A Coming Attraction: Credit Union History Since 1970

Although Ian MacPherson's 1999 book on the development of the global credit union movement partially bridges the gap, one of the most gaping holes in contemporary credit union historiography has been the lack of a synthetic treatment of the American movement's recent history. While Moody & Fite's The Credit Union Movement remains an absolutely vital resource, an enormous amount has happened since the last edition was released in 1984 that has the potential to shine new interpretive light on the whole sweep of the movement's development.

One of the benefits of a synthetic work of history is that it organizes the jumble of changes that characterize its subject's development into a coherent, meaningful narrative structure. While people often enter into ferocious debates about the exact parameters of that structure, having some sort of understanding of the mechanisms by which the world came to exist in its current form is a powerful aid to decision-making. Without such a framework, it is impossible to learn from the past beyond the scope of simple personal experience. As George Santayana put it more than a century ago, "when experience is not retained ... infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Book Review: The Credit Union Lady by Paul Thompson

For those seeking an introduction to the origins of the credit union movement, the general dearth of contemporary literature on the topic can be quite frustrating. Given the available resources, it is often necessary to either settle for the overly-simplistic thumbnail sketches that can be found in CUNA publications such as People, Not Profit, or commit to the dense and slightly out-of-date academic histories of Ian MacPherson or Moody & Fite. Fortunately, retired CUNA speech-writer Paul Thompson's recently published book, The Credit Union Lady, offers a new medium through which prospective students of credit union history might become acquainted with the field: historical fiction.

Thompson's novel traces, from 1927 to 1956, the experiences of three generations of a German-American family in the fictional industrial town of Brighton Falls, Wisconsin, whose lives are intimately bound up with the development of the credit union movement. Over the course of these decades (and in less than three hundred pages), Thompson weaves a truly impressive depth of historical information into his narrative. Not only does he get the "big stuff" such as the emotional and populist atmosphere of one of Roy Bergengren's rallies in the 1930s, but The Credit Union Lady also teases out some subtle dynamics (such as the importance of payroll deduction for early credit unions) that only became apparent to me as significant after many hours spent poring over credit union board of directors meeting minutes from the 1940s and 1950s.