On Black Tuesday, Norfolk’s City Manager Told City Workers to Join Their Credit Union

By Mark Treichel  |  Credit Union History

October 29, 1929. Black Tuesday. In New York, the stock market was in free fall, and the day would become shorthand for the start of the Great Depression.

In Norfolk, Virginia, the afternoon paper carried a different kind of financial story on page 28.

The Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, Tuesday, October 29, 1929.

"Truxtun Gives Hearty Endorsement To Union"

The union in that headline was the Norfolk Municipal Employes’ Credit Union. City Manager I. Walke Truxtun had given it his public backing, and the paper reported that “new life has been taken on” since: more than 50 new members had enrolled since the previous Friday.

Every city employee was eligible, including the public school teachers. A number of teachers had already joined, and the credit union planned meetings with school principals to sign up more. The officers were city staff: assistant city attorney J. Paul Jackson was president, and deputy city clerk John D. Corbell was secretary.

The reason for the push was in the subhead of Truxtun’s statement: “In Absence of Pension Fund.” Norfolk’s city workers had no pension. The credit union was the closest thing they had to a safety net.

"Conditions beyond our control"

Truxtun’s statement reads very differently knowing what was happening in New York that same day:

“Many of us, by reason of physical disqualification or lack of finances, are not able to surround ourselves and families with the protection offered by the insurance companies and realizing the many frailties of human nature and our susceptibility to conditions beyond our control, I suggest that those men and women connected with the city give serious thought to this opportunity, not only in order to provide against the future, but, at the same time, to insure a fair return on the amount invested.”

And then a line that sounds like a boss who genuinely cared:

“It would be especially pleasing to me if I knew that all those with whom I am now associated had protected themselves against misfortune and old age.”

To be fair to the timeline, Truxtun almost certainly wrote this without knowing how bad the day in New York would get. The story says his statement was “issued today,” and the Ledger-Dispatch was an afternoon paper. But the words landed on the same page, on the same day, as the worst crash in American history.

It wasn’t only Norfolk

The same day, 700 miles away in Elkhart, Indiana, the Elkhart Truth ran a short item. At a special meeting of the New York Central Credit Union, two new directors were elected “for the purpose of starting a membership drive at once.”

The Elkhart Truth, Tuesday, October 29, 1929.

And the day before, Monday, October 28 — when the market had already lost more than any day in its history to that point — Brooklyn’s Standard Union society page wished a happy 29th birthday to a young lawyer named Samuel Douglas. Among his credits: president of the Kings County Credit Union.

The Brooklyn Standard Union, Monday, October 28, 1929.

Three papers, three states, 48 hours. Not one of them shows any panic about credit unions. While Wall Street crashed, credit unions were signing up members.

What came next

The crash turned into the Depression, and thousands of banks failed over the next four years. Credit unions, small and built on members who knew each other, came through in remarkably good shape. By 1933 a newspaper in Woodward, Oklahoma, would describe them as an institution “which has withstood the rigors of the depression in a remarkable degree.” In 1934, Congress passed the Federal Credit Union Act.

Norfolk’s city employees, it turned out, had been given good advice.

The Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch (Norfolk, Va.), Tuesday, October 29, 1929, p. 28. The Elkhart Truth (Elkhart, Ind.), Tuesday, October 29, 1929. The Standard Union (Brooklyn, N.Y.), Monday, October 28, 1929. Woodward Daily Press (Woodward, Okla.), December 5, 1933. Accessed via Newspapers.com.