Scott Reynolds Nelson: Mad Men in the He-Cession
...Pundits have come to label the current economic downturn a "he-cession." In the summer issue of Foreign Policy, Reihan Salam, a fellow at the New America Foundation, suggested that because men's traditional jobs (particularly in finance and construction) have declined faster than women's (particularly in health care and the service sector), we might see a rise in angry, unemployed men—a source of social instability in 1990s Russia and today's Middle East.
There have been a lot of economic downturns in American history. While economists in the Reagan years tended to highlight the slow, gentle increase in American GDP that seemed to feed economic growth from the American Revolution forward, heterodox economists have argued that the American economy has been riven with crises, shocks, and other bear-market calamities. Where orthodox economists have read back into history the "Great Moderation," heterodox economists have seen hysteria, chaos, and violence. Cultural historians, meanwhile, have noticed a lot of hysterical talk about manhood, violence, and chaos during the panics of 1785, 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873—the list goes on. So what do scholars have to tell us about the tribulations of previous American panics? Was manhood in peril then? Were unemployed men really dangerous?...
As [historian Woody] Holton demonstrated, the crisis between the end of hostilities in the Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution was dangerous: lots of boys and lots of guns. In the so-called Newburgh Conspiracy, recently unemployed officers who had served under George Washington threatened a coup if they were not paid for their services; Congress, fearing anarchy, demanded $2-million from the states. When the Commonwealth of Massachusetts responded by taxing whiskey, hard-up farmers in the middle and Western part of the state rose up in Shays' Rebellion. Ordinary Americans were not yahoos who demanded inflationary currency to avoid paying off their debts; they wanted to ease the pain of all the new taxes, taxes that were going to pay off speculators like Abigail Adams. Backers of the Constitution tended to favor bondholders and feared state rebellions; they sought to prevent episodes of runaway inflation. Those mixed motives pushed Americans toward a Constitution that removed monetary power from the states (no more state inflation) yet protected ordinary Americans from a government that might grow oppressive and punitive. The nation, it turns out, was conceived in a financial crisis. Mad men were not just in the background: The fear of violence by unemployed or economically insecure men shaped American economic policy; the Constitution became an instrument to protect creditors from future he-cessions of angry, numerous, and armed people concerned about their debts....
In Jackson's era, collective violence against the Republic seemed a thing of the past. Nothing as coherent as the Newburgh Conspiracy, Shays' Rebellion, or the Whiskey Rebellion seemed in the works. By the 1819 and 1837 panics, the nation's police powers seemed effective at preventing angry young men from lacing up their moccasins and threatening the nation's sovereignty. National violence was more often personal than collective. In an age of unlimited liability and debtors' prisons, a man's reputation could mean the difference between success and jail. For men whose reputation, credit, and gender were tightly bound together, individual violence became a socially acceptable method for coping with the economic tensions of the day. From the 1790s through the 1830s, one sees a tight connection between dueling and a rage at the banks: Aaron Burr versus Alexander Hamilton; the future senator Thomas Hart Benton versus the attorney Charles Lucas; the Kentucky Representative and bank attorney Henry Clay versus the antibank Virginia Representative John Randolph; the journalist James Watson Webb versus the editor William Leggett. Jackson represented tens of thousands of men who were inclined to solve conflicts with canes, horsewhips, and pistols. A fair portion were slaveholders, men who sought to keep their slaves frightened by cultivating an air of unpredictable rage....
...Fresh mischief emerged with the panic of 1873, a long and violent depression. David O. Stowell's edited collection, The Great Strikes of 1877 (University of Illinois Press, 2008), explores the last and most violent upheaval that followed that six-year depression. The contributors show that the panic of 1873 pushed railroads on the edge of receivership into agreements to collectively reduce wages across all the major railroads. The announcement of those cuts in 1877 precipitated the Great Strike, the largest nationwide strike America has ever seen. Begun in railroad repair shops in Baltimore and Pittsburgh, it quickly spread through important junctions in Martinsburg, W.Va., and Nashville, Tenn. On the one hand, the coordination among striking engineers, brakemen, and firemen appeared to be the first stage of what labor officials would later call industrial unionism. On the other hand, anti-Chinese violence in California suggested that race-baiting was an important rallying point. And who was raising hell? Apparently mostly well-dressed gentlemen and riotous women destroyed railroad hubs all over the country. The diversity of the crowds proved interesting and sobering. In the longest term, the burning of Pittsburgh and the deaths of strikers and soldiers in the mayhem led many middle-class citizens to form citizens' councils and build armories in major cities. The Great Strike also helped justify the creation of a national guard for confronting the threat of armed insurrection in major cities. By 1877 a Constitution and credit reports were not enough to restrain violence, and so Congress called on a more permanent police force to protect itself from the angry unemployed, men and women....
Men's failure during panics, once viewed as a moral failing or a loss of masculinity, became more routine as panics became more routine in America. Reforms like the Bankruptcy Act eased the sting of depression for angry young men and did appear to minimize violence. As bankruptcy became more familiar and less harrowing than a prison sentence, tempers over indebtedness appeared to cool.
Are unemployed American men as dangerous as their counterparts in Russia or Pakistan? Probably not. The American political system has been jiggered and rejiggered through two centuries of angry, impulsive, violent men. Sometimes political institutions have been calibrated to deploy that violence, sometimes to redirect it, sometimes to quash it....
As for a coming Armageddon, statistics on bullet sales and macaroni purchases may be overreactions. Analysts have also noted a rapid rise in condom sales. One explanation for that is a rise in leisure time. Another explanation might be a rise in family planning. Male rage may go hand in hand with reflections on men's irrational exuberance in the past, and frank concerns about the shape of the future.