------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------  
Published by EH.NET (October 2006)  
  
David Zimmerman, _Panic! Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American   
Fiction_. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.   
xi + 294 pp. $22.50 (paperback), ISBN: 0-8078-5687-8.  
  
Review for EH.NET by Scott Dalrymple, Department of Business   
Administration, Hartwick College.  
  
  
My grandmother, who came of age during the Great Depression,   
eventually became a bank teller. By the 1970s, she was head teller at   
her bank, a position that made her justifiably proud. She liked the   
banking world, and understood it quite well.  
  
And yet, while she maintained a savings account at the bank where she   
worked, she always kept a sizeable portion of her cash in a coffee   
can hidden away in the closet. I once asked her about this, asked her   
why she would forego the potential interest from her money. "You can   
never be too careful," she warned me, quite seriously. "The bank   
might not be there tomorrow."  
  
In our post-FDIC world, it's easy to forget that generations of   
Americans shared this very real fear of the banking industry, and   
understandably so. Panics like those that occurred in 1873, 1893, and   
1907 were so devastating because they caused ordinary Americans to   
lose _trust_ in the banking system -- trust that is essential for a   
capitalist economy whose engine is the lending of money to others.  
  
In _Panic!_, David Zimmerman, a professor at the University of   
Wisconsin, Madison, has chosen a fascinating lens through which to   
view the phenomenon of bank panics: contemporary novels written in   
response to the panics. As Zimmerman points out, bank panics left   
people searching for answers about what had just happened, and why.   
And as they always do, authors of fiction stepped forward in an   
attempt to make sense of it all.  
  
Zimmerman concentrates his study on novels published during the   
period from 1898 to 1913 -- a choice that makes perfect sense, since   
this was the heyday of the American economic novel. Hundreds of   
novels on economic themes appeared during this fifteen year period, a   
point first made by V.L. Parrington's _Main Currents in American   
Thought_ in 1930, and later expanded in Walter Fuller Taylor's   
exhaustive 1942 analysis, _The Economic Novel in America_.  
  
As Zimmerman points out, novelists who tried to explain panics tended   
to come from two camps: those who viewed panics as evidence that   
capitalism as a system simply did not work; and those pro-business   
authors who sought to explain the mechanics of the system and "give   
the United States a business paternity" (p. 22). Zimmerman organizes   
his study into five chapters. The first chapter examines Frederic   
Isham's _Black Friday_ (1904); the second, Frank Norris's _The Pit_   
(1903); the third, actual stock manipulator and sometime-novelist   
Thomas Lawson; the fourth, Upton Sinclair's _The Moneychangers_   
(1908); and the fifth, Theodore Dreiser's _The Financier_ (1912).  
  
All of these chapters are well written, insightful, and engaging. The   
chapter on Lawson, though, is especially interesting. As Zimmerman   
reminds us, Lawson was a feared stock manipulator who had a large   
hand in the 1899 Amalgamated Copper stock swindle. He later gained   
notoriety with his 1904 expos� _Frenzied Finance_ -- in which he   
revealed scandalous details about how the stock market actually   
worked, indicting numerous Wall Street figures including himself.   
Lawson became something of a sensation, lauded by those who   
appreciated his apparent turnaround ... and vilified by those who   
thought his muckraking just another attempt at market manipulation.  
  
Lawson is even more intriguing because in 1906, he wrote a novel,   
_Friday, the Thirteenth_. The lead character, who seems quite   
obviously based on Lawson himself, actually justifies the creation of   
market panics, which he believes will somehow cleanse the system of   
its problems -- sort of like a bank robber claiming to have taken the   
money in order to help improve bank security. Zimmerman spends a few   
pages discussing Lawson's novel, providing an ostensible reason for   
this chapter to be in the book. In truth, though, this chapter is a   
stretch for _Panic!_; it just doesn't seem to fit. Having said that,   
it's a fascinating chapter, and quite worthy of expansion into its   
own book.  
  
Most of _Panic!_ is more traditional historical/literary criticism,   
and quite well done at that. Zimmerman's discussion of Frank Norris,   
especially, shows no small amount of insight into Norris's   
psychology. Zimmerman uncovers an obscure 1897 Norris article titled   
"Inside the Organ" (in which Norris waxes rhapsodic about a huge pipe   
organ) and proceeds to show how Norris used similar language and   
imagery to describe financial markets in _The Pit_. This insight   
reveals much about how Norris -- author of the much less   
business-friendly novel _The Octopus_ -- could not help but be awed   
by Wall Street, despite its warts. This is a very interesting piece   
of literary detective work on Zimmerman's part, and it helps bolster   
this fine essay on Norris, who, had he lived beyond his thirties,   
might have become our greatest American novelist.  
  
Zimmerman's overall knowledge of the economic fiction of the time is   
impressive. He discusses not only the more obvious authors of such   
work -- Norris, Dreiser, and Sinclair -- but also some of the   
once-popular names since forgotten by literary history, including   
writers like Samuel Merwin, Henry Kitchell Webster, Will Payne, and   
Edwin Lef�vre.  
  
_Panic!_ is a well-written, well-researched study and a worthy   
addition to the literature of economic and literary history.  
  
  
Scott Dalrymple is Assistant Professor of Business Administration at   
Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY. His essay on economic novelist Will   
Payne was awarded the James Soltow Award by the Economic and Business   
Historical Society in 2005.  
  
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