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, an antebellum financial crisis that brought in its wake business failures, farm foreclosures, and mass unemployment lasting for years. Similar events, wreaking havoc with prices, wages, and the familiar pace of commercial life, struck at least once per generation from the 1830s to the 1930s, spinning the nation through a dizzying cycle of booms and busts. For much of this period, however, when Americans set about explaining these economic swings, they did so with a conceptual toolkit markedly different the one we use today. Data on supply and demand, indicators like GDP or the unemployment rate, and even notions of contraction and growth lay far in the future.
Instead, many Americas of the long nineteenth century 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 might be done to steady its fitful activity.
