Shortfall

Starred review from August 14, 2017
Bankruptcy and fraud run through the ostensibly wholesome business culture of small-town America in this intimate study of a Depression-era building-and-loan failure. Echols (Hot Stuff), professor of history at the University of Southern California, recounts the 1932 bankruptcy of the City Savings Building and Loan Association of Colorado Springs, Colo., a thrift run by her grandfather Walter Davis. The failure wiped out thousands of depositors and sparked scandal when Davis fled and some of his victims plotted to kidnap his daughter (Echols’s mother, Dorothy) to compel his return; he hanged himself in jail after his capture. Drawing on family archives, Echols combines lucid exposition of the rickety economics of the building-and-loan industry with a rich social history of its decline from cooperative nonprofit institutions that financed working-class home buyers to laxly regulated, for-profit venues for predatory lending and Ponzi schemes. She styles Davis as a darker—in her telling, truer—version of building-and-loan icon George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life: not a populist hero, but a greedy social climber seeking wealth and status through reckless—then fraudulent—gambles with other people’s money, enabled by the anticollectivist ethos of his conservative community. Echols’s absorbing portrait makes Main Street the rival of Wall Street for callous corruption. Photos.

August 1, 2017
How discovering the truth about her banker grandfather enabled the author to unlock much that has been forgotten about the Great Depression era.A chance conversation with her father launched Echols (History and Gender Studies/Univ. of Southern California; Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, 2010, etc.) on an investigative journey that included attempts to elicit remembrances from her mother and visits to libraries in search of the real Walter Davis, a building and loan officer in Colorado Springs. The discovery of boxes of material after her mother died was crucial. The family had passed down the story that the unmentionable grandfather was an embezzler, and he was driven to suicide after desperate efforts to generate cash from his life insurance policies to pay off some of the creditors of his insolvent bank and try to provide for his wife's future. In the author's hands, her family's story becomes a counterpoint to Frank Capra's feel-good romance It's a Wonderful Life, with Jimmy Stewart as the small-town banker. But it is more than that, as Echols sets Davis' story against the background of the financial excesses of the 1920s, which led inexorably to insolvency, bankruptcy, and the catastrophe of the Great Depression. Like her family's own history, much of this back story has been largely hidden or blocked out, but Echols revives it. Back then, excessive house construction and shady mortgage finance led to insolvency and financial collapse, a situation that calls to mind current practices. Throughout, the author's personal story meshes well with her history of building and loan associations. "The collapse of these associations," she writes, "like the all too common failure of state-chartered banks, affected millions of Americans." A lively and informative treatment in which one man's rise and fall opens a window onto a long-overlooked historical landscape in all its finely drawn detail.

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October 15, 2017

Set in the early 1900s in the American West, this captivating true story centers on Echols's (Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies, Univ. of Southern California; Scars of Sweet Paradise) grandfather and his family's dramatic rise and fall associated with the building and loan industry during the Great Depression. Unlike the happy ending in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, this story is more complex, filled with family secrets, schemes, and swindles. Surprisingly similar to many movies of the time that depict wealthy individuals engaging in extravagant spending and lifestyles, Echols's relatives actually enjoyed such a life. The title "shortfall" has a double meaning and can allude to character deficits and corrupted moral values. Echols's style is honest and gripping, and readers will be hooked from start to finish as the story unfolds with discoveries of letters and memorabilia in the family home and concludes with the question of whether the family hid treasures and monies yet to be uncovered. Echols's extensive research efforts are reflected in the many photos, primary documents, and notes. VERDICT Because of its historical accuracy, this book provides many insights about American culture and economy and is therefore recommended for both public and academic collections.--Caroline Geck, Somerset, NJ

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2017
Echols, a history professor and author of several in-depth cultural studies, here delves into the collapse of the building-and-loan industry during the Depression, starting with the long-buried scandal in her own family, revolving around her grandfather, whose building and loan in Colorado Springs collapsed in 1932. She cites his case as a microcosm of the countrywide debacle that occurred, starting in the 1920s, which she calls the decade of debauchery. As one of four owners of building and loans in Colorado Springs, his decision to play all the angles by paying out more interest than his company could afford led to the company's implosion, and a shortfall of more than $1 million, which left 3,600 depositors stranded. Echols extends her discussion of her grandfather's avarice to include its broader implications, up to and including the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007. Her book, she states, became not only her excavation of a buried financial history but also a timely, on-the-ground history of twentieth-century American capitalism. The result is a thoughtful, thoroughly researched look at financial crises, past and present.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)