Picturing Providence, Illustrating Illness
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Part 3, version 2
plain
2017-07-10T15:08:20-07:00
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.
