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.
