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 of years that Tampa had more than just two major downtown banks.

C: That is right.

B: Do you think that made a big difference?

C: I think it made some difference, yes, because I think it gave businesspeople and
 borrowers another bank to go to. Exchange Bank was a good bank. First
 National Bank was a good bank. Both of them were old banks, controlled to
 some extent by families. Exchange Bank by the Peter O. Knight family to a great
 extent and then the First National Bank by the Tolliver family and others. There
 had been some other downtown banks that went bust during the Depression. As
 far as I know, Mr. Howell's bank was the first bank that had been chartered in
 downtown since the banks went bust during the Depression. From that little
 location where he was, he moved down to what had been Madison Drugs at the
 corner of Madison Street and Franklin and really developed the bank there. Then
 he built the big building across the street, I think probably the first new building
 downtown Tampa after the war.

B: The big blue building.

C: Hm-mm [yes], which is now the police station. I am sure that the other banks had
 a great deal to do with keeping other banks out. They were powerful. They were
 run by powerful people.

B: Of course, banking and politics are the same as any other business. You want to
 have a political environment that helps business. But I wonder if you have an
 opinion, or if you can give me an opinion, of a historical argument that I have
 heard. The argument is this: some people say that after the end of the Civil War,
 northern banking and northern industry kept money out of the South in the
 United States and that southern business felt itself to be cut off a lot from access
 to capital for major borrowing, and that had a lot to do with keeping the South
 backwards relative to the kind of growth that big northern cities experienced
 during the early part of the twentieth century. This argument says that it was not
 until Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal that southern businessmen and
 southern banks got access again to capital and that it was because of the New
 Deal that business was able to get energized and be able to do bigger borrowing
 than they historically had. Does that sound like it makes sense to you?

D: I think that certainly could be an argument. I have not gone back and studied
 banking that far back, but there is no question about the fact that the southeast
 did not have major banks. The question, then, would be why? That could
 certainly be one of the arguments as to why it did not have major banks. Take
 Florida, Ed Ball [DuPont heir, founder of Florida National Banks] had twenty-one
 banks or something, twenty-two banks, in the state of Florida. He could have