Picturing Providence, Illustrating Illness
“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. Americans who confronted dramatic economic changes in the nineteenth century lacked many of the analytical resources that we take for granted today. Economic science was not a distinct or refined academic discipline, and basic economic data was scarce and unreliable. Indicators of national economic vitality like GDP or growth rate had not been invented, and the very notion of “the economy” – a self-contained circuitry of complex commercial connections – did not yet exist.
When painters, lithographers, and cartoonists tried to convey what was happening in the economic realm to an unsettled and fearful public, they often turned to idioms with a more familiar history. Among the most popular in the period bounded by the Panics of 1837 and 1893 were divinity and illness.
“The Explosion,” a lithograph that appeared in Junius Jr.’s “Vision of Judgment, Or a Present for the Whigs of ’76 and ‘37” depicted four spirits racing out “from the fabled box of Pandora” bringing with them “Poverty, Distress, and Famine.” The accompanying text blamed the release of these phantoms on the hard-money ideology of the Democrats, but the image suggested that the precise link between cause and effect was murky, with panic more an other-worldly punishment for immoral behavior than a clear consequence of unsound policies.
The visual language of fate-from-above drew on older traditions in Western art. Depictions of the “money devil” showering covetous Europeans with undeserved riches dated back to the seventeenth century and cast prosperity (at least the get-rich-quick kind) as a curse from beyond. Americans would invoke this motif time and again in the nineteenth century. “Gold at 160. Gold at 130,” printed in Harper’s Weekly in 1869, envisioned diabolical influences in the volatile gold market, while “Economy – The Lesson of the Great Panic” (1873) and an untitled cartoon in J. Laurence Laughlin’s Facts About Money (1896) presented failure as a heavenly spirit descending on the acquisitive masses.
The lesson these images conveyed was more moral than technical. These artists did not profess to know how to manage economic affairs, either in one’s personal life or in the halls of political power. Instead, echoing powerful moral traditions, they cautioned against greed and hubris, casting ruin as divine retribution and success as a goal best pursued by modesty, diligence, and thrift – advice made clearest by engraver John Donaghy’s instruction to “Emulate Poor Richard.”
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.
