He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Working for Debt: Banks, Loan Sharks, and the Origins of Financial Exploitation in the United States, and reported the following:
Page 99 is the opening page of Chapter 4, a part of the book where I delve into cultural history, showing how the “loan shark” problem was framed as an affliction of Northern white breadwinners during the 1910s and 1920s. This is in sharp contrast with the reality of credit experiences (analyzed in the preceding chapters), which rather underline the key role played by “wage loans” for Black households, and Southern Black women specifically. This page actually sums up a core argument of the book, explaining that in the post-abolition era, “whiteness” underpinned many battles for social progress in an industrial, free market society. To quote it in short, in an excerpt that relies on ideas from Amy Dru Stanley’s From Bondage to Contract (1988):Learn more about Working for Debt at the Columbia University Press website.During the 1910s and 1920s, and the advent of consumer capitalism, the loan shark once again tapped into the distant anxiety that “freedom would ultimately bring the end of all domestic order” by replacing ‘organic relations of dependency—between master and slave, husband and wife, the propertied and the unpropertied’ with “the cruel hierarchies of free market relations.” Wage usurers jeopardized the very material and cultural foundations of the postbellum order, as the contractual freedom to build debt collided with the potential enjoyments of free labor.More generally, Working for Debt studies about how U.S. workers began relying on wages, not property to access credit, at the beginning of the twentieth century. While “loan shark” lending has often been reduced to immoral, and profligate debt, the book contends that small payday and chattel loans, backed by future wages, were massively used by working classes as a flexible credit instrument, to adjust other expenses or debts, and finance small investments. These loans were all at once exploitative and key to survival. While the industrial era is usually associated with the reign of wage earning and along, labor exploitation, here I show that debt and labor remained inextricably bound, especially for those who primarily relied only on their bodily labor as collateral; that is non-whites and women borrowers. So far, workers’ debt has remained largely under-documented, as compared to mortgages or instalment credit, primarily because it remains harder to describe, as it was often not recorded in standard credit surveys or macroeconomic data. To remedy this, I collected a large amount of legal archives, along with “loan shark” business documents, local press clippings, and combined those with more commonly philanthropic sources, reformist surveys, and historical statistics.
In the existing research, consumer credit has often been regarded either as a secondary exploitation, or presented as an alternative to direct welfare, with credit expansion being praised for these opportunities it offered, such as access to consumer goods or housing. In this framework, wage loans are often positioned on the wrong side of a resource/liability divide, associating middle-class credit with future opportunities, and working-class debt with financial burdens. Here, I show that many poor workers were long included within formal credit markets, but on more exploitative terms, as segregation proved profitable for many white lenders. Finally, the credit reforms implemented to eradicate these “loan sharks” essentially led to a form financial exclusion, with many contemporary ramifications for the post-war era and what is now called ‘predatory lending’. Theoretically, I used the framework of racial capitalism to show how financial exploitation produced racialized and gendered experiences of debt among lower-class debtors, underlining how race and gender inequalities were long engrained in the politics of credit expansion. Along the “wages of whiteness”, wage credit proved key in structuring social and economic hierarchies within the working-class, from the Progressive Era to the New Deal.
--Marshal Zeringue
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