Book Smart

October often brings panic to the American stock market. Witness the events of October 1929 and October 1987, for example. Of course, tumbling markets occur at no particular month or time, and their lack of predictability is at the heart of what make these fluctuations so devastating. According to Zimmerman, everybody, including novelists, has tried to make sense of them.

“Fiction about these panics offers an extraordinary lens — or perhaps more precisely, a prism — through which we can read how modern understandings of economic crisis, crowds and markets emerged,” he says, adding that the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries faced a host of economic changes and social challenges that citizens sought to come to terms with, and writers struggled to explain.

“The novels I examine are overtly preoccupied with financial crises and market panics. These books typically follow the fortunes of a speculative titan on Wall Street or the Chicago Board of Trade, and they draw their suspense from the chaotic collapse of market prices. Panic novelists capitalized on and contributed to the surge of popular interest in high finance and the stock market at the turn of the 20th century. Wall Street emerged as a national thrill park, equal parts casino, sports arena and magic show,” he says.

However, for some writers, Wall Street’s maneuvers proved much more than expedient plot devices, Zimmerman says.

“Some novelists, such as Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, wrote about financial panics to test the capabilities and limitations of their art,” Zimmerman says. “The most astonishing example of this experimentation was performed in 1907 by the nation’s pre-eminent financial reformer and stock adviser, Thomas W. Lawson. Lawson crafted a novel, ‘Friday the Thirteenth,’ which he hoped would motivate his substantial readership to sell their stocks and incite a cataclysmic panic. This is a first in American fiction: a novel about the stock market designed to have concrete, indeed disastrous effects in the stock market.”

In fact, Zimmerman says that many novelists, journalists and social reformers saw financial crisis as the hinge on which teetered the nation’s fate.

“After the massive crisis of 1893, when about a fifth of the nation’s labor force was out of work, many Americans anxiously anticipated class war,” he says. “The same was true in 1907. In special ‘panic editions’ of their newspapers, socialist editors announced that the moment of revolution was at hand. The most sensational account linking financial catastrophe and class apocalypse that I found is Frederic Isham’s forgotten 1904 novel ‘Black Friday.’ It elaborates parallels between Jay Gould’s attempt to corner the nation’s gold market in 1869, the Paris Commune workers’ insurrection of 1871 and cultural collapse, signaled by the presence of feminists and sexual revolutionaries on Wall Street.”

Financial panics also offered the perfect venue for literary musings about crowd psychology. “Frank Norris deploys the intersection of psychic research, crowd psychology and market behavior in his novel ‘The Pit,’ about a Chicago speculator’s sensational attempt to monopolize the world’s wheat market. Norris’ novel is the most sustained examination in American fiction of the psychological hazards of playing the market,” Zimmerman says.

Ethics as well as psychology and politics are a factor in many of the panic novels of this period, he says. “Upton Sinclair’s terrible but terribly interesting book ‘The Moneychangers,’ published in 1908, shows J.P. Morgan deliberately causing the panic of 1907. The novel fascinates me because it is one of the first American novels to show how moral complicity spreads in the marketplace. For Sinclair, not only the financial villains at the conspiracy’s center but also shareholders and consumers across the economy are all to blame for the panic. Sinclair articulates how markets bind us morally to each other,” Zimmerman says. “‘The Moneychangers,’” he continues, “illuminates a lesson for this century.

“Studying markets and their radiating effects makes me think more about the ways each of us is bound by our economic purchases and investments to individuals all over the world. We are all market participants, and each of us is responsible for the effect that our financial actions engender, no matter how remote,” he says.

Zimmerman is starting a new project about why writers in the 1800s were so preoccupied with conspiracies. This semester he is teaching a freshman honors course focusing on how mass media shape our experiences of the world and ourselves. He also is teaching a large lecture class on British and American ghost stories.

“I’m most excited when I’m teaching fresh material,” says Zimmerman, recipient of a 2005 Distinguished Teaching Award for faculty. His new book is targeted for release in 2008.