“Us” and “Them” in Credit’s Classroom: Training the First Wave of US International Bankers in the Early 20th Century

In the early 1910s, there was virtually no such thing as an international branch of a US bank. By 1920, nearly 200 branches of US banks operated overseas. This expansion posed a staffing challenge to US institutions, and in response to the problem, National City Bank, the first and most aggressive national bank to expand abroad, created the “College Training Program” to prepare young men for overseas work. This paper examines the program as a vehicle for understanding how US bankers were conditioned to interpret new communities, extract observations from unfamiliar business cultures, and convert these impressions and conclusions into banking “facts” in their work overseas. Their beliefs about race, gender, and class became encoded in banking systems that facilitated an emerging architecture of US-driven trade finance and helped determine who would and would not receive credit. US bankers’ relationships with their adopted communities overseas often depended on cultural brokers on the ground, such as compradors in China and local elites in Latin America, as well as constructed racial solidarities with British and other European bankers working abroad. Further, banks’ emerging processes for screening clients and extending credit took on even greater importance as the Federal Reserve relied on a newly created derivative—a banker’s acceptance—to increase liquidity in the US economy. The Federal Reserve’s investments in banker’s acceptances in the 1910s and 1920s helped legitimize and render profitable the emerging systems by which US international bankers solicited and screened international clients. The paper seeks to understand the training practices for a new cohort of US international bankers against the backdrop of larger, macroeconomic changes that increased the prominence of the United States in the global economy in the early decades of the twentieth century.