Re-storying bankers: historical antecedents of banker bashing in Britain and America

Abstract

Whittle and Mueller's discursive psychological analysis of banker storying during the recent British Treasury Select Committee hearings is the latest twist in the financial crisis storytelling genre. Although Whittle and Mueller focus on storytellers' use of classically derived story tropes, they otherwise pay scant attention to how history enters into stories in which bankers are blamed for economic turmoil. The current paper moves beyond their work by showing how culturally transmitted historical narratives provide potent discursive resources for banker bashers. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, our examples are the American Catholic priest-cum-broadcaster Charles Coughlin and the British fascist Oswald Mosley. Each drew their banker stories from content-laden, culturally supplied master narratives: traditional American populism and British declinism, respectively. Studying the emplotment of bankers within a nation's deep-seated historical storylines, we argue, is the key to factoring history back into the banker storytelling debate.

Keywords::

• culture
• declinism
• fascism
• financial crisis
• narrative
• populism

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Gothenburg, the University of Liverpool, Sheffield Hallam University, and the University of Leiden. We thank all those who gave us comments.

Notes

^1. The title is from a 1959 Otto Preminger-directed film starring Jimmy Stewart.

^2. The six figures are as follows: Andrew Carnegie, Terence V. Powderly, Frederick J. Turner, Jane Addams, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

^3. In line with White's ideas about emplotment, we organise our discussion of Coughlin and Mosley in the same way (biographical introduction, plot, conspiracy subplot).

^4. We distil this narrative from the work of Harvey and Emery. On how and where populism gained traction, see Munslow (1992) and Ostler (1995).

^5. The original pamphlet is undated, but its publication date is widely known to be 1932.

^6.http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikes-letter/heres-how-to-fix-the-wall-street-mess-from-michael-moore (accessed August 9, 2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Reveley

James Reveley is Associate Professor of Management at the University of Wollongong (NSW, Australia). His research interests include the changing nature of work and organization in financialized capitalism, financial crisis narratives, and business associations within the banking sector. His work has been published in journals such as Human Relations, Organization, Journal of Management Studies, and Business History.

John Singleton

John Singleton is Professor of Economic and Business History at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. His research interests include the parallels between financial disasters and other types of disaster, and the history of the interaction between banks and the social and political spheres. His most recent book is Central Banking in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2011).