country asking for samples of their scrip,
paying in some cases with postage stamps.
One case was particularly interesting.
Upton Sinclair, the great muckraker and
author of The Jungle, ran for governor of
California in 1934 as a socialist, his slogan,
“End Poverty in California.” Red-baiting
enemies circulated fake scrip called “Sin-
cLIAR dollars,” which were “Good Only
in California and Russia.”
What lessons might be drawn from the
Crash of 1929 with its scrip? One might
be the protective role of government. We
live in a cynical time of disdain for public
service. But Gulick symbolized faith in
enlightened leadership, and the knowl-
edge required to turn theory into effective
public policy. In a foreword to a lauded
1936 Rockefeller study of liquor reform,
“After Repeal,” Gulick wrote:
For Depression-era consumers short of cash to pay fractional sales taxes, some states issued
tokens like these bottle-cap cardboards in values as small as one-tenth of a cent.
for its prompt use. And some government
entities issued square or round tokens of
tin, aluminum or cardboard, in denomi-
nations as small as one mill, one-tenth
of a cent, to pay sales tax on very small
purchases. The Treasury later ruled these
fractional coins illegal.
As for scrip, as long as issuers didn’t
claim to be minting legal tender, Wash-
ington was willing to look away. Given the
dire circumstances, scrip was legal enough.
Some was exchanged at a utopian exper-
iment called the Natural Development
Association of Salt Lake City, an influen-
tial cooperative with its own newspaper
and, according to authors Weishaar and
Parish, more power than 50 trainloads of
Communists. It was limited, however, to
members who subscribed to Christianity.
Fascinatingly, one of the earliest advo-
cates of self-liquidating scrip, and a harsh
critic of the monetary system, was Charles
A. Lindbergh Sr., father of the aviator,
who served in Congress from Minnesota
from 1907 to 1917 and opposed Ameri-
can involvement in World War I, an
isolationist like his son.
I didn’t know much about scrip until
finding it in archives I was working on in
Baruch College’s Newman Library after
leaving The Times. I had started a blog on
an especially historic collection, the papers
of the Institute of Public Administration
and its longtime director, Luther Halsey
Gulick III (1892–1993). With the gener-
ous help of Carnegie Corporation of New
York, we got the donated collection of
700 overstuffed cartons out of storage and
into Baruch for processing and digitiza-
tion. One of the surprises we found was
Gulick’s collection of scrip.
Gulick, it turned out, was not just a
leading theorist of government manage-
ment, a counselor to Presidents Wood-
row Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and
Harry Truman, and New York’s first City
Administrator, under Mayor Robert F.
Wagner. He was also an obsessive collec-
tor of posters, charts, maps—and scrip.
Starting in April 1934, Gulick, fascinated
with all the workings of government, sent
letters to municipal officials around the
14 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Fall 2019 | www.MoAF.org
The real work of government is not to
be found behind the Greek columns
of public buildings. It is rather on the
land, among the people. It is the post-
man delivering mail, the policeman
walking his beat, the teacher hearing
Johnny read, the whitewing sweeping
the street, the inspectors—dairy, food,
health, tenement, factory, on the farm,
in the laboratory, the slaughterhouse,
the slum, the mill; it is the playground
full of children; the library with its
readers; the reservoirs of pure water
flowing to the cities; it is street lights
at night; it is thousands and thousands
of miles of pavements and sidewalks;
it is the nurse beside the free bed; the
doctor administering serum; and the
food, raiment and shelter given those
who have nothing; it is the standard of
weight and measure and value in every
hamlet. All this is government and not
what men call ‘government’ in great
buildings at capitols; and its symbol
is found not in the great flag flown
from the dome of the capitol but in the
twenty-five million flags in the homes
of the people.
Ralph Blumenthal, a Distinguished Lec-
turer at Baruch College and reporter for
The New York Times from 1964 to 2009,
gave a lunchtime talk at the Museum of
American Finance on October 29, 2019,
for the 90th anniversary of Black Tues-
day, 1929. This article is adapted from his
presentation.