The Money in the Gloves: How a Banking Scandal Shaped a Family
The epilogue of Shortfall is short. Just a few pages. But it might be the most honest part of the whole book.
The gloves
In 1956, when Alice Echols was five, a moving van pulled up to their new house in Chevy Chase Village, Maryland. Out came furniture, steamer trunks, and over a hundred boxes. It had all been in storage in Colorado Springs since Lula’s death in 1945.
Her father started going through it. He opened a box filled entirely with gloves. When he lifted a pair, the fingers were stiff. He pulled out the hundred-dollar bills that Lula had rolled up and stuffed into every single finger of every single glove in that box.
Total: about $2,500.
The fur coats
Echols’s mother had expected her own mother’s fur coats to be heavy with cash when they arrived from Colorado. And they would have been. But the furriers ignored her instructions to store the coats whole. Instead they took them apart, which was apparently the standard method for long-term fur storage. Did the furriers feel the bulges in the lining and, knowing the Davis name and reputation, open them up? Probably.
What was actually left
The gloves weren’t all that remained of Walter’s fortune. The family sold Walter’s black diamond ring to a D.C. jeweler in 1958 for $16,000. And when Lula’s estate was settled in 1945, Echols’s mother inherited $85,000.
In today’s dollars, Lula died with an estate worth roughly $1 million. That doesn’t include the uncounted cash and jewelry.
Here’s the uncomfortable math Echols does: her mother and grandmother could have parted with thousands of dollars during the Depression without themselves suffering. For depositors who lost everything, just about any size check would have made a difference.
What the money paid for
The money wasn’t spent on anything frivolous. But it wasn’t exactly going to essentials either. It paid for a house in tony Chevy Chase Village. It paid for private schools and colleges. Echols attended Sidwell Friends, one of D.C.’s preppiest prep schools.
Her mother, rejected by the “charmed circle” back in Colorado Springs, tried to launch her daughters into Washington society instead. No luck. Like a lot of girls in the sixties, Echols systematically thwarted her mother’s social ambitions.
But here’s the thing she can’t get around: her grandfather’s money shaped her, even the terms of her rebellion. Growing up, the value of hard work was drummed into her. She assumed the comfortable life they had was primarily the result of her father’s hard work.
Writing Shortfall forced her to reconsider. What if she hadn’t gone to Sidwell Friends? What if Walter hadn’t been “both ambitious and ethically challenged”? Maybe nothing separated her family from her great-uncle Willard and his wife, stuck in a ramshackle house on west Colorado Avenue, except Walter’s talent for stealing other people’s money.
The fairy tale
Echols ends with the big question. Walter Davis wasn’t an outlier. The building and loan business bore little resemblance to Bailey Brothers. So why do we cling to the fairy tale at the heart of It’s a Wonderful Life? The idea that capitalism is redeemable, not because of regulators, but because of wonderful people like George Bailey?
She doesn’t claim to have the answer. But she asks whether we need George Bailey to keep at bay all the real-life Walter Davises. To keep us from losing faith in the fairness of the system.
And maybe the hardest question: what if our own investments in this system, our own hopes of making it, are also part of this fairy tale?
That’s where the book ends. Not with resolution. With a question mark.
Book: Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking by Alice Echols (ISBN: 978-1-62097-304-2)