Consider, for example, pictorial responses to the unraveling of 1837. The graphics most prone to addressing this Panic were those most open to treating current events: “news.” Hence political cartoons took the lead. And among these was “The Times” by Edward Clay (fig. 11). The creator of a large and varied oeuvre of images (including several prints savagely mocking northern free blacks), Clay produced this stand-alone lithograph in the summer of 1837, just as the import of the downturn began to be felt. Configured as a panorama of densely packed scenes, several with a decidedly theatrical feel, the picture presents figures that often run to repulsive types. Not just the drunk (to the left), but also the callous landlord, the carriage-fitted lawyer to the right, and presumably the unseen proprietor of Shylock’s pawnshop (this last detail reflecting the antisemitism occasionally springing up in the milieu): all verge on disparaging caricatures. So that in this case it’s not just the unsavory poor but others as well who are “othered” by means of offputting stereotypings. But this does not stop Clay from simultaneously displaying the human cost of the downturn. If the drunk has only himself to blame, his stricken wife, the pathetic widow pleading with her landlord, the crowd storming the bank, the cartless teamster, and the unemployed (and barefoot!) workers in the foreground: these are all surely innocent casualties. In fact, another inflection of his stereotyping is that some of his needy figures—the widow and bedridden wife especially—amount to the kind of positive (and melodramatic) caricatures also loose in antebellum America, accompaniments to the extravagantly sentimental presentations of poor waifs (like the girl in fig. 9) circulating through the culture. Still, notwithstanding his reliance on types, Clay departs from received cartoonist practices and makes his downtrodden victims more than mere tokens of ideological postures. For are they not manifestly suffering? Indeed, the frantic crowd, the widow-landlord encounter, and the tradesmen’s jarring combination of unragged apparel and shoelessness together comprise the artist’s method of registering, not merely the condition of those already poor, but the new—and shockingly unanticipated—stringencies besetting all kinds of residents of communities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia amidst the 1837 Panic.
And then Clay ties it all together with a political indictment. Although his attack does not overshadow the print’s recitation of hardship, Clay’s critique is hard-hitting. Positioning his scenes beneath an ironic July 4th banner and, more pointedly, a sunburst of Andrew Jackson’s signature hat, glasses, and pipe set beside the sinking balloon of the Democrats’ banking scheme, Clay joins other Whiggishly slanted cartoonists in blaming this crisis on speculative practices springing from Democratic fiscal policies. Triggered by identifiably wrongheaded decisions, the 1837 Panic is thus depicted as deeply unusual. And as a result, even as it includes the poor in variously permutated typologies, “The Times” ultimately manages to keep at a distance all its needy figures—whether they are pictured as malevolent or blameless—by continuing to construct their condition as fundamentally abnormal. But then too, no less significantly, Clay uses his partisan analysis to bolster the explanatory force of his image. Like other antebellum images bearing on economic difficulties, Clay’s cartoon rode the legitimizing crest of explanation. And for this image, the basic understanding turns on the mistaken political vision of Jacksonian Democrats.