Some people have asked me how I found the stories in “The Panic of 1893.” Most are from newspapers.
I have a particular way of using newspapers. It began when I was recruited for a research project by Lorraine McConaghy, the historian of Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry. My task was to read Civil War newspapers from Washington territory and contribute to a database of stories that related to the war. No battles were fought in the Pacific Northwest, but there were rhetorical combats aplenty. Territorial newspapers quoted the two sides and were often combatants themselves. In my research, each rhetorical blast became a database entry. The database would contain the name of the newspaper, the date, the page, the headline and a summary of the contents of the story. Doing this, I found details that were fascinating. The summaries became pieces in a mosaic, a bigger picture of what was going on.
When I decided to write a history of the depression of the 1890s in Washington, people showed me how to use the computer to find stories by scanning for keywords, then copying the stories into computer files. This was the modern, electronic way to do history. No pencil and paper. Just take a laptop and thumb drives to the library and come home with computer files.
I didn’t want to do it that way. I was writing a history of an entire state from about April 1893 through August 1897. Scanning for keywords was mostly useless. I didn’t know what all the right keywords were. If I used keywords, I’d miss stories I didn’t know about. I needed to look through the whole record. There were, however, certain stories during that period that had antecedents — when was this venture started? — and I could use keywords to scan from, say, 1890 to 1892 for those. Other stories had post-1897 resolutions — when was the debt repaid? — and I could scan ahead for those. But mostly I didn’t do computer searches. I used my eyes.
I went through the whole paper, either online from home, if that was available (which it was for the Seattle Post-Intelligencerand both the Spokane papers) or by using microfilm readers at the library. This was skimming, with an eye out for stories about the depression. Sometimes other stories would catch my eye — the trial of the ax murderer Lizzie Borden, the arrest of Alfred Dreyfus in France, or of Oscar Wilde in England; or local stories like reports of industrial injuries on railroads or in shingle mills, or the arrest of a doctor in Spokane for performing “an illegal operation” on a 14-year-old girl. Occasionally I would make an entry about these stories on the thought that there might be some way to use them, and occasionally I did use them. I got some accidents in my book, and even a few lynchings. Lizzie Borden and Alfred Dreyfus didn’t make it.
When I saw a story I might use, I made an entry. Here is one from the Seattle Press-Times, the ancestor of today’s Seattle Times:
July 29, 1893, p. 4. “Banks of Seattle.” Puget Sound National to increase capital from $300,000 to $600,000, which the reporter calls “a practical exhibition of confidence in the financial standing of Seattle by outside capitalists.” The bank was incorporated in 1883 with $50,000; was the third bank in Seattle, after Dexter Horton Bank and the First National. Puget Sound National’s new stock is all subscribed. President is Jacob Furth, born in Bohemia in 1840, who was one of the incorporators in 1883, when he was the cashier. Still is cashier as well as president.
The form is date, page, headline, summary, details. Here’s another entry, from a Populist paper, the New Whatcom Champion:
Nov. 25, 1893, p. 2. Editorial. “The Champion’s Appeal.” Paper was started April 21, 1893 as a Populist journal. “We have upon our books more than 800 delinquent subscribers who have been receiving the paper regularly for the past six months.”
I have thousands of entries like these, made over the course of four years.
Both of these were originally written in pencil while reading from microfilm. I didn’t want a photocopy or computer copy of the full story, because I didn’t want thousands of full stories in separate files to wade through. I wanted database entries like the ones I’d done on the Civil War project, organized in large, computer-searchable files.
When I got home, I’d type my penciled entries into my desktop computer, filing them by publication and date. The first entry above went into a 48-page file called Seattle Times 1893. The second went into a 100-page file called Bellingham papers, which contained all the New Whatcom papers for the whole period.
The drawback of this system is that I could make a mistake in writing the date, page number and title in pencil, and might never know to correct it. At the end of the day, I had the database entry only. If I wanted to check the full article, I had to go back to the library and look it up. That’s an important drawback, and I had to live with it.
The advantage of this system is that it rid me of useless tailings. I thought of myself as a miner, digging for ore. By shrinking newspaper stories to database summaries and quotes I was running my ore through a concentrator, increasing its purity and organizing it in specific piles. Organized either by date only or by subject and date in a computer-searchable file — searchable using keywords I chose — the information was much more useful.
Most important, I had run the information through my brain once when I read it on the screen, once when I summarized it in pencil, once when I typed my penciled entry into my desktop computer at home, and once again when I selected the entry out of my large word-processing file along with related entries and put them into a working file. That’s four times through the brain cells. Now I was
ready to write a first draft of, say, 650 words. I had the facts, the quotes and the information for the endnotes.
Over three years, I wrote the first draft as I went along, when the specific topics were fresh in my mind. A few weeks or months later, I’d read over my work, editing for logic and style, cutting what I didn’t want and identifying the holes that required more research. I did this several times until I had it the way I wanted.
“The Panic of 1893” tells the story of a depression in the state of Washington from 1893 through 1897. Research meant looking at lots of different papers. Among the dailies I read the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the city’s principal paper, every day from Nov. 1, 1892, to May 3, 1898, and one other daily, either the Seattle Press-Times (which became the Seattle Times) or the Seattle Telegraph, for most of that period. For Tacoma, I read the Tacoma Ledger daily from April 1893 through January 1898, and either the Tacoma News or the Tacoma Union through most of that period. For Spokane, I read the Chronicle from December 1892 through December 1896, and the Review or the Spokesman-Review through most of that period.
Some of the dailies had weekly editions, and when things were slow, I’d read one of the weekly editions while still reading the other paper’s daily editions.
There were lots of weeklies. A few were online, and I tended to read those the most because I could read from home. The Yakima Herald, the Pullman Herald and the Aberdeen Herald were online. Other weeklies were available at the University of Washington in Seattle, such as the Anacortes Progress and Anacortes American, which I read, the second one after the death of the first, from August 1889 to August 1897. Many other papers I read in smaller segments: the Bellingham Bay Reveille, the New Whatcom Blade and the New Whatcom Champion; the Chehalis Bee and theChehalis Nugget, the Vancouver Independent; Ellensburg Capital and Ellensburg Localizer; the Everett Times and Everett Herald; the Port Angeles Democrat-Leader and Townsend Daily Leader; the Snohomish Tribune and that town’s Populist sheet, The Eye. I read bits and pieces of a handful of out-of-state papers, principally the Portland Oregonian, the Daily Morning Astorian and the Victoria, B.C., Daily Colonist.
Sometimes I had to drive to distant libraries. The South Bend Journal, for example, was available only in the library in Raymond. I drove there twice and read what I could: Dec. 9, 1892, to Dec. 8, 1893; July 20, 1894, to Dec. 7, 1894; June 7, 1895, to Aug. 7, 1895; and Aug. 1, 1896, to Dec. 31, 1897. I found some interesting things in the South Bend Journal, but then, I knew what I was looking for, having read small wire stories datelined “South Bend” in the Post-Intelligencer — wire stories that were copied and condensed from their originals in the South Bend Journal.
In relying on newspapers, I was opening myself to biases. Especially as the depression began, there was a strong tendency to downplay it, to reassure readers that everything would be fine, that the town banker would make good on the frozen deposits in his failed bank, etc. Always there was a tendency to play up good news and play down (or omit entirely) bad news. Clearly also there were papers, especially the small ones, that printed the information they were given, without questioning it.
There was also an “officialdom” bias. Newspapers in those days covered what officials did and said, but covered the private sector only sporadically, usually when it involved the government. They did cover receivership — bankruptcy — which was helpful to me. Twice I traveled to College Park, Maryland, to read the correspondence between James Eckels, the comptroller of the currency in Washington, D.C., and the receivers he appointed to wrap up the affairs of failed national banks. For state banks I mostly had to rely on newspapers. Sometimes I read about a lawsuit, and I could look that up.
Many histories lean heavily on personal papers, which is useful for biographies, especially for people who keep descriptive and revealing personal records. From private papers I got a few things that added detail and color to my account. One is the correspondence between an American artist in Paris and Seattle investor Thomas Burke about the purchase of a painting. Another is a letter to Amaryllis Thompson, a banker’s wife, in Tacoma, from a woman in Everett who is seeking a sinecure for her stepdaughter. I wish I had more such examples; if I had, I would have used them. (And I wish I had Amaryllis Thompson’s reply to the woman in Everett.) Relevant stories are not easy to find in personal papers, which are generally full of private things. And there aren’t that many troves of personal papers from Washington in the 1890s.
Newspapers, for all their biases and lacunae, were my best sources. A newspaper article is not a letter written for a friend or directions to a lawyer, etc., but a report written for the public — and my book is also a report written for the public. I wrote newspaper stories for 37 years. I know newspapers. I can read what a newspaperman in the 1890s wrote and sometimes imagine what he didn’t write but what was probably there. I can tell when he’s trying to sell me something, and usually why, particularly if I have half a dozen stories about the same thing from different days or different papers.
And despite the limitations of newspapers, I did find a lot of things. The first draft of The Panic of 1893 was nearly 17,000 words longer than the final version. Over the course of nine months I cut a paragraph, a line, a word at a time, carefully and painfully. I did it because I wanted the book published — and publishers don’t want long books. Several people who have read this book say it is “condensed” or that my style is “terse.” I suppose it is. Every word had to pay its way — and no apologies for that.
Enjoy the book.