By Eric Brothers

“ Our public men have had almost no training in economics or finance. Very few people knew what the monetary system of the country was by law.”

— Economist Francis A. Walker, 1893

Panic hit Wall Street the first week of May 1893. On May 7, The New York Times reported that“ it reached its most acute stage on Friday morning, when for nearly two hours it seemed as if the whole Street would go down in a crash … by the afternoon there had been a rebound of prices almost as great as the morning fall … the market was feverish, and from feverishness it is likely to quiet down into a weak dullness, like a patient who has been exhausted by violent spasms.”

Industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie wrote powerfully about the panic in September of 1893:

It is doubtful if a more disastrous financial cyclone ever blasted a country to such an extent in such a short time … hundreds of thousands of workmen idle, when before every one was employed … the sufferers among the wage-earning classes are already numbered by hundreds of thousands. The country has fallen from the apex of prosperity to the depths of industrial depression. Adversity has taken the place of prosperity; stagnation in business has succeeded activity; confidence has given place to distrust; and, as is always the case when business is disturbed, the chief part of the loss or suffering is falling, and must fall, upon the workingmen— upon the

Library o f Congress

Drawing of panicked stockbrokers on May 9, 1893, from Frank Leslie’ s Illustrated Newspaper.

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