If the idiom of the divine drew on an older religious vernacular and the language of illness anticipated a more secular and pragmatic future, were there images that fit in between, explaining economic life to Americans who no longer saw God in the market but did not yet see the governable forces of supply and demand? The specter of conspiracy loomed especially large in the political imagination of nineteenth-century Americans, animating deep suspicions of political parties, exclusive clubs, freemasons, and Jews and Catholics. In such secretive and hierarchical organizations, many men and women saw the beginnings of a resurgent aristocracy that would doom the new nation’s experiment in republican self-governance. Widening economic inequality, made most visible in times of economic collapse, inspired a range of illustrations that portrayed commerce as a game rigged by factory owners, Wall Street bankers, and their political cronies.

“The Alchemist of the Past, and the Alchemist of the Present” (1884), published in the illustrated magazine Puck (1871–1918), offered a comparatively tame variation on this theme. In it, a crush of investors line up to visit a market analyst, the cartoon’s modern-day alchemist, who “Can Make Gold Out of Everything.” The notion that Wall Street prosperity was both magical and reserved for those in-the-know was especially resonant in the postbellum period when financiers like Jay Gould were seen as manipulating the market to their own private ends.

“Caught in the Tape” (1877), engraved for the Daily Graphic by Arthur Burdett Frost, offered a stronger indictment of the Robber Barron class as Gould, pictured as a bear, drags the bulls of the market around by ticker tape. “Hoarding Gold,” a cartoon from the Populist pamphlet Coin’s Financial School (1896), depicted a “Financial Manipulator” holding down the price of cotton in order to inflate the value of his gold hoard, while the hand of “Politics” simply anchors the scale, powerless to move it.

“The Condition of the Laboring Man at Pullman,” published in Judge magazine in 1894, carries the notion of a rigged economy to its cruelest extreme, as a vaguely Semitic George Pullman squeezes coins and life out of an employee caught in the vice of “Low Wages” and “High Rent.” Here, economic life is governed neither by God nor policy but by the rapacious designs of the corporate elite.