What is it about?
Banking on the Oklahoma frontier was a zero-sum game in which one bank's gain was another bank's loss. In this article, I describe the competition between three banks in the Oklahoma Panhandle to illustrate what I call Wild West capitalism in the early 1900s.
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Why is it important?
"Battle of the Banks" grew out of my research into banking in Oklahoma, a project that resulted in 2 books, Banking in Oklahoma before Statehood and Banking in Oklahoma, 1907-2000 (OU Press, 2013 and 2014), and several articles on community banks. Two conclusions pervade my work: (1) community banks, and particularly so-called "country banks," have been the heart and soul of small towns since their inception in the frontier era; and (2) the development of community banks sheds light on business and economic development in the Great Plains.
Perspectives
Perhaps the most rewarding part of my research into Oklahoma banking was the oral history interviews I conducted with bankers across the state. Many of them represented the third and fourth generations of their families to manage their banks, and their stories provided an intimate perspective of the challenges that small-town bankers have faced since territorial days. As a sociologist, I was most intrigued by anecdotes that illustrate the importance of banks that serviced regional markets and served as engines of local economies. Practically every banker I interviewed described the struggle to survive in an age of consolidation and online banking.
Michael Hightower
University of Virginia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Battle of the Banks: The Genesis and Resilience of Community Banking in Oklahoma, Great Plains Quarterly, January 2020, Project Muse,
DOI: 10.1353/gpq.2020.0003.
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