Financial History Issue 122 (Summer 2017) | Page 31
By Josh Lauer
In late November 1913, a dapper old man
stopped into a Cleveland department store
to do some shopping. On his way out, he
gave a young female clerk his name and
instructed her to charge several items to his
account. The clerk, who did not know the
man, insisted on calling the credit depart-
ment to authorize his purchases. Perhaps the
stranger’s wig and lack of eyebrows aroused
her suspicion. The 74-year-old man suffered
from generalized alopecia, a condition that
had caused him to lose all of his body hair.
After the credit department confirmed the
customer’s identity and creditworthiness,
of our transaction and instantly updates
our status and legitimacy as a paying
consumer. All of this happens in the few
seconds that it takes to swipe a plastic
card — or just as commonly, in the time
it takes for an online purchase to be con-
firmed. Such speed and ease are hard to
argue with. Why fool around with cash
when the whole thing can be settled with a
signature or code?
Rockefeller and many of his fellow
Americans would have agreed. For some-
one like Rockefeller, a charge account
was largely a matter of convenience. He
A History of Consumer Surveillance
and Financial Identity in America
his charged goods were approved, and he
left without incident. This exchange would
be completely unremarkable except that the
stranger was no average consumer. He was
John D. Rockefeller, literally the richest man
in the world. The multimillionaire oil baron
had been denied access to credit, “at least
until the clerk learned that he was ‘good.’”
One hundred years later this story still
resonates. Twenty-first century Ameri-
cans are accustomed to having their iden-
tities and creditworthiness tested, often
multiple times each day, to see if they
are “good.” Indeed, whenever we use a
bank card to pay for something, we enter
into an invisible surveillance network that
confirms our identity, records the details
Portrait of John D. Rockefeller. Even the
world’s richest man was subject to credit
checks during his lifetime.
had piles of money sitting in the bank.
But for many Americans who did not,
credit accounts allowed them to walk out
of stores with all sorts of things — from
furniture and appliances to clothing and
food — all on the thin promise of future
earnings. Credit was not just a frivo-
lous indulgence, as its critics have long
insisted. In many cases, it was a necessary
bridge between income and paychecks.
The absurdity of the Rockefeller incident
was comic fodder for newspapers through-
out the nation. The retired titan of industry
took it in stride and even commended the
embarrassed clerk for her “caution.” He had
bigger concerns, such as founding some of
the nation’s most venerable philanthropic
organizations and caring for his ailing wife.
Yet the story, for all of its populist mirth,
reveals something else: consumer credit
surveillance was an established fact of life.
It was funny that Rockefeller’s credit stand-
ing had been questioned, but it was taken
for granted that systems for interrogating
one’s identity and creditworthiness already
existed. Rockefeller, like millions of Ameri-
cans from all walks of life, had a second self,
a disembodied financial identity that inhab-
ited the vast files of retail credit departments
and local credit bureaus. No one, not even
the wealthy or famous, could escape the
gaze of this unseen surveillance apparatus.
How did this happen? How did Ameri-
cans become faceless names and numbers
in an enigmatic network of credit records,
scoring systems and information bro-
kers? How did financial identity become
such an important marker of our per-
sonal trustworthiness and worth? It is easy
to mistake consumer credit surveillance
and financial identity for new technologi-
cal developments, products of late 20th
century databases and algorithms. The
importance of financial identity and credit
risk has become a topic of serious public
debate. The scourge of so-called identity
theft and the 2008 subprime mortgage
crisis illustrate the high stakes of credit
information in contemporary life.
However, systems for monitoring con-
sumer credit identities and for judging
one’s creditworthiness are not new at all.
They were central to the ascent of con-
sumer capitalism in the United States.
Long before credit cards filled mailboxes
in the 1960s, before Americans bought
refrigerators on the installment plan or the
first mass-produced and mass-financed
Model Ts rolled off assembly lines, con-
sumer credit surveillance systems were
already in place. This was the surveillance
system that Rockefeller stumbled into
when his financial identity — his hidden
record of prompt payment and trustwor-
thiness — temporarily trumped his iden-
tity as the world’s richest man in the flesh.
At the center of this story is the consumer
credit bureau. The modern credit bureau is
www.MoAF.org | Summer 2017 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 29