America's First Credit Union Periodical: The Bridge

First edited together as a small newsletter in June of 1924 by Roy Bergengren, the Credit Union Bridge served as the movement's primary "journal of record" for decades before it became the present Credit Union Magazine. In that time, the Bridge was both a clearing-house for practical information about how to run a credit union in addition to being a forum in which early credit unionists in the United States and Canada debated the direction of the movement.

Glorious!

Needless to say, such a publication is an incredibly rich and useful primary source for anyone interested in the history of credit unions, and it had long been a dream of mine to travel to the CUNA archives in Madison, WI and spend a week or two reading as many back issues as I possibly could. Therefore, I was floored when, a few weeks ago, Jeremiah Cahill, the Associate Editor of Credit Union Magazine, sent me an email inquiring whether I'd be interested in an almost complete set of issues stretching from the mid-1930s to the end of 1962. Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity, and last week I came home to two heavy boxes sitting on my front stoop filled with bound volumes of the Bridge!

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."

(Credit Union) Historic Boston

As this last week was my partner (and fellow history nerd) Allison's February break from teaching, we decided it'd be fun to take a short trip to Boston from our home in northern Vermont. Alli is a social studies teacher with a particular passion for photographing old New England cemeteries (some samples of her work in Vermont can be seen here), so our activities were primarily focused around the various sites on the Freedom Trail. The colonial-era buildings and burying grounds were quite interesting, but, fortunately for myself and the readers of this blog, she was kind enough to oblige me in taking some detours to locate a few sites of historical importance to the credit union movement.

My quest was initially inspired by the knowledge that a plaque honoring Edward Filene was located somewhere on the Boston Common. Since that park was on our itinerary anyway, I found a webpage that provided the plaque's location, and we set out in search of Ed.

Unfortunately, the directions on that page turned out to be a filthy lie; the plaque is nowhere near the intersection of Tremont and Temple Streets. After making a few loops, we stopped into the visitors center, but the woman behind the desk was clueless as to the existence of the memorial. Though it was beginning to feel like a wild goose chase, we decided to circle through the Common one last time.

Victory at Last!

This time, lady luck was on our side, and we stumbled upon the memorial near the intersection of Carver and Boyleston across the street from a piano store and adjacent to the Central Burying Ground. Erected by the Credit Union National Association in 1959 (25 years after the organization's founding at Estes Park, CO in 1934), the monument reads:

Edward A Filene

1860-1937
Author, Scholar, Outstanding Citizen of Boston and Public Benefactor
Acknowledged as the Founder of the Credit Union Movement in the United States
This Tablet Erected by the Credit Union National Association
May 1959

Book Review - Comme D'Or: The First Fifty Years of Holy Rosary Credit Union by Michael Behrendt

At the end of my recent trip to America's Credit Union Museum in Manchester, NH, museum director Peggy Powell gave me a copy of the Michael Behrendt's recently published book Comme D'Or: The First Fifty Years of Holy RosaryCredit Union. According to Ms. Powell, the book is representative of a new trend in the historiography of credit unions. For the past few decades, when written about at all, the primary focus of credit union history has been at the level of the national and state-level movement institutions. More recently, however, Ms. Powell has encountered a number of folks working on detailed histories of individual institutions, of which Comme D'Or is an excellent example.

Self-published by Holy Rosary Credit Union of Rochester, NH to commemorate its fiftieth anniversary, Comme D'Or is accessibly written and structured in a way that reveals it's author's solid understanding of the nature of the credit union model. At a time when uncertainty about the nature of the difference between banks and credit unions is far too common, it would be quite easy for a writer coming from outside the movement to write the history of a credit union as if it were that of a bank, with the economic story taking center stage.

Fortunately, Michael Behrendt doesn't fall into this trap. The city planner of Rochester, NH by profession with a book about that city's architectural history already under his belt, Behrendt brings an enormous depth of knowledge about, and appreciation for, the social and cultural history of Rochester to Comme D'Or. As a result, while the economic aspects of Holy Rosary Credit Union's development are not neglected, people and community are (very appropriately) at the core of the narrative.

A Primary Source Mother Lode: The St. Francis Xavier University Online Archives

In the early 20th century, St. Francis Xavier, a small Catholic college in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, stood as one of North America's most innovative and active institutions working in support of cooperative development. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Roy Bergengren began corresponding with some of the leading lights at St. Francis Xavier (particularly Father Moses Coady), which led to a great deal of mutual influence between the American credit union and the "Antigonish" movements.

Given this history, I've been wanting to make a trip to Antigonish for a while now in order to dig through the Coady-Bergengren correspondence that is housed in their archives. Though such a journey remains in the realm of idle fantasy for the moment due to lack of funds, I was extremely excited today to discover that they have made a substantial chunk of their collection available to the public through an online archive!

Best. Anniversary. Present. Ever.

My girlfriend tried her hand at making me a t-shirt tribute to Roy Bergengren, with epic results. CU History nerds, eat your hearts out, cuz this baby's one of a kind!

Book Review - The Ownership of Enterprise by Henry Hansmann

Given the almost total absence of the cooperative model from mainstream business school discourse, I was recently delighted to hear that an acquaintance was teaching an "Introduction to Cooperatives" course at a college in Connecticut. I was quite curious to see what such a course would consist of, so I went on the website and downloaded the syllabus. While the students were exposed to a diversity of readings, the core of the course seemed to be built around one book, The Ownership of Enterprise by Henry Hansmann. Intrigued, I got my hands on the text and began digging in.

As its title suggests, the purpose of Hansmann's book is, fundamentally, the investigation of the forms of ownership that are prevalent in different sectors of the economy. Using a perspective that leverages tools from both economics and political science (he understands the governance of firms to be subject to similar political dynamics that public choice theory dissects in government), Hansmann starts off by offering a general theory of ownership that relies on two key factors.