| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Banksters, Bosses, and Smart Money: A Social History of the Great Toledo Bank Crash of 1931. By Timothy Messer-Kruse. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. xii, 196 pp. $44.95, ISBN 0-8142-0977-7.)
In this concise and very readable social history of the Toledo, Ohio, bank crisis of 1931, Timothy Messer-Kruse makes good use of contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts, as well as the limited number of government and corporate documents still available, to offer a detailed story of the private and public mismanagement that led to one of the worst banking crises among the many that took place during the Great Depression. The result is a fine contribution to the history of bank panics in particular and to the literature on the Great Depression more generally.	1
Messer-Kruse argues that contemporary observers laid too much of the blame for the banking crises of the era at the feet of irrationally panicked depositors and not nearly enough on the desktops of incompetent and corrupt "banksters" and politicians. Central to this argument are two claims. First, he carefully documents the ways in which numerous local bankers engaged in patterns of real estate investment during the 1920s that clearly broke existing antifraud laws and often benefited bank directors and other insiders. The result was that banks' balance sheets offered a highly distorted picture of their health, thanks to overvalued real estate.	. . .

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