Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America

Reading the Market Peter Knight Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Knight, Peter. Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.47478. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/47478 [ Access provided at 28 Sep 2021 08:25 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Reading the Market new studies in american intellectual and cultural history Jeffrey Sklansky, Series Editor Reading the Market Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America PETER KNIGHT Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore Open access edition supported by The University of Manchester Library. © 2016, 2021 Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Johns Hopkins Paperback edition, 2018 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this book as folllows: Names: Knight, Peter, 1968– author Title: Reading the market : genres of financial capitalism in gilded age America / Peter Knight. Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, [2016] | Series: New studies in American intellectual and cultural history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015047643 | ISBN 9781421420608 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781421420615 (electronic) | ISBN 1421420600 [hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 1421420619 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Finance—United States—History—19th century | Finance— United States—History—20th century. | Journalism, Commercial—United States—History | Capitalism and literature—United States—History. | Finance in literature. | Finance in art. Classification: LLC HG181.K63 2016 | DDC 332.0973/09034—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047643 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-2521-4 (paperback) ISBN-10: 1-4214-2521-1 (paperback) The Open Access edition of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. CC BY-NC-ND ISBN: 978-1-4214-4110-8 (open access) Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at [email protected]. Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible. Valerie Kay Knight (1940–2014) This page intentionally left blank contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Market Reports 24 2 Reading the Ticker Tape 59 3 Picturing the Market 101 4 Confidence Games and Inside Information 144 5 Conspiracy and the Invisible Hand of the Market 191 Epilogue 252 Notes 259 Index 307 This page intentionally left blank acknowledgments This project has racked up debts that will take a lifetime to repay. Writing this book, however, has also made it apparent that, at its best, the academic com- munity still operates as a gift economy rather than as an exchange economy. For making the sometimes impersonal and abstract process of research more personal, and for proving that not all insider networks are sinister, I would like to thank all those who took part in the Culture of the Market Network, funded by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), in particular my co-organizers Sven Beckert, Christopher McKenna, and Julia Ott, as well as Jean-Christophe Agnew, Joyce Appleby, Edward Balleisen, Marieke de Goede, Justin Fox, Alissa Karl, Leigh-Claire La Berge, Jessica Lepler, Jonathan Levy, James Livingston, Stephen Mihm, Rowena Olegario, Martin Parker, Mary Poovey, Jeffrey Sklansky, Richard White, and David Zimmerman. For generously taking time to share inside information with me, I am grateful to Steve Fraser, Walter Friedman, Richard R. John, Marina Moskowitz, Caitlin Rosenthal, Brook Thomas, and Caitlin Zaloom. I am also indebted to the organizers and audiences at seminars and conferences I have taken part in, especially the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan (ENS Cachan); the National Museum of American History Colloquium; the Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur la Vie Économique des Pays Anglophones, part of the Centre for Research on the English-Speaking World (Cervepas/CREW) at Paris III; the British Association for American Studies; Lancaster University; the University of Copenhagen; the University of Edinburgh; Leibniz University (Hanover); and the Research Collo- quium on Crowd Dynamics and Financial Markets at the Copenhagen Business School. I would like to thank the MA students in my Fictions of Finance class, and all my colleagues in English and American Studies at the University of Man- chester, especially Laura Doan, Hal Gladfelder, and David Matthews, as support- ive heads of department. x Acknowledgments I owe a debt of thanks to Jeff Sklansky, as the series editor, for his initial enthu- siasm; Bob Brugger, at Johns Hopkins University Press, for making a speculative investment in this project; the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, for their thoughtful suggestions for improvement; and Kathleen Capels, for her meticu- lous copyediting. A portion of chapter 2 appeared in an earlier form as “Reading the Market: Abstraction, Personification and the Financial Column of Town Topics Magazine,” Journal of American Studies 46 (2012): 1055–1075; and a section of chapter 4 was first published as “Edith Wharton and Inside Information,” in Class and the Making of American Literature: Created Unequal, ed. Andrew Lawson (New York: Routledge, 2014), 147–61. I am grateful to the presses for permission to include the revised versions here, and the respective editors and reviewers for their perceptive comments. Personal generosity is one thing, but for hard cash and institutional support I would like to record my gratitude to the Leverhulme Trust, for a Study Abroad Fellowship; the Warren Center at Harvard University, for hosting me; a Baird So- ciety Resident Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution; and a Gilder Lehrman Fellowship at the New-York Historical Society. I would like to thank the staff and librarians of those institutions, as well as those at the New York Public Library and the Baker Library at the Harvard Business School. For conversation and hos- pitality while on research trips to the United States, I am grateful to John Plotz and Lisa Soltani, Judith and Paul Plotz, and Gus and Davina Porter. I began this project in the basement of libraries in the United States, consult- ing long-forgotten financial advice pamphlets and novels, but by the time I came toward the end, much of what I needed had been digitized. I would therefore like to acknowledge the importance of the Internet Archive and other institutions that have preserved and made this material available. Although reading the outpour- ing of Gilded Age financial literature on my computer at home was far easier (and racked up far fewer air miles), there are some things that virtual scholarship can’t produce, such as a serendipitous meeting with Michael Zakim in the reading room of the New-York Historical Society. My heartfelt thanks are extended to Andrew Lawson, who generously provided an incisive reading of the manuscript. I would like to thank everyone in- volved in putting on the “Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present” exhibition, above all my co-conspirators, Paul Crosthwaite and Nicky Marsh, whose intellectual companionship has meant so much to me. This book would probably have been finished much earlier if I had not gotten sidetracked into our collaborative ventures, but I am eternally grateful that I did. Acknowledgments xi Thanks also are due to my parents, for their unfailing support over the years. This book is dedicated to my mother, Valerie Knight, who sadly did not live to see it completed. My deepest debt is to Lindsay and Elspeth, who have counted the cost of too many lost weekends and evenings I spent reading the market. This page intentionally left blank Reading the Market This page intentionally left blank Introduction Finance is a subject which the liveliest writer may well despair of making popular, since the mere sight or suspicion of it alone is enough to cause every reader, except the dullest, to close the most promising volume. Henry Adams, “The Legal-Tender Act” (1870) There is no more interesting or exciting serial story than the stock- ticker tells, from day to day, to those interested in the stock market, or one that often excites more joy or sorrow, or carries with it more weal or woe, prosperity or ruin. Henry Clews, Fifty Years in Wall Street (1908) In the opening chapter of The Pit (1903), the second book in Frank Norris’s un- finished epic trilogy on raising and selling wheat, the young Laura Dearborn at- tends her first opera in Chicago. She is annoyed that the men in the audience are disturbing the aesthetic purity of the drama with their constant whispering about the day’s events at the Chicago Board of Trade. “It was terrific, there on the floor of the Board this morning,” one of the voices asserts. “By the Lord! they fought each other when the Bears began throwing the grain at ’em—in carload lots.”1 Yet all of a sudden, Laura comes to see that the financial wranglings at the Board of Trade are not a dull, workaday distraction from the operatic performance she has come to see: And abruptly, midway between two phases of that music-drama, of passion and ro- mance, there came to Laura the swift and vivid impression of that other drama that 2 Reading the Market simultaneously—even at that very moment—was working itself out close at hand, equally picturesque, equally romantic, equally passionate; but more than that, real, actual, modern, a thing in the very heart of the life in which she moved.

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