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.

Of course, there was always a more unsettling possibility: that economic life wasn’t governed at all. In addition to the language of conspiracy, nineteenth-century artists made liberal use of the theme of chaos, representing in paint and ink what one historian has argued was a new belief that “sudden, utterly unforeseeable, extreme turns of wealth” were a matter of chance.

Transportation furnished one of the more amenable metaphors for this worldview. In literature, images of choppy seas, tropical storms, and capsize and shipwreck pervaded discussions of economic life. In illustrations, artists expressed panic or collapse as akin to a train crash or being bucked by a wild horse – dramatic interruptions in mundane activities that resulted in colossal injury to all involved.

The anarchic, libidinous crowd was also a favored motif. “The Stock Exchange As It Appeared at the Height of the Erie Excitement,” printed in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1872, portrayed Wall Street as a cacophonous melee of investors driven by rumors, urges, and instincts – a far cry from the calculating plutocrats of “Caught in the Tape” or “Hoarding Gold” and from the contained and mechanical economic body of “Uncle Sam Sick with La Grippe.” William Holbrook Beard’s “The Bulls and Bears in the Market” (1879) made the animal spirits unleashed by commerce more visible by transforming New York bankers into literal bulls and bears. Unlike in “Caught in the Tape,” no one class is manipulating the other as much as they are all careening into one another in a desperate, irrational attempt to sate their appetites for profit.

Chaos and conspiracy marked a middle ground between older notions of economic fate as punishment or reward for moral behavior and modern notions of economic performance as consequence of sound technical management. Unlike the religious idiom, these illustrations cast doubt on whether the small individual was really responsible for his or her economic experiences, extending the equally troubling possibilities that success was random or inversely related to morality, a reward for manipulation. Unlike the language of health and sickness, they questioned whether the economic realm was a contained and rational whole, suggesting that it was either a field of power and conflict, winners and losers, or of arbitrary chance.