TY - JOUR AU - Lu, Qian AU - Wallis, John Joseph TI - Banks, Politics, and Political Parties: From Partisan Banking to Open Access in Early Massachusetts JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 21572 PY - 2015 Y2 - September 2015 DO - 10.3386/w21572 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21572 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21572.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Qian Lu Central University of Finance and Economics E-Mail: lu@econ.umd.edu John Joseph Wallis Department of Economics University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 Tel: 301/405-3552 Fax: 301/405-3542 E-Mail: wallis@econ.umd.edu M1 - published as Qian Lu, John Joseph Wallis. "Banks, Politics, and Political Parties: From Partisan Banking to Open Access in Early Massachusetts," in Naomi R. Lamoreaux and John Joseph Wallis, editors, "Organizations, Civil Society, and the Roots of Development" University of Chicago Press (2017) AB - The United States was the first nation to allow open access to the corporate form to its citizens. The state of Massachusetts was not only one of the first states to provide its members with legally sanctioned tools to create organizations and enable open access but, on a per capita basis, had many more banks and other corporations than other states as early as the 1820s. Nonetheless, Massachusetts did not open access easily. This paper documents that until 1812, bank charters were only available to members of the Federalist Party in Massachusetts. When the Democratic-Republicans gained control of the state legislature and governor’s mansion in 1811-12, they chartered two new Democratic-Republican banks and threatened to eliminate most of the Federalist bank. The paper documents the close association of politicians and bankers. Before 1811, close to three-quarters of all the bankers we can identify had been or would eventually become a state legislator. The evolving relationships between politics and banking, the eventual opening of banking, and the wealth of bankers are tracked into the 1850s. ER -