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Arts and Charts

Gold at 160, Gold at 130

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Picturing Providence, Illustrating Illness
The visual language of fate-from-above drew on older traditions in Western art. Depictions of the “money devil” showering covetous Europeans with undeserved riches dated back to the seventeenth century and cast prosperity (at least the get-rich-quick kind) as a curse from beyond. Americans would invoke this motif time and again in the nineteenth century.

"Gold at 160. Gold at 130," printed in Harper’s Weekly in 1869, envisioned diabolical influences in the volatile gold market. Lorum Ipsum, sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?

“Economy – The Lesson of the Great Panic” (1873) Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?

An untitled cartoon in J. Laurence Laughlin’s Facts About Money (1896) presented failure as a heavenly spirit descending on the acquisitive masses. "Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?

The lesson these images conveyed was more moral than technical. These artists did not profess to know how to manage economic affairs, either in one’s personal life or in the halls of political power. Instead, echoing powerful moral traditions, they cautioned against greed and hubris, casting ruin as divine retribution and success as a goal best pursued by modesty, diligence, and thrift – advice made clearest by engraver John Donaghy’s instruction to “Emulate Poor Richard.”
Picturing Providence, Illustrating Illness
The visual language of fate-from-above drew on older traditions in Western art. Depictions of the “money devil” showering covetous Europeans with undeserved riches dated back to the seventeenth century and cast prosperity (at least the get-rich-quick kind) as a curse from beyond. Americans would invoke this motif time and again in the nineteenth century. “Gold at 160. Gold at 130,” printed in Harper’s Weekly in 1869, envisioned diabolical influences in the volatile gold market, while “Economy – The Lesson of the Great Panic” (1873) and an untitled cartoon in J. Laurence Laughlin’s Facts About Money (1896) presented failure as a heavenly spirit descending on the acquisitive masses.The lesson these images conveyed was more moral than technical. These artists did not profess to know how to manage economic affairs, either in one’s personal life or in the halls of political power. Instead, echoing powerful moral traditions, they cautioned against greed and hubris, casting ruin as divine retribution and success as a goal best pursued by modesty, diligence, and thrift – advice made clearest by engraver John Donaghy’s instruction to “Emulate Poor Richard.”
Picturing Providence

When nineteenth-century Americans sought to explain how forces beyond their direct control could influence their economic lives, they often turned to the power of Providence. Imagery that cast booms and busts as the work of God or the Devil were highly resonant in a religious culture that often emphasized divine judgment and revelation.
Note how fortune appears to descend from the heavens or from winged creatures in these images. Calamity is not traced to natural events or human relations; it is something that originates in another world and passes into our own. Like the divine, these financial crashes seem to be beyond mankind's full comprehension.

Yet humans are not guiltless in its arrival. Greed, gambling, and the search for a quick dollar invite divine or diabolic judgment, making misfortune a moral issue – a kind punishment for one’s devotion to pecuniary gain. The nation too is liable for having tolerated sin in its midst.

These themes echoed imagery that circulated in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Observe the similarities between these representations as well as the differences. Economic matters are bound together with religious values. Yet in these European images, it is sudden prosperity that signals immorality rather than sudden poverty. Both rapid gain and loss stem from the same embrace of illicit temptations in this worldview, but in the American version, it is the negative consequences – panic, dependence, and destitution – that are given greater emphasis.
Picturing Providence, Illustrating Illness
“In one word, excitement, anxiety, terror, panic, pervades all classes and ranks.”

Thus did one observer describe conditions in New Orleans, the financial capital of the South, at the onset of the Panic of 1837. Americans who confronted dramatic economic changes in the nineteenth century lacked many of the analytical resources that we take for granted today. Economic science was not a distinct or refined academic discipline, and basic economic data was scarce and unreliable. Indicators of national economic vitality like GDP or growth rate had not been invented, and the very notion of “the economy” – a self-contained circuitry of complex commercial connections – did not yet exist.

When painters, lithographers, and cartoonists tried to convey what was happening in the economic realm to an unsettled and fearful public, they often turned to idioms with a more familiar history. Among the most popular in the period bounded by the Panics of 1837 and 1893 were divinity and illness.

“The Explosion,” a lithograph that appeared in Junius Jr.’s “Vision of Judgment, Or a Present for the Whigs of ’76 and ‘37” depicted four spirits racing out “from the fabled box of Pandora” bringing with them “Poverty, Distress, and Famine.” The accompanying text blamed the release of these phantoms on the hard-money ideology of the Democrats, but the image suggested that the precise link between cause and effect was murky, with panic more an other-worldly punishment for immoral behavior than a clear consequence of unsound policies.

The visual language of fate-from-above drew on older traditions in Western art. Depictions of the “money devil” showering covetous Europeans with undeserved riches dated back to the seventeenth century and cast prosperity (at least the get-rich-quick kind) as a curse from beyond. Americans would invoke this motif time and again in the nineteenth century. “Gold at 160. Gold at 130,” printed in Harper’s Weekly in 1869, envisioned diabolical influences in the volatile gold market, while “Economy – The Lesson of the Great Panic” (1873) and an untitled cartoon in J. Laurence Laughlin’s Facts About Money (1896) presented failure as a heavenly spirit descending on the acquisitive masses.

The lesson these images conveyed was more moral than technical. These artists did not profess to know how to manage economic affairs, either in one’s personal life or in the halls of political power. Instead, echoing powerful moral traditions, they cautioned against greed and hubris, casting ruin as divine retribution and success as a goal best pursued by modesty, diligence, and thrift – advice made clearest by engraver John Donaghy’s instruction to “Emulate Poor Richard.”

Something closer to modern understandings of “the economy” was found in images that portrayed economic catastrophe as an illnesses. In Edward Williams Clay’s “Uncle Sam Sick with La Grippe” (1837), an infirmed national body is tended to by politicians offering “Bonds lotion” and “Post Note bills.” “Be Sound in Mind and Body” (1879), drawn by the goldbug Thomas Nast over forty years later, found Uncle Sam with his foot caught in the silver trap and his leg immobilized by swells of inflation.

These images were not as common as those emphasizing the power of Providence, and they told a very different story. Where “The Explosion” or “Economy” gestured toward a moral continuum of economic action and the unbound influence of other-worldly forces, these illustrations pictured an economic society that was organic, contained, and treatable. Like the body, they suggested, it could be helped or hindered by deliberate and technical intervention. What made Uncle Sam’s leg swell or fever rise were not moral failings or the judgment of the gods but rather secular stimuli that spurred inevitable, mechanical reactions.
Gold at 160. Gold at 130.
"Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?"
The Money Devil This visual language of fate-from-above drew on older traditions in Western art. Depictions of the ‘money devil’ showering covetous Europeans with undeserved riches dated back to the seventeenth century and cast prosperity (at least the get-rich-quick kind) as a curse from beyond. Americans invoked this motif time and again in the nineteenth century. “Gold at 160. Gold at 130,” printed in Harper’s Weekly in 1869, envisioned diabolical influences in the volatile gold market, while “Economy – The Lesson of the Great Panic” (1873) and an untitled cartoon in J. Laurence Laughlin’s Facts About Money (1896) presented failure as a heavenly spirit descending on the acquisitive masses.