Providence and Partisanship
When nineteenth-century Americans sought to explain how forces beyond their direct control could influence their economic lives, they often turned to morality tales that emphasized the sins of political leaders and the judgment of providence. Imagery that cast booms and busts as a form of punishment posited a causal link between individual actions and economic effects, but it was a connection that ran through the medium of God, the Devil, or another other-worldly moral arbiter.
Note how fortune appears to descend from the heavens in many 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 of punishment for one’s devotion to pecuniary gain. Note the ways in which these images turn other-worldly economic interventions into a judgment on personal behavior.
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 European images, it is sudden prosperity that signals vice and sin rather than sudden poverty. Both rapid gain and loss stem from the same embrace of illicit temptations in the providential worldview, but in the American version, it is the negative consequences – panic, dependence, and destitution – that are given greater emphasis.
