The Price of Panic: 1876 Seattle Views on Labor and Economic Depression
An editorial from the Seattle Daily Intelligencer explores the deep-seated economic anxieties of the era, blaming trade disputes and 'idle' men for the systemic instability of the Pacific Northwest.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
When all the people of the Whitman country are productive, they must be reasonably prosperous, whether wages or profits are high or low. If wages are low, capital is encouraged, and enterprise is pushed forward. If there is no proportion between capital and labor, and if there is idle money in the banks while many idle men are in the streets, this is exactly the trouble now existing. The evil has been greatly intensified by that widespread distrust which has almost entirely killed the spirit of enterprise. Those who have the money are afraid to trust it to the laborer, and the laborer, who would be, if they were not afraid to trust one another, in the United States, at least 10,000,000 working or producing people. The country can well afford to have one-third of its people idle, yet, if this idle portion should be put to work, each would earn $500, a total of $5,000,000,000, the sum actually lost annually to the country. It is no wonder that the hard times prevail when such a vast amount of productive energy is kept in idleness.
“It is no wonder that the hard times prevail when such a vast amount of productive energy is kept in idleness.”
This 1876 reflection on the 'cost of idleness' and the fragility of capital during a recession mirrors the perennial Seattle debate over economic growth, labor unrest, and housing stability. Even nearly 150 years ago, the city was grappling with the tension between the promise of regional expansion and the cycles of boom-and-bust that define the Pacific Northwest economy.
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