Wall-st. bear: “He certainly is a great hunter!”

President Roosevelt holds a rifle on his right shoulder and a bag labeled “off to Louisiana” and walks away from four bears hiding behind a “Wall Street” sign.

comments and context

Comments and Context

A fascinating, and historically valuable, aspect of political cartoons, beyond their insights into contemporaneous events they address, is how the better cartoonists could be prescient — presenting and forecasting important trends, movements, and forces.

An excellent example by one of America’s excellent political cartoonists is this drawing by J. H. Donahey of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. President Roosevelt was departing for a vacation, a bear hunt in Louisiana. Superficially, the bears of Wall Street (not the bulls) look on. But it was while Roosevelt on this vacation that the Wall Street Panic of 1907 commenced.

During the summer there had been more bank failures than usual; and Roosevelt’s new Treasury Secretary George B. Cortelyou worked to promulgate a closer cooperation between banks and the national government, specifically opening government securities to banks. But a relatively minor move in the financial market — an attempt to corner the copper market, banks that could not cover asset calls, and soon a row of financial dominoes that fell — cascaded into a panic, and threatened to become a Depression.

The president returned from his hunt — which actually was the middle event in a long speaking tour into October, taking him to Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia — and immediately was met with news of the spreading panic on Wall Street. His first two days back at the White House were filled with meetings on the economy with Elihu Root, Philander C. Knox, James T. Metcalf, James Rudolph Garfield, and others. Over the next week he would confer with other cabinet officials like Cortelyou and Charles J. Bonaparte; and financiers Henry Clay Frick, Elbert H. Gary, and, eventually, J. P. Morgan.

Cortelyou became the administration’s point-man on the crisis, dealing especially with J. P. Morgan who would largely be responsible for salvaging the economy and staunching the Panic’s hemorrhaging. Morgan acted in self-interest, no doubt — he received concessions from the Administration so that his plan for consolidations would be not seen as forming a trust — but in the national interest too.

The palliatives hammered out by Morgan and Cortelyou were seeds that sprouted in the subsequent presidential administrations of Taft and Wilson, more monetary than financial. But comparatively soon after this cartoon’s publication, the bulls and bears of Wall Street could be more at ease.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1907-09-21

Creator(s)

Donahey, J. H. (James Harrison), 1875-1949

Language

English

Period

U.S. President – 2nd Term (March 1905-February 1909)

Page Count

1

Production Method

Printed

Record Type

Image

Resource Type

Cartoon

Rights

These images are presented through a cooperative effort between the Library of Congress and Dickinson State University. No known restrictions on publication.

Citation