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Reading the Market: Abstraction, Personification and the Financial Column of Town Topics Magazine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2012

PETER KNIGHT
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Abstract

This article examines the role of the market report as a performative technology that does not merely reflect the emerging world of financial capitalism in late nineteenth-century America but actively shapes it. It takes as its case study the financial pages of Town Topics, the preeminent society gossip magazine in the 1880s and 1890s. Although at first sight the financial section seems far removed from the salacious gossip that the main section of the magazine traded in, there are close connections between the two. An analysis of the rhetoric of the financial pages of Town Topics uncovers a mixture of abstraction and personification in their depictions of market activity. In the same way that the society gossip column in effect created the very possibility of “society” as both exclusive and public property, the genre of the financial page helped create the idea of “the market” as both a human-scale drama and an abstraction that was beyond the control of any individual, or even government.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , November 2012 , pp. 1055 - 1075
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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10 Preda, 165.

11 Although the circulation of Town Topics was comparatively high, it is unclear the extent to which the financial pages were being read; like the serious articles in Playboy, it is possible that the money columns were there merely as respectable window dressing for the real business of the magazine, in this case society gossip. However, the fact that the magazine established its own investment advice bureau suggests that the Wall Street reporting was seen as a vital part of the magazine's business by its owners.

12 On the early history of market reports see Neal, Larry, “The Rise of a Financial Press: London and Amsterdam, 1681–1810,” Business History, 30 (1988), 163–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McCusker, John J. and Gravesteijn, Cora, The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism: The Commodity Price Currents, Exchange Rate Currents, and Money Currents of Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: NEHA, 1991)Google Scholar.

13 Poovey, Mary, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For accounts of nineteenth-century business and financial journalism see Forsyth, David P., The Business Press in America, 1750–1865 (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1964)Google Scholar; Parsons, Wayne, The Power of the Financial Press: Journalism and Economic Opinion in Britain and America (Aldershot: Elgar, 1989)Google Scholar; and Hewitt, Elizabeth, “Romances of Real Life; or, the Nineteenth-Century Business Magazine,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 20 (2010), 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 New York Herald, 28 Feb. 1838, quoted in Crouthamel, James, Bennett's New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989), 80Google Scholar. It is intriguing to note that Bennett's very first discursive money article in the Herald put forward a conspiracy-minded explanation for the fluctuations in prices.

15 In “Romances of Real Life,” Hewitt shows how Bankers’ Magazine from the 1840s endeavoured to portray the aesthetic sublime of modern commerce to a nonspecialist business audience. In contrast the later rhetorical uses of personification in Town Topics, she shows how “the personal and domestic sketches so typical of the Romance of Real Life genre are not offered in Bankers’ Magazine to humanize the story of money, but to dramatize the ways monetary relations must be told without feeling or sympathy” (14).

16 Wall Street Journal, 8 July 1889, 1. On the ideological, performative work performed by impersonal, statistical reporting such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, see de Goede, Virtue, Fortune, and Faith, chapter 4.

17 For an outline of a history of these fraudulent practices see Balleisen, Edward J., “Private Cops on the Fraud Beat: The Limits of American Business Self-Regulation, 1895–1932,” Business History Review, 83 (2009), 113–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 On the rhetorical struggle in the second half of the nineteenth century to redraw the boundaries between the vice of gambling and respectable speculation see Fabian, Ann, Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; de Goede, chapter 3; David Hochfelder, “Where the Common People Could Speculate”; and Levy, “Contemplating Delivery.”

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20 Logan, Andy, The Man Who Robbed the Robber Barons (London: Victor Gollancz, 1966), 14–15Google Scholar. Unless otherwise indicated, information about Mann in subsequent paragraphs is from Logan's biography.

21 On the history of society journalism, see Logan; and Homberger, Eric, Mrs. Astor's New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age (New York: Yale University Press, 2002), 204–19Google Scholar.

22 “Saunterings,” Town Topics, 17 Dec. 1891, also quoted in Homberger, 210.

23 “Mann Would Reform the Four Hundred,” New York Times, 1 Aug. 1905, 7.

24 Post, Edwin Jr., Truly Emily Post (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1961), 143Google Scholar. In Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country (1913), parvenu Undine Spragg is instructed in the ways of society by Mrs. Heeny, the society manicurist and masseuse, who brings clippings from Town Talk, Wharton's thinly disguised version of Town Topics (the same title also appears in The House of Mirth (1905)).

25 Homberger, 202–19. For a more wide-ranging account of the self-conscious formation of the New York bourgeoisie as a distinct class, see Beckert, Sven, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 For discussions of Frank Norris's novels that combine melodramatic elements with a portrayal of an “economic sublime” see Horwitz, Howard, By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, chapter 5; Tandt, Christophe Den, The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998)Google Scholar, chapter 7; and Zimmerman, David, Panic! Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar, chapter 3.

27 Clear data on the level of popular participation in stock markets in this period is thin on the ground. For a good summary of the varying evidence see Ott, Julia C., “‘The Free and Open People's Market’: Political Ideology and Retail Brokerage at the New York Stock Exchange, 1913–1933,” Journal of American History, 96 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, n. 2.

28 The story of Thomas W. Lawson, a stock promoter who turned into one of the most vociferous muckraking protestors against the abuses of the system, is told in Zimmerman, chapter 2.

29 US Senate Industrial Commission, Report of the Industrial Commission (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902)Google Scholar. For a discussion of the debates in this period surrounding the idea of popular shareholding see Ott, Julia C., When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors' Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 In Wall Street: A Cultural History (London: Faber, 2005), Steve Fraser provides a historical survey of the usually negative cultural responses to the stock market.

31 In addition to Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street, see Cowing, Cedric B., Populists, Plungers, and Progressives: A Social History of Stock and Commodity Speculation, 1890–1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hochfelder, “Where the Common People Could Speculate”; and Levy, “Contemplating Delivery.”

32 For details of the restricted membership of the NYSE see Sobel, Robert, The Big Board: A History of the New York Stock Market (New York: Free Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

33 See Hochfelder; Preda, Framing Finance, chapter 4; and Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street.

34 Town Topics, 3 Feb. 1887, 20.

35 Town Topics, 20 Jan. 1887, 15.

36 Town Topics, 3 Feb. 1887, 19.

37 Town Topics, 2 Jan. 1890, 20.

38 Town Topics, 2 Jan. 1890, 16.

39 Town Topics, 9 Feb. 1893, 15.

40 Town Topics, 20 Jan. 1887, 15.

41 Town Topics, 13 Jan. 1887, 1. Edith Wharton takes the trope of the rise and fall of a woman's stock to the extreme in The House of Mirth (1905).

42 Town Topics, 6 Jan. 1887, 1.

43 Town Topics, 27 Jan. 1887, 1.

44 Town Topics, 27 Jan. 1889, 15.

45 Town Topics, 17 Feb. 1887, 13.

46 Town Topics, 3 Feb. 1887, 20. In the legal struggle over bucket shops’ access to price information over the ticker, the NYSE was understandably accused of operating a cartel, setting minimum rates for commission and restricting which stocks could be listed; see Hochfelder, “Where the Common People Could Speculate.”

47 Town Topics, 17 Feb. 1887, 12. In Panic!, Zimmerman argues in his interpretation of Frank Norris's The Pit (1903) that mesmerism was a recurrent trope in accounts of the market in this period. The novel's stock-manipulating hero Curtis Jadwin attempts to wrest control of the invisible hand of the market with the force of his magnetic personality and economic might, but in the end he is mesmerized by the economic sublime of the market itself.

48 “The Golden Calf: High-Class Bunco Steering,” Town Topics, 24 Feb. 1887, 14. The most shocking thing of all, the article concludes, is that Clews ropes women into speculating in the market by employing particularly enticing promoters.

49 Town Topics, 13 Mar. 1890, 17.

50 Town Topics, 13 Jan. 1887, 15.

51 Town Topics, 14 Jan. 1892, 16.

52 Town Topics, 24 Feb. 1887, 17.

53 Town Topics, 13 Jan. 1887, 15.

54 Town Topics, 17 Jan. 1907, 22.

55 See Logan, The Man Who Robbed the Robber Barons, chapters 2–3, 8–10.