The Speculation Economy

FOUR THE NEW PROPERTY

90

FROM DEPRESSION TO PROSPERITY

Eighteen ninety-three was the year of the great Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a corporeal celebration of more than sixty years of industrial success. It was also a year of financial panic, a year followed by a long and dismal depression that was then perhaps the worst in the nation’s history. Crop prices were low, hundreds of banks and thousands of businesses failed, railroads continued their slide into bankruptcy and almost four million Americans were out of work. Business retrenched and ...