Left: Put Cleveland to Work Society, Inc. five cents scrip, 1933. Right: Pismo Beach, California, 50 cents clamshell scrip, 1933.
to Sing Sing for embezzlement, having
defaulted on loans worth today nearly half
a billion dollars.
It looked momentarily like the worst
had passed. Some said stocks were now
at bargain prices, presenting great buys.
Not everyone was lulled. In the governor’s
mansion in Albany, Franklin D. Roosevelt
denounced “the fever of speculation.”
But by the following Tuesday, October
29, the selloff turned catastrophic. In ensu-
ing days, John D. Rockefeller was prevailed
upon to break his habitual silence to deliver
a message of confidence. “Believing that
fundamental conditions of the country are
sound,” he said, “my son and I have for
some days been purchasing sound com-
mon stock. The comedian Eddie Cantor
joked: “Sure, who else had any money left?”
There would be money after the country
fell into the Great Depression. Only it
wouldn’t always be the kind Americans
usually carried in their pockets. It would
be a new kind of emergency currency—
scrip, a provisional certificate of money,
maybe derived from “subscription receipt”
or an old French word for purse, escrepe.
In 1933, two New York newspaper-
men, Wayne Weishaar and Wayne Par-
rish, published a book called Men Without
Money: The Challenge of Barter and Scrip.
Now that the country had tumbled into
the Depression, they wrote, “Economi-
cally and socially the barter movement in
all of its phases is the outstanding ‘story’ in
the United States today.”
Barter, of course, was the ancient
medium of commerce, where people trade
what they have for what they need from
someone else. A farmer trades bushels of
corn to a shoemaker for a pair of shoes. But
in a complex society, making such matches
was cumbersome. What do you trade if you
are say, a lion tamer, or a mirror-silverer?
So amid the shortage of legal tender,
municipalities, organizations and busi-
nesses came up with their own unof-
ficial medium of exchange—scrip. Some
of it was paper, mimicking Treasury bills.
Some was wood, literally wooden nick-
els. Pismo Beach, California, even issued
clamshells as currency.
One little town in western Washing-
ton State between Seattle and Portland
was particularly innovative. Tenino (Ten-
NINE-Oh), named for an Indian tribe,
suffered the closing of its only bank in
1931. With the next closest bank 15 miles
away, depositors were encouraged to
assign to the Chamber of Commerce 25%
of their frozen bank assets in exchange
for scrip certificates that local merchants
agreed to accept for purchases, in amounts
of 25 cents, 50 cents, $1, $5 and $10.
It was printed at the local newspaper,
the Thurston County Independent, but
along with paper, some of the 27,000
certificates were run off on thin strips of
“slicewood”—two rectangles of spruce,
3¼ by 5½ inches, with paper in the mid-
dle. Word spread quickly with motor-
ists detouring to Tenino to snap up the
wooden money. In the end, of the $10,000
in scrip issued, only $40 was actually
spent. Almost everyone wanted to hang
on to it, which defeated the purpose but
made Tenino world-famous in numismat-
ics. To this day, wooden money is printed
there for souvenirs.
According to one leading scholar,
Loren Gatch of the Department of Politi-
cal Science at the University of Central
Oklahoma, by 1933 the amount of scrip
in circulation, in today’s valuation, was as
much as $14 billion.
There was so-called reputational scrip
issued by corporations and organizations
(and backed by their solid reputations) to
meet payrolls or purchase goods. There
was bank and financial scrip exchanged
as certificates between financial institu-
tions or issued to depositors in lieu of
cash. There was barter and self-help scrip,
exchanged in cooperatives where farmers
traded crops for harvest help and goods.
There were tax-anticipation notes issued
by cash-strapped municipalities to their
employees with certificates. Some scrip
required the application of stamps each
time it was exchanged. When a sufficient
number of stamps had been affixed, the
currency lost its value, adding an incentive
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