September 22, 2023: AmericanStudying the Panic of 1873: Anti-Chinese Prejudice

[On September 20^th, 1873, the New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days, a key moment in the developing economic crisis that came to be known as the Panic of 1873. So for the 150^th anniversary of that moment this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Panic contexts, leading up to a weekend post on 2023 echoes of those histories!]

On the Panic’s key role in three stages of the era’s evolving anti-Chinese movement. [NB. For a lot more on all of this, keep an eye out for my next book!]

1)      The Workingmen’s Party of California: While the Panic of 1873 and the resulting Long Depression affected all Americans, as I discussed in yesterday’s post it hit railroad workers especially hard; many of those railroad workers were in the Western U.S., and so workers in states like California felt the effects particularly acutely. In 1877, a group of labor leaders in that state formed a third party, the Workingmen’s Party of California (sometimes known as the Workingmen’s Party of the United States), in an effort to stand up for the rights of working Californians—or rather, of white working Californians, as their platform (hyperlinked above) directly targeted and attacked Chinese American workers as a principal source of their woes. Indeed, this prejudice wasn’t just a component of their platform—“The Chinese Must Go!” became the party’s constantly repeated slogan. This labor-linked political party could have chosen to fight for all laborers, but instead made attacks on Chinese American workers an essential element of its identity and goals.

2)      The San Francisco Massacre (often called a race riot, but you know my feelings on that): As American history has demonstrated time and time (and time and time) again, such prejudiced and hateful propaganda always results in violence, and this rising anti-Chinese narrative was no exception. In late July 1877, the Daily Alta California newspaper ran an article on the evolving Great Railroad Strike, and the Workingmen’s Party called for a July 23^rd rally at the space near San Francisco’s City Hall known as the Sandlot. While the rally’s first speakers sought to downplay anti-Chinese sentiments in favor of broader labor activism, the audience was primed by the Party and movement’s overall messages and repeatedly chanted “Talk about the Chinamen” and “Give us the coolie business.” When a Chinese American man happened to walk by, the crowd attacked him, and the hate crime exploded into a multi-day orgy of violence targeting the city’s longstanding (indeed, pre-United States in origin) Chinatown neighborhood. By the massacre’s end on July 25^th, much of that community had been burned to the crowd, with substantial casualties as well as widespread destruction that permanently altered this neighborhood, city, and American community.

3)      Denis Kearney’s Speeches: Denis Kearney, the Irish immigrant and San Francisco business leader turned labor activist and eventual national face of the anti-Chinese movement, took a circuitous path into the movement, as I will discuss at much greater length in my book. But by September 1877, Kearney was giving his own speeches at the Sandlot, and the heart of those speeches (which made Kearney a hugely prominent and influential figure on the national stage) was a thoroughly interconnected critique of capitalist bigwigs and Chinese Americans. To quote the final two paragraphs of his most famous stump speech: “We are men, and propose to live like men in this free land, without the contamination of slave labor…California must be all American, or all Chinese. We are resolved that it shall be all American, and are prepared to make it so.” This Kearneyism, which became the most significant factor in the passage of the nation’s first federal immigration law, stemmed entirely from the intersection of the Long Depression and anti-Chinese prejudice and hate.

2023 connections this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

September 21, 2023: AmericanStudying the Panic of 1873: The Railroad Strike

[On September 20^th, 1873, the New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days, a key moment in the developing economic crisis that came to be known as the Panic of 1873. So for the 150^th anniversary of that moment this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Panic contexts, leading up to a weekend post on 2023 echoes of those histories!]

On how a hugely important labor action was influenced by the Panic, and vice versa.

As I wrote in my recent Labor Day Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, labor unions and labor activism go all the way back to the foundational moments and eras in American history, and became significantly more possible still (at least in legal terms) and thus more widespread after the 1842 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision I discuss there. But those antebellum labor organizations and actions generally remained local, contained to the specific communities and settings where they originated. It was in the period immediately following the Civil War that a truly national labor movement began to emerge, as illustrated by the August 1866 founding of the National Labor Union in Baltimore and the 1869 creation of the Knights of Labor in Philadelphia. And not too long after, the first truly national labor action took place, the 1877 protests and riots that came to be known collectively as the Great Railroad Strike.

The Great Railroad Strike thus certainly has to be contextualized by both the labor movement’s longstanding presence and its unfolding late 19^th century shifts, and it’s in those contexts that I’ve always thought about these 1877 events. But in researching this week’s series, I’ve learned just how much the strike was also influenced by the Panic of 1873 and the resulting depression. As I discussed earlier in the week, the collapse of the railroad boom was a major factor in the Panic itself; moreover, one of the immediate results of the Panic was the September 1873 failure of financier Jay Cooke’s banking and investment company, which was closely tied to railroad bonds and the collapse of which furthered the railroad implosion. Due to these factors (complemented and extended by the usual corporate greed and short-sightedness, natch), railroad companies began to cut workers’ wages consistently and steeply, culminating in three distinct and equally sizeable cuts in 1877 alone. As I discussed in that Saturday Evening Post column, the fight for better wages was always at the heart of the American labor movement, and these post-Panic wage cuts were without question the central cause of the largest and most national labor action to date.

So the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was clearly interconnected with and even caused by the Panic of 1873—but I would argue that the strike surely played a role as well in helping end the post-Panic economic downturn. Most of the narratives of that 1870s Long Depression I’ve encountered suggest that it simply “ended in 1879” (with some lingering aftereffects, of course), but if American history teaches us anything about economic downturns, it’s that countering and reversing them requires specific and sustained government intervention. And I think it’s no coincidence that the first such sustained federal government response to the Long Depression seems to have begun in late 1877, spurred on by newly elected President Rutherford B. Hayes’ Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman as well as Congressmen like Missouri’s Richard Bland and Senators like Iowa’s William Allison. Government intervention requires both acknowledgment of the problem and a collective appetite for solutions, and I can’t imagine anything providing more clarity on both counts than a nationwide labor strike.

Last 1873 contexts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

September 20, 2023: AmericanStudying the Panic of 1873: Two Panics

[On September 20^th, 1873, the New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days, a key moment in the developing economic crisis that came to be known as the Panic of 1873. So for the 150^th anniversary of that moment this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Panic contexts, leading up to a weekend post on 2023 echoes of those histories!]

On what was quite similar and what was distinct about two 19^th century economic downturns.

Rampant speculation, a longstanding bubble that was about to burst, changes in international monetary and lending policies, and concurrent declining prices for key products led to widespread economic panic and resulting bank runs. When the banks ran out of their reserves, customers were unable to access (much less redeem) their currency and other holdings, and the economy quickly collapsed. While that sounds very much like the 1873 conditions I described in yesterday’s post that culminated in the Panic of 1873, here I’m actually describing the conditions in late 1836 and early 1837 that culminated in the May events which became known as the Panic of 1837. Despite some specific time period variations (for example, the 1837 bubble was in land speculation, rather than railroad companies and stocks as was the case with the 1873 bubble), the two Panics share many similarities, as do the depressions that followed each of them. (One can say the same about their mutual resemblance to the 2008 financial crisis, on which more this weekend.)

As the man said, though, history might rhyme but it doesn’t repeat, and there certainly were also important and telling differences between the Panics of 1837 and 1873. Perhaps the most telling was the role of the U.S. President in helping cause the earlier panic—not Martin Van Buren, who had been inaugurated only weeks before the Panic started (although he was blamed for the economic crisis nonetheless, a fate that many presidents have suffered), but his predecessor and mentor, Andrew Jackson. As with most questions of historical causation, there has been significant debate over whether Jackson’s infamous Bank War directly contributed to the Panic, and I’m not going to pretend to be expert enough to weigh in on that debate. But it seems clear to me that the absence of a centralized national bank was at least a factor in the collapse of the banks, and that absence was due directly to Jackson’s refusal to extend the charter of the Second Bank of the United States.

Historical causes are complicated enough to pin down, but I’d argue that effects can be even trickier. Over the next two posts I’ll focus on two particularly complicated and unquestionably crucial aftermaths of the Panic of 1873, each of which is unique to that era and thus distinct from the effects of the Panic of 1837 and the resulting depression. But I would argue that by far the biggest historical difference between the two Panics was that in 1873 the nation was in the midst of one of the largest federal government initiatives in American history, Federal Reconstruction—and the extended depression that followed the Panic of 1873 without question contributed to the frustratingly and tragically early conclusion to that federal effort. It did so in a variety of ways, including heavily influencing the pivotal Congressional elections of 1874 that voted out many members of President Grant’s Republican Party. One could also argue, with a great deal of validity, that both the depression and the elections provided cover for white Americans to abandon Reconstruction’s commitments to racial justice and equality. But however we parse the relationship, there’s no way to analyze the Panic of 1873 without situating it in the Reconstruction era, and that certainly represents a key difference from 1837.

Next 1873 contexts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

September 19, 2023: AmericanStudying the Panic of 1873: The Coinage Act

[On September 20^th, 1873, the New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days, a key moment in the developing economic crisis that came to be known as the Panic of 1873. So for the 150^th anniversary of that moment this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Panic contexts, leading up to a weekend post on 2023 echoes of those histories!]

On complex financial realities, simpler ones, and causes and contingencies.

This might mean I have to give back my Gilded Age Historian membership card (and I’d like to think I’ve thoroughly earned it, between the diss/first book and the many-times-taught class), but I’ve never entirely gotten the whole silver/gold debate. I do know that the Populists were entirely opposed to the late 19^th century move to a gold standard, as exemplified by perennial presidential loser William Jennings Bryan’s famous 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech. And apparently a key stage in that shift was the April 1873 Coinage Act (also known as the Mint Act), a federal law which made it illegal for silver bullion to be converted into dollars while allowing for the conversion for gold. That law was caused at least in part by the German Empire’s ending the minting of silver coins in 1871, which put more pressure on the US silver supply and pushed the federal government to hasten this shift toward a gold standard. But the law also significantly reduced the overall domestic money supply, which contributed to the runs on banks that I discussed yesterday and that blossomed into the Panic of 1873.

Okay, I think that has about exhausted my take on the silver and gold debate (and as with literally everything I write about in this space, I welcome additions, corrections, impassioned rebuttals, and what have you). But one thing I do get on a broader level is the narratives and realities alike that came to define the Gilded Age, and it’s important to note that while Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner didn’t coin that phrase until their 1874 novel of the same name, the period’s trends were of course well underway by 1873. For example, it seems clear to me that the Coinage Act came to be colloquially known as the Crime of 1873 not because of specific details about silver and gold so much as due to a broader understanding that this was a law that benefitted the wealthy (who were able to obtain and stockpile gold much more easily) at the expense of poorer Americans. While that doesn’t seem to have been a main impetus for or purpose of the act, it’s fair to say that President Grant’s corrupt corporate buddies weren’t sorry when he signed it into law.

So the Coinage Act was unquestionably controversial, and reflects developing divisions that would only deepen alongside the Gilded Age over the next few decades (perhaps culminating in Bryan’s 1896 speech). But was there really enough time between its April passage and the September start of the Panic for the Act to have played a key role in causing that financial crisis? Given the earlier contributing factors like the 1871 and 1872 fires on which I focused in yesterday’s post (among other long-term factors like the collapsing railroad boom), was the writing already on the wall for the Panic long before Grant put pen to paper? The relationship between causes and contingencies when it comes to historical events always makes for compelling (if ultimately unanswerable) questions, and that’s certainly the case for this pair of 1873 events. And wherever we come down on those questions, putting the Act and the Panic in conversation helps us see both as stages in the evolving and deepening Gilded Age, an example of historical interconnection with a lot to tell us about late 19^th century America.

Next 1873 contexts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

September 18, 2023: AmericanStudying the Panic of 1873: Two Fires

[On September 20^th, 1873, the New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days, a key moment in the developing economic crisis that came to be known as the Panic of 1873. So for the 150^th anniversary of that moment this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Panic contexts, leading up to a weekend post on 2023 echoes of those histories!]

On how two disasters helped set the stage for the Panic, and why they’re even more significant than that.

I wrote at length about the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 for my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column a few years back, so in lieu of a first paragraph here, I’d ask you to check out that column and then come on back here. Thanks!

Welcome back! For whatever reason (maybe it’s that damned cow), the Chicago Fire is far better remembered than the following year’s Great Boston Fire of 1872, but that latter one seems to have been just about as destructive, meaning that one of America’s oldest cities and one of its newest ones both experienced parallel, equally terrible tragedies in the early 1870s. While there are lots of contributing causes of the Panic of 1873 (including the most proximate one, a Congressional law I’ll discuss in tomorrow’s post), these two fires are definitely high on the list, as the stunning level of property damage they produced led to significant bank and financial shortages as the communities sought to respond and rebuild. Much like the Great Depression, this Panic and the subsequent depression (on which more in Wednesday’s post) really began with runs on the banks, and it’s fair to say that those runs were due both to actual financial shortages and to the widespread uncertainty and fear that can follow these kinds of disasters.

So the Chicago and Boston fires were important factors in the lead-up to the Panic of 1873, and well worth more of a place in our collective memories as a result (Boston at all, and Chicago more accurately, as I discussed in that column). But I would argue that these two fires also reflect and exemplify something else about America in the early 1870s, a related but more overarching point: its hugely rapid (and only increasing) urbanization. Obviously fires can and do occur in any community, and are hugely destructive and tragic wherever and whenever they happen. But there’s a certain kind of fire that consumes a developing urban center, as embodied most famously perhaps by the 1666 Great Fire of London and as would define another rapidly developing American city a few decades after Chicago and Boston. I’m not necessarily suggesting that fires are a given in those settings and periods—but it does seem a common (if still tragic) part of the urbanization process, a reflection perhaps of growth that outpaces infrastructure. That’s a big part of where America was in the early 1870s, a moment ripe for fires and, it seems, Panics as well.

Next 1873 contexts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

September 15, 2023: AmericanStudying The Rising: “My City of Ruins” and “Superman (It’s Not Easy)”

[For this particular AmericanStudier, there’s no better way to think through another anniversary of September 11^th, 2001 than to consider some of the many lessons we can learn from the best cultural work depicting that moment: Bruce Springsteen’s album The Rising (2002). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy pairs of songs from that vital work—please share your own responses, nominations for other vital 9/11 cultural works, and further thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On how art can radically change in meaning alongside history.

The song, and one of the cultural works in any media, that became most overtly associated with September 11^th and its aftermaths was released almost exactly a year before the attacks. America Town, the second studio album from Five for Fighting (the stage name of singer-songwriter Vladimir John Ondrasik), was released on September 26^th, 2000 and included the song “Superman (It’s Not Easy).” That song, an interesting psychological examination of Superman’s inner perspective and emotions, was the album’s second single and had already become a minor hit by September 2001; but in the aftermath of the attacks it became an anthem for the first responders, an expression of their collective service and sacrifice on and after that horrific day. Five for Fighting’s live piano performance of it at the October 20^th Concert for New York City was one of the most moving moments in a period of American and world history full of them, and cemented this song’s enduring status as a definitive artistic expression of the best of post-9/11 America.

Obviously all of Bruce Springsteen’s 2002 album The Rising comprised another, and much more intentional, such artistic expression. But interestingly enough, perhaps the single song from that album which became most overtly connected to 9/11 and its aftermaths—including a similar live performance at another benefit concert, September 12^th, 2001’s televised special “America: A Tribute to Heroes”—was likewise written a year before that event. Springsteen first wrote the song “My City of Ruins” in November 2000 for a Christmas benefit concert for Asbury Park, New Jersey, the seaside community that had been such a vital element of Springsteen’s childhood and early musical career alike. By 2000 Asbury Park was in pretty rough shape (hence the need for a benefit concert), and so was the titular city of ruins to which Springsteen’s speaker repeatedly implores that it “come on, rise up!” By performing the song at the Tribute to Heroes benefit Springsteen already began to shift its association to post-September 11^th New York City, however, and then his inclusion of it on The Rising—indeed, it is the album’s concluding track—cemented that new and enduring association.

The specific circumstances and ways in which these two songs became so closely associated with September 11^th are thus quite different, but the fundamental facts are nonetheless similar: songs written in the fall of 2000 becoming repurposed a year later after the attacks and in the process coming to feel like collective artistic anthems of that moment and its emotions. And that’s what I would especially emphasize about this interesting and telling pair of 9/11 songs: a particular and potent form of what literary critics would call reader-response theory. That critical perspective argues that the meaning of texts is made not by the authors (nor by intrinsic elements within those texts), but by audiences through their engagement with and responses to the texts. In my understanding reader-response generally focuses on individual reader/audience member, but there’s no reason why we can’t think about collective such responses, and indeed when it comes to historical events that affect an entire community or nation, it makes sense that there would likewise be collective experiences of cultural and artistic works. Moreover, Springsteen sought to produce such a collective experience with his post-9/11 album The Rising, and it’s clear that he succeeded very fully indeed.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Other 9/11 texts you’d highlight?

September 14, 2023: AmericanStudying The Rising: “The Fuse” and “Let’s Be Friends”

[For this particular AmericanStudier, there’s no better way to think through another anniversary of September 11^th, 2001 than to consider some of the many lessons we can learn from the best cultural work depicting that moment: Bruce Springsteen’s album The Rising (2002). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy pairs of songs from that vital work—please share your own responses, nominations for other vital 9/11 cultural works, and further thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On the vital role of art about sex in challenging times.

One of the more frustrating recent debates has been over whether sex scenes in film and TV are necessary or outdated. Part of my frustrations have to do with a significant historical mistake: many of those arguing against sex scenes seem unaware that films were quite sexy until the emergence of the industry’s restrictive Hayes Code in the 1930s, and thus that sex scenes are far more foundational and defining to the genre than they are modern. But even leaving those important details aside, it’s also very frustrating to see so many folks arguing that sex scenes in films or TV shows serve no storytelling purposes other than to titillate or appeal to the male gaze or the like. Of course some sex scenes might be superficial or unnecessary (or even sexist and shitty), but the same could be said for virtually any type of scene in cultural works; of course there are specific issues around intimacy that need to be addressed with this particular type of scene (and are being conscientiously addressed these days, it seems), but that’s a distinct question from whether the scenes themselves contribute to elements like plot, characterization, and themes.

Songs are sex are not identical to sex scenes in visual media (although there’s unquestionably a problematic history of blatantly sexist music videos), but many of the same questions could nonetheless apply. More exactly, I’d likewise make the case that songs about sex similarly can play important cultural and social roles, well beyond titillation or the like. And one of the songwriters who has most consistently included sexy songs on albums where they might seem out of place but instead contribute meaningfully to the whole is Bruce Springsteen. Take “Cover Me,” for example, which immediately follows “Born in the U.S.A.” at the start of that album and reflects the speaker’s desire for physical companionship (not limited to sex, but certainly including it) amidst that challenging 1980s world. Or “You’ve Got It,” for another example, which comes halfway through Wrecking Ball and importantly offers sex and romantic love as ways to counter that album’s dark and depressing themes.

The Rising includes not one but two such songs, a pair of sexy tracks that complement each other and collectively represent sex’s vital role in these kinds of fraught and fragile historical moments. The couple in “The Fuse” are already together, and so the speaker’s repeated plea of “Come on let me do you right” in response to a moment when the “Devil’s on the horizon line” reflects how existing companionship can counter such darknesses. Whereas “Let’s Be Friends (Skin to Skin)” is as its title suggests a proposition, one that makes direct (and maybe slightly cynical, but it doesn’t feel that way to this listener at least) use of the moment’s uncertainties (“Don’t know when this chance might come again/Good times go a way of slippin’ away”) to make the case that the speaker and addressee “get skin to skin.” As with all of Springsteen’s sexy songs, both of these tracks exist not in spite of nor separate from their album and moment’s broader contexts, but as important layers to those contexts, reminding us as so much great art does that sex is fully part of art and world alike.

Last RisingStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 9/11 texts you’d highlight?