The Specter of Conspiracy
With the rise of large financial and industrial corporations after the Civil War, many Americans alighted on a new culprit to explain sudden economic crises: corporate conspirators. The notion that behind each economic swing was a conspiring capitalist saturated the political discourse of nineteenth-century America.
Representations of Wall Street as a space of illicit dealings resonated with long-standing American suspicions of secretive organizations corrupting the democratic process. Note the portrayal of the body of the capitalist as corpulent and vaguely Jewish.
This was meant to identify financiers and industrialists as beyond the pale of Christian ethics – as morally foreign in their favoring of profit over hard work and fellowship.
Like Beard’s The Bulls and the Bears, Arthur Burdett Frost’s “Caught in the Tape” (1877) drew on animal imagery to illustrate how the market operated. It told a very different tale, however, depicting the railroad financier Jay Gould as a bear dragging the bullish investors of Wall Street around by ticker tape. Frost was highlighting not the animal passions that drove the economy but the manipulation of the market by a privileged few.
