Placing Bets

Franklin Eliot Felton. The Secrets of Internal Revenue. Philadelphia: William Flint, 1870.

Throughout the 19th century stock speculators sought to distinguish their risk-taking from “ordinary” gamblers, with mixed success. In this book, author Frank Eliot Felton called Wall Street a “theatre of unprecedented and astounding financial operations and reckless speculations” and charged that it was like every other “gambling hell.”

As an object lesson, Felton wrote extensively about the 1869 Gold Crash (“Black Friday”), a financial panic caused by the attempts of investors Jay Cooke and James Fisk to corner the gold market, thus leading many people (but neither Cooke nor Fisk) to financial ruin. This image, “Betting on the Indicator,” depicts people standing outside the stock exchange placing side wagers on gold’s wildly fluctuating price.