Kirby Wilbur, the Kirby Wilbur Show, KVI-AM, August 28, 2018
“A fascinating book. What happened to Puget Sound and Washington state in 1893, only four years after we became a state, was a depression, and there are some echoes in this book of the current atmosphere in the attitude of many people toward business… I highly recommend this book.”
Podcast of Kirby’s interview: http://kvi.com/podcast/kirby-continued-bruce-ramsey-interview-the-panic-of-1893
 | Only four years after achieving statehood, Washington was caught up in one of the worst economic collapses in U.S. history. www.seattletimes.com |
A new book shows why it would be a mistake to overlook the significance and lessons of previous economic downturns, even from 1893. www.thenewstribune.com |
Historian Feliks Banel on Sept. 19, 2018, on KIRO Radio, Seattle
Link to the show: http://mynorthwest.com/1117133/panic-of-1893-radio-scripts/
Review of the book by Steve Cox, Professor of Literature, University of California San Diego, Liberty website, July 2018.
There aren’t a lot of good treatments of national politics and economics in the 1890s. Allan Nevins’ biography of Cleveland (1932) remains the best. And there are few decent treatments of the effects of the depression on individual men and women, in their local communities. That’s the vital part of the story that practically nobody knows. And that’s what Ramsey gives us in his brilliant new book about the state of Washington during the Panic.
In writing such a book, Ramsey faced one of the hardest challenges a writer of history can encounter. A straight-line narrative of national political and economic events would capture only part of the picture. So would an exclusive concern with one particular locality, such as Bruce’s home state, Washington. So would concentration on certain personalities, as in the cheap, tangential approach to history that one sees in the Ken Burns films. What Bruce needed to present was the full tapestry of local people and local events, rippling in the strong winds of national affairs; he needed to capture not only the big patterns but the individual figures in the tapestry, and he needed to show those ripples of history too. But he was equal to the challenge.
Bruce Ramsey is a quick but colorful narrator. He provides the pungent detail and the suggestive episode and then moves briskly onward to the next significant picture, whether it’s the portrait of an interesting man or woman, an array of statistics, a sketch of political developments nationwide, or a tale of something that’s too ridiculous to be true, but is. Did you know that in 1893 the Populist governor of Kansas tried to use the state militia to oust the Republicans (who happened to be in a majority) from the House of Representatives in Topeka? (If Dorothy wanted adventure, she could have stayed right in Kansas.) This absurd drama — one of many in Ramsey’s book — offers some perspective on the absurd politics of the present era. To say that Ramsey’s political narrative is entertaining is itself absurd; it’s an absurd understatement.
Here are thousands of stories, small in the number of words that Ramsey, a thrifty narrator, allots to each, but large in drama and implication. We see people who are found talking gibberish in darkened hotel rooms because their bank deposits of $256 had been lost to the panic. We see government officials who steal money, and lose it, and then escape to Argentina, or to a place off the coast of Washington called Tatoosh Island, thence to change identities and be discovered working as mowers in Idaho. We learn of a government official who is acquitted by a jury that doesn’t believe that bribery is against the law. We listen to a contractor for the Northern Pacific railway who says he “had put white men at work at $2 and gradually raised their wages to $2.50, although there was no time when [he] could not have employed Chinamen at 80 cents” (p. 51). We meet mayors who work in shingle mills because their cities can’t pay them a salary, and unionists who resort to riot and terror to keep their salaries from being cut.
The sheer number of stories that Ramsey tells is remarkable; still more remarkable is his unfailing ability to integrate them into larger contexts of meaning. Here’s one of the general patterns he sees. Businesses and banks that made it through this
great depression often did so because they backed each other up. Seattle, where the spirit of cooperation was strong, suffered many fewer losses than such competing communities as Tacoma and Spokane. Seattle’s bankers went so far as to refuse deposits from people who had withdrawn them in panic from other banks. This was individual action, but it was mutually supportive. It was a kind of spontaneous order, and it often saved the day.
Here’s another pattern. Led by President Cleveland, the federal government disclaimed responsibility for helping individuals — whether bankers or street sweepers — get out of their financial jam. Most public opinion seems to have backed him up. Newspapers in the Pacific Northwest counseled their readers to take responsibility for themselves — and above all not to hurt business by fleeing to some place with a marginally better economy. Their message was “stay here and keep pitching.” A Baptist potentate cautioned against giving money to the poor indiscriminately; this was “a selfish act, done to make the giver feel good” (83). Some local governments acted in what they regarded as the spirit of community and provided employment on public works projects, and some of them went broke doing it. But charity ordinarily began at home. As Ramsey observes, very perceptively, “In a world with little free public food, people tend to be generous with their private food” (93).
A darker side of community spirit was the almost universal feeling that if anyone was going to be without a job, it shouldn’t be someone white. Everywhere Asians were fired from jobs or prevented from getting any, and mobs formed to destroy Chinatowns throughout the region. It was only a temporary rescue when the wife of a local missionary faced down a mob that came for the Chinese people of La Grande, Oregon: “She appeared with a Winchester and announced that the first man to enter the house would be shot” (79). Most of the Chinese left town anyway; and although 14 rioters were arrested, none was convicted. Oregon’s Progressive governor haughtily rejected President Cleveland’s request that he protect the rights of the Chinese.
Much of Ramsey’s book is devoted to racism and progressivism during the depression. It’s quite a story, and again, it’s a gift of perspective: then as now, the predominant individualism of America was too much of a burden for many Americans to bear.
Obviously, the implications of Ramsey’s stories go far beyond the Pacific Northwest. The stories of that region cannot be explained without reference to the bigger stories of the nation’s money policy, its “reform” and “progressive” movements, and its national elections. Ramsey devotes lively chapters to all these things. If you don’t know the 1890s, this is the book for you, wherever you live. If you do know the 1890s, you know a lot about America, and this book will help you learn even more.
The Panic of 1893 is beautifully illustrated, with fine contemporary pictures, and backed by years of patient research. It is a distinguished and compelling book.
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Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution. Newly published is Culture and Liberty, a selection of works by Isabel Paterson.