuses upon retail merchants and their suppliers at the start of the twentieth century. When small retailers at the start of the twentieth century encountered trouble, it fell to the credit professionals who worked for their faraway and unpaid suppliers to sort things out. These credit men, as they called themselves, did not tolerate debtors whom they deemed unworthy, but they believed that it was appropriate to give some debtors a second chance. Their solicitude for these “worthy debtors” combined notions of honor and decency with self-interest. They pressed for legal reforms to provide a check against the forces that interfered with their efforts to reach a “friendly adjustment” of debt. In the process, they changed what behavior between debtor and creditor was acceptable and what was not.