Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America

Abstract

Creditworthy is an accessible history of consumer credit reporting. While there are still no comprehensive recent studies, this book fills many gaps and tells a story. Josh Lauer's description of the history of consumer credit portrays an evolution toward “textualizing”: as in while personal encounters remained an essential mode of credit evaluation during much of the twentieth century, the information recorded during these interactions—along with ledger reports, public records, and newspaper clippings compiled by credit bureaus—all served to textualize (and thereby depersonalize) credit relationships. (p. 112) Lauer says that, until the Civil War, consumer credit was offered on the basis of each merchant's personal knowledge of the customer. When population movements made personal knowledge difficult, third-party credit bureaus began to gather the same type of information individual merchants used: payment history, ability to pay, and personal situations that might affect willingness to pay. Credit bureaus solicited this information from merchants and also paid individual reporters, who collected news clippings and gossip. By the late 1880s, large dry goods stores as well as installment and mail-order businesses began to employ in-house credit specialists.