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Arts and Charts

The Panic

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An Age of Panics
“In one word, excitement, anxiety, terror, panic, pervades all classes and ranks.”
Thus did one observer describe the onset of the Panic of 1837, which sent the entire American economy into a tailspin that lasted for years. Such events struck at least once per generation during the long nineteenth century, spinning the nation through a dizzying cycle of booms and busts. Yet when Americans set about explaining these economic swings, they did so without many of tools we take for granted today – data on supply and demand, indicators like GDP or the unemployment rate, and models of the relationship between interest rates and growth, for example.

Instead, they turned to technical and artistic images that told a range of stories about how the economy functioned, why it bounced men and women up and down with little warning, and what was to be done to steady it.
Introduction

Most of us sense that our lives are entwined with broader economic forces. When business is bustling and we can afford the things we need and want, we feel that the economy is good. When our hours are cut, we lose our jobs, the stock market tanks, or companies close down, we sense that the economy is bad.

But what is an “economic force”? What is this thing called “the economy”? Have Americans always thought about their economic lives in the same way that we do today? What alternative ideas and concepts have influenced American economic thinking since the market revolution of the early nineteenth century?

Art and Charts: Picturing the American Economy surveys the long history of how Americans imagined their place in the larger economic order. It does this by taking a close look at the visual imagery people created and consumed in order to make sense of the booms and busts, peaks and panics that effected their lives in profound ways. The paintings, cartoons, charts, and graphs that filled the public sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not neutral or objective representations of the forces that led to poverty or prosperity. Each image, from the most elaborate magazine sketch to the plainest line graph, told a story about what had happened in that abstract and bewildering realm of human activity that we now, perhaps still trepidatiously, simply call “the economy.”
An Age of Panics
“In one word, excitement, anxiety, terror, panic, pervades all classes and ranks.”
Thus did one observer describe the onset of the Panic of 1837, which sent the entire American economy into a tailspin that lasted for years. Such events struck at least once per generation during the long nineteenth century ((maybe a link here to a page within the exhibit that’s just a timeline of major economic events)), spinning the nation through a dizzying cycle of booms and busts. Yet when Americans set about explaining these economic swings, they did so without many of tools we take for granted today – data on supply and demand, indicators like GDP or the unemployment rate, and models of the relationship between interest rates and growth, for example.

Instead, they turned to technical and artistic images that told a range of stories about how the economy functioned, why it bounced men and women up and down with little warning, and what was to be done to steady it.
An Age of Panics “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. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some kind of national economic catastrophe struck at least once a generation. Smaller crises, affecting cities or regions, were common too. Said Congressman William Frye in 1873, "There is a gale blowing always in commercial life, and beneath that gale there are wrecks every day and every hour unnoticed by the world."