Source for scrip ideas
This article is a deeply detailed account of a few frantic months in 1933. Oklahoma banks were forced to close. All sorts of businesses and business groups and banks and governmental units issued all sorts of scrip with all sorts of payment and clearing mechanisms. The state actually ran on scrip for about a month, until FDR finally finished the 'Bank Holiday' and currency returned to normal.

Okla's own banks were reasonably solid because Okla had learned a lesson from the panic of 1907 which coincided with statehood. The state's founding laws thus included heavy regulation of banks. The problem in 1933 was that banks in other states were collapsing and closing, so most transactions were impossible or dubious.

Modern groups looking to create scrip or local currencies should read the article. Plenty of clever schemes using existing laws and banking mechanisms to set up a currency that isn't exactly a currency.

Scrip is unique as a DIY form of fiat currency. A small business can't generate its own gold, and it can't legally print its own dollars or pounds. But a small business CAN generate scrip to help trade its own products and services with other businesses and customers. Search '1933 scrip' on Ebay. Most of those certificates were printed for individual businesses, not for banks or governments. [I'm going to return to the DIY theme shortly.]

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Sidenote: What got me thinking about scrip was this episode of 'Strange as it Seems'. The story of JW Tilden, a gas station owner in Vancouver, Wash who was injured and blinded by robbers in 1932, then decided to keep running his station on a semi-self-service basis. In the dramatization, a customer pays with scrip. Tilden apparently has no trouble identifying the scrip. Customer then asks "But if I should give you money, how would you make change?" Tilden then describes the trick of keeping different bills in different pockets, and says that nobody has even tried to short him since he was blinded.



Was there something about the scrip in SW Wash that was identifiable by tactile methods? Online info doesn't help much, except for the unique wooden bills produced in the little town of Tenino. Amazing lost technology. Not just chunks of wood; flexible translucent laminated 'cards' with a watermark between the layers. Were those wooden bills widespread? Or was the scrip simply sized to match denomination? Probably never find out.

Graphic notes: I tried putting a uniform cap on the Tilden character, because gas station men (and just about everyone!) had specific uniforms in the '30s. With the cap he looks too much like a soldier to my modern eyes, so I took it off. Now he doesn't look authentic without it. I guess there's no middle ground. Also, I use Polistra so often that I forget how GODDAMN BIG her head is, until I put her next to a realistic human character.


Continued here.

Labels: defensible spaces, scrip

  ¶ 3:13 PM