Dixieland DTs

A lecture about money is really about so much more.

Arriving at the Virginia Historical Society at 11:58, I slid into the seat directly behind a cameraman.

The woman next to me immediately initiated conversation with me and the woman on her other side.

"What is a deadbeat, do you think?" she asked, sounding quite sincere.

"Someone who doesn't know anything?" the older woman next to her volunteered.

"Someone who doesn't pay their bills?" I suggested.

"Oh, you mean like how we're going to be for the next four years?" my seatmate said, sliding in opinion I didn't want to hear.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, lady. Don't be foisting your ill-informed political opinions on me.

Scott Nelson was giving a talk on his book, "A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Disasters."

Could there have better timing for such a topic?

Apparently not because C-SPAN was there filming it for posterity, if blocking my view of the slide show on occasion.

Nelson explained right off the bat that he couldn't take us through every financial panic in U.S. history or "we'll be here for three or four hours."

From the folly of the Continental Congress printing their own worthless money (and the British government copying it and selling it for pennies on the dollar in taverns) to the wild inflation it caused, Nelson was a lively and informed speaker.

The stories of our lawmakers he shared brought few surprises.

Our boy Jefferson was appalled that fully half of Congress had stock in the First Bank of the U.S. created by Congress.

I'm right there with you, T.J.

There were tales of smuggling during the Napoleonic wars (U.S. ships picking up cargo in British and French colonies, taking it back to "touch" a U.S. port and then selling it to France and Britain) and a reference to Baltimore as "a nest of pirates."

Seems that the War of 1812 taught us that if you can't sell American debt, you can't fight a war, a lesson we clearly took to heart.

There was the Panic of 1819, a five year depression (sound familiar?) where so many alcoholic merchants ended up in the hospital trying to kick their debt-induced alcoholism that a new condition was identified and term coined.

Delerium tremens. You know, the DTs.

And there's more. With the national banking system a wreck, states began getting into the business of money.

The Citizens' Bank of Louisiana issued ten-dollar notes with the French word for ten ("dix") on them and the area where these notes were passed became known as Dixieland.

See why I go to these history lectures?

It was the Panic of 1837 when the south repudiated its debt and Britain began acknowledging what deadbeats the U.S. were.

That's when railroads got into the mortgage business by collecting the land around that given to them for train tracks, granting mortgages to people to build along the RR lines and selling bonds to Europe with those notes.

There was the Swamp Act of 1850 (a state could drain any land they deemed a swamp and sell it) where states took advantage of the latitude to declare anything a swamp (even a mountaintop).

And in a neat little tie-in, guess what young lawyer was busily fighting the Swamp Act?

That's right, Honest Abe.

But it was the Panic of 1873 that best equated to what the U.S. is now experiencing.

Perhaps most fascinating of all, Nelson said he'd written an article in 2007 forecasting our present depression, based solely on the mortgage and lending issues that mirrored what had happened in 1873.

People were amazed as his predictions. He gave talks on the subject.

And this book was born from trying to explain the patterns of American deadbeat culture.

It's all about the interest rates.

Bottom line: Americans have been borrowing and Europeans have been lending to us since the 1790s.

At least now I know who to go to when I need cash.