From Frontier to Finance

Even before he knew it, John Elliott Tappan’s life was connected to money. In 1873, when he was three years old, living on his family’s farm in Wisconsin, momentous events were taking place around him. America plunged into an economic depression, or “Panic” in the word of the times. But this was not just an ordinary downturn of the business cycle. This economic calamity would reshape the social and political landscape of the nation for years to come. Before it was over, railroad workers would go on strike, paralyzing the country’s transportation network in America’s first nationwide industrial action. Conflicts between two emerging groups, those who owned factories, banks, and stores, and those who worked in them, would raise the specter of class warfare. Unemployment in the nation’s rapidly growing cities would turn “respectable” upper-class members of society inward, away from the poor, bedraggled, and increasingly immigrant masses that made up the bulk of the urban population. In the West, farmers would form new organizations with quaint-sounding names like “The Patrons of Husbandry.” They rallied against what they saw as a different sort of social danger—not mobs but monopolists, the rich and powerful who owned the means of transportation, communications, and, increasingly, manufacturing.