The SEC Historical Society’s on-line archive is now almost a decade old but remains underutilized by scholars. Its collection
includes important documents covering a time span between the late eighteenth
century and the present day. For
example, its earliest document is the Buttonwood Agreement (1792), which might
be considered the original founding document of what would become the New York
Stock Exchange. Its most recent document
is a 2011 report involving financial accounting standards. The collection also includes dozens of oral
histories from SEC commissioners, division heads, other senior officials, and
judges, such as Manny Cohen, Frank Easterbrook, and Roderick Hill.
In additional
to primary sources, the site features a number of “galleries” which consist of
essays written by historians along with the digitalized primary documents upon
which the essays rely. A gallery that I
curated “The Imperial SEC?: Foreign Policy and the Internationalization of
Securities Markets” argued that the SEC had a long history of involvement in
U.S. foreign affairs and that its
policies regarding foreign capital markets must be understood as part of the
Cold War. Accompanying documents elucidate
the tension in the SEC’s contribution to the growth of global capitalism in the
1980s-1990s by both slowly easing restrictions to foreigners’ access to U.S.
capital markets while simultaneously seeking to increase its jurisdiction over
enforcement actions in foreign markets. Moreover
as the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc fell, the SEC was one of the first
U.S. agencies to establish a presence in these emerging capitalist markets. Once there, the SEC sought to “teach”
foreigners about how to regulate markets.
A stunning sense of U.S. exceptionalism appears throughout SEC documents
as officials boasted that the United States had the most honest, transparent,
and well-regulated markets in the world.
The archive is also particularly rich with documents involving the New
Deal and the growth of the administrative state. In painstaking detail, the collections allows
the historian to see the everyday work of an administrative agency including
its intra- and inter- agency disputes,
its conflicts and compromises with the judicial, executive, and
legislative branches of government, as well as the financial industry and
foreign governments.
