But as the history of debt in America shows, condemnations of extravagance can obscure more than they illuminate. The equation of debt and decline assumes that once upon a time Americans lived within their means and saved for what they bought. This is fantasy: there never was a golden age of thrift. Debt has always played an important role in Americans’ lives — not merely as a means of instant gratification but also as a strategy for survival and a tool for economic advance.

Yet our moral traditions have concealed this complexity. "Owe no man anything," St. Paul warned, and from the New England Puritans forward, legions of Protestant ministers made this their text. Indebtedness signified a sin against the Protestant ethic of self-control; it also threatened the ideal of independent manhood that underwrote the founders’ vision of a virtuous republic. The indebted man "must smile on those he hates, he must extend his hand where he would strike, he must speak pleasantly with a curse in his throat," a Harper’s contributor wrote in 1894. "He wears dependence like a yoke." Benjamin Franklin coined similar lessons in aphorisms later memorized by generations of Victorian-era schoolchildren: "The Borrower Is a Slave to the Lender." "Be frugal and free." The link with lost freedom was more than metaphorical: you could still be imprisoned for debt in many places (including New York City) down to the early 1900’s.

Still, the case against debt was more principled than practical. Every generation of moralists imagined the same fall from financial rectitude. In their novel "The Gilded Age" (1873), Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner mourned the disappearance of the antebellum "horror of debt" amid the speculative borrowing of the post-Civil War years.

NY Times

Bill Coppedge

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