Remember the good times. Never speak ill of the dead.
The PNC Legacy Project’s new exhibit on National City Bank’s 163-year history politely follows the best funeral etiquette. The museum-style display at the renamed PNC Center downtown never mentions subprime mortgages, former chairman Dave Daberko or the 2008 banking crisis. Instead, its photographs, audio stations and memorabilia recall National City in its prime while telling a larger story — the history of commerce and banking in Cleveland.
PNC surely created the Legacy Project, which documents the history of “predecessor banks,” to salve the wounds of mergers and takeovers. But rather than bore us with a straight-up tribute to National City’s good works, it treats viewers to a panorama of old-time Cleveland objects and images. Evocative photos of industrial might and ingenuity range from a shot of John D. Rockefeller’s sprawling Standard Oil refinery in Cleveland in 1889 to a worker peering into a scope at General Electric’s lamp laboratory in 1928.
Displays capture how Cleveland changed. Notices in five local newspapers advertise the 1947 opening of a bank branch at Pearl and Brookpark roads — in German, Italian, Polish, Hungarian and Serbo-Croatian. Old giveaway items become time-capsule symbols of changing cultural mores, such as a mini-clothesline and clothespin kit from 1961 that reminded women of the bank’s services.
Yet a sad sense of foreboding follows, and not just because of the Legacy Project’s eulogy for National City (“Known for its resilience, NCB offered friendly, innovative services”). It starts, of all places, at an audio station featuring the 1908 presidential candidates: populist William Jennings Bryan arguing for federal bank deposit insurance (“[it] protects the community from the business embarrassment that follows a bank failure”), William Howard Taft calling Bryan’s idea “a tax on the honest and prudent banker to make up for the dishonesty and imprudence of others.”
From there it’s a short walk to the Great Depression: A recording of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first fireside chat, explaining the bank panic, and a telegram announcing FDR’s mandatory bank holiday.
National City was a pillar of strength during the Depression, we learn. In fact, it grew by taking over two ailing Cleveland banks in spring 1933, paying their depositors back with grants from the Reconstruction Finance Corp. — a new federal agency not terribly different from the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
In a crisis, not only do the strongest banks survive, the government turns to them to keep their weaker, wounded competition from failing. Perhaps the exhibit’s curators found a way to comment on National City’s end after all.