Emily
Editor, Senior Moderator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1837
http://www.librarycompany.org/Economics/2007Conference/sklansky.pdf
The Melodrama of Panic:
William Leggett and the Literary Logic of Jacksonian Political Economy
Jeffrey Sklansky
Department of History, Oregon State University
October 2007
"Three days after the New York banks suspended redemption of their notes in May 1837, the intellectual leader of the city?s militant workingmen?s movement welcomed the long-awaited crash. ?Let the banks perish! Let the monopolists be swept from the board!? declared William Leggett in his new weekly newspaper, The Plaindealer. ?Let the whole brood of privileged money-changers give place to the hardy offsprings of commercial freedom, who ask for no protection but equal laws, and no exemption from the shocks of boundless competition.? Three months later, as tens of thousands of New Yorkers were thrown out of work and banks failed across the country, Leggett exulted that the collapse had finally exposed Wall Street and Pearl Street for what they were: ?[T]hese bankers now stand before the world, by their own confession, as a crew of swindling pirates, who have been preying on the property of the community. They threw open their vaults, where they led the publick to believe that they had abundant resources of hidden treasure, and lo, not an ounce of silver or gold is there! . . . [T]heir promises now, instead of representing silver and gold, represent nothing but violated faith, andthe folly of publick credulity in the honesty of soulless corporations which derive their very being from legislative corruption.?1
Neither The Plaindealer nor the workingmen?s movement survived the panic of 1837, and Leggett himself died two years later at age 38, as broken as the banks. But his zealous opposition to the power of financiers and to the volatile system of paper currency and credit over which they presided gained a wide following amid the panic and the depression soon to follow.2 His advocacy of general incorporation laws and the ?separation of Bank and State? became democratic orthodoxy, and the editorial persona of ?the plaindealer? inaugurated a mode of plebeian polemic taken up by New Yorkers such as Mike Walsh, George Lippard, and especially Walt Whitman, who looked to Leggett as a mentor.3....."
http://www.librarycompany.org/Economics/2007Conference/sklansky.pdf
The Melodrama of Panic:
William Leggett and the Literary Logic of Jacksonian Political Economy
Jeffrey Sklansky
Department of History, Oregon State University
October 2007
"Three days after the New York banks suspended redemption of their notes in May 1837, the intellectual leader of the city?s militant workingmen?s movement welcomed the long-awaited crash. ?Let the banks perish! Let the monopolists be swept from the board!? declared William Leggett in his new weekly newspaper, The Plaindealer. ?Let the whole brood of privileged money-changers give place to the hardy offsprings of commercial freedom, who ask for no protection but equal laws, and no exemption from the shocks of boundless competition.? Three months later, as tens of thousands of New Yorkers were thrown out of work and banks failed across the country, Leggett exulted that the collapse had finally exposed Wall Street and Pearl Street for what they were: ?[T]hese bankers now stand before the world, by their own confession, as a crew of swindling pirates, who have been preying on the property of the community. They threw open their vaults, where they led the publick to believe that they had abundant resources of hidden treasure, and lo, not an ounce of silver or gold is there! . . . [T]heir promises now, instead of representing silver and gold, represent nothing but violated faith, andthe folly of publick credulity in the honesty of soulless corporations which derive their very being from legislative corruption.?1
Neither The Plaindealer nor the workingmen?s movement survived the panic of 1837, and Leggett himself died two years later at age 38, as broken as the banks. But his zealous opposition to the power of financiers and to the volatile system of paper currency and credit over which they presided gained a wide following amid the panic and the depression soon to follow.2 His advocacy of general incorporation laws and the ?separation of Bank and State? became democratic orthodoxy, and the editorial persona of ?the plaindealer? inaugurated a mode of plebeian polemic taken up by New Yorkers such as Mike Walsh, George Lippard, and especially Walt Whitman, who looked to Leggett as a mentor.3....."