Alasdair Roberts's First Great Depression

• Date: 01 September 2013
• Published date: 01 September 2013
• Author: Scott Reynolds Nelson
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12125

Book Reviews 775

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 73, Iss. 5, pp. 775–776. © 2013 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12125.

Scott Reynolds Nelson teaches

history at the College of William & Mary.

His book Steel Drivin’ Man (Oxford

University Press, 2006), about the life and

legend of John Henry, won four national

awards, including the National Award for

Arts Writing and the Merle Curti Prize

for best book in U.S. history. His latest

book, A Nation of Deadbeats: An

Uncommon History of America’s

Financial Disasters (Alfred A. Knopf), was

named a best business book of 2012 by

Business Week.

E-mail: srnels@wm.edu

Sonia M. Ospina and Rogan Kersh, Editors

Scott Reynolds Nelson

College of William & Mary

Alasdair Roberts, America’s First Great Depres-

sion: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder

after the Panic of 1837 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 2012). 264 pp. $35.00 (cloth),

ISBN: 9780801450334, $18.95 (paper), ISBN:

9780801478864.

The provocative cover on the hardcover edition

of Alasdair Roberts’s America’s First Great

Depression: Economic Crisis and Political

Disorder after the Panic of 1837 will confuse historians.

Why does a book about the panic of 1837 have cut-

outs from an engraving of nativists at the Philadelphia

Bible Riots of 1844? And why does the author call it

America’s f‌i rst great depression when it was either the

second or third? Cover confusion aside, Roberts’s book

is a history of America’s sovereign debt crisis in the

decade after the 1837 panic.  at it does rather well.

 e author dispenses with the panic of 1837 quickly.

He follows Jessica Lepler in arguing that the Bank of

England’s withdrawal of transatlantic credit combined

with Andrew Jackson’s Specie Circular to pinch the

market for “bills of exchange,” the f‌i nancial instru-

ment that allowed British banks to lend to American

borrowers.  e rest of the book, though, is quite

new. Roberts returns our attention to America’s

embarrassing decade of the 1840s, when U.S. states

borrowed madly after private credit markets dried up.

(Legislators in Greece, Italy, and Spain did the same

between 2009 and 2011.) When interest payments on

state debt came due in 1840, states from Mississippi

to Maryland loudly defaulted, prompting Britons to

tartly refer to the United States as a “confederation of

public bankrupts” (182).

Roberts shows how these state failures destroyed the

nation’s public credit for a time and how these cash-

strapped states with weak municipal policing proved

unable to cope with labor upheavals, anti-Catholic

mobs, and general mayhem (thus the Bible riot).

 is decade of the 1840s made the United States a

laughingstock in Europe, which, in turn, produced a

kind of international irritability among Americans,

particularly American diplomats abroad in Europe,

who tired of hearing about their untrustworthiness.

Roberts does a f‌i ne job of showing how the nation’s

sore spot led American of‌f‌i cials in Britain to imagine

British conspiracies to build an independent Texas

and free the slaves there. President John Tyler, fearing

the worst, quickly annexed Texas and produced fur-

ther sectional discord inside the United States.

 e mix of state, federal, f‌i nancial, and diplomatic

history makes for interesting reading, though the

causation is sometimes fuzzy and confusing.  is is

compounded by the thematic organization that has

us relive 1841–1848 at the municipal, state, national,

and international levels in chapters 2–5. Roberts per-

suades nonetheless that this state default and public

embarrassment helped make the United States so bel-

licose by the 1840s that it would engineer a war with

Mexico to twist the British lion’s tail.

Roberts’s account of the political situation after the

1837 panic is intended to help us draw lessons for

today, and it mostly does. FDR’s popular mandate

after the 1929 crash was almost unique. He got

tremendous authority to push through public utili-

ties, public works, an end to Prohibition, and a new

infrastructure for regulating banks and stock markets.

But f‌i nancial panics seldom produce such mandates,

as 1792, 1819, 1837, 1873, and 1893 show. President

Obama got a month, Dodd-Frank, and then partisan

gridlock. Roberts shows that 1840s partisan gridlock

likewise prevented substantial reform as Democrats

and Whigs, Northerners and Southerners, all wran-

gled over whom to blame and what to build.  e

debates are familiar: a nasty debate over the govern-

ance of banks, a bankrupt Post Of‌f‌i ce facing compe-

tition from private carriers, a downsized navy with

half-built military projects, harsh accusations about

taxes (just tarif‌f s then), sectionalism, and threats of

secession. We see then, as now, both parties trying to

narrate a story that made the other party the instiga-

tor of f‌i nancial panic.

Alasdair Roberts’s First Great Depression