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Fifth Avenue (though dispensing only pills, not abortions, that industry having been driven underground and turned over to the unscrupulous and the untrained). Comstock, calculating that the once immune Restell was now safely isolated by the new repressive moral climate, called on her incognito, got her to sell him a contraceptive device, and arrested her. He also made sure that every paper in town was invited to witness her arraignment at Jefferson Market Police Court. Restell managed to post bond, though with considerable difficulty as most people were afraid to be publicly associated with her. As the weeks before her trial dragged on, with the press lambasting her daily, she became convinced Comstock would succeed in hounding her back into prison. Rather than accept such a fate, she lay down in her tub, filled it half full, and slit her throat from ear to ear. The New York Times declared it “a fit ending to an odious career.”

58

Work or Bread!

At ten o’clock on Thursday morning, September 18, 1873, leading Wall Street bankers and brokers gathered at the New York office of Jay Cooke and Co. The Philadelphia-based investment banking house had long been considered one of the strongest in the country, but it was now teetering at the edge of bankruptcy, and Cooke’s men pleaded for an immediate transfusion of funds. Their pleas were refused. At eleven o’clock, they closed their doors and telegraphed the bad news to Cooke in Philadelphia. He promptly shut down the entire concern. A titan of American finance had crumpled.

When news of Cooke’s suspension was announced on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, “a monstrous yell went up and seemed to literally shake the building.” Now “dread seemed to take possession of the multitude,” the Tribune reported. Brokers began trampling one another to sell off stocks that were suddenly, terrifyingly vulnerable.

All that day and all the next, as a Nation reporter observed from the gallery, a “mad terror” swept through the “great crowds of men [who] rushed to and fro trying to get rid of their property, almost begging people to take it from them at any price.” Jay Gould reigned jubilant amid the carnage. Having gauged the market correctly and bet on a massive decline, he had already made an instant fortune and now sought to claw down prices even farther. Vanderbilt, champion of the bulls, bought desperately to buoy prices. He protected his New York Central but was unable to do much more. Many Vanderbilt concerns were battered down, and Gould (with his ally Russell Sage) scooped them up. Brokerage firms failed on all sides. Banks buckled. On Friday, despite a pelting rain, a “seething mob” filled Broad Street. Frenzied depositors surged through the mud to remove their funds from banks whose vaults were stuffed with railroad bonds deteriorating in value by the minute. One broker moaned that the unfolding catastrophe was the “worst disaster since the Black Death.”

By Saturday the governors of the Exchange had had enough. At eleven o’clock they shut down trading “for an indefinite period.” Wall Street, in its extremity, turned to Washington for help. President Grant and Secretary of the Treasury Richardson hustled north to take charge. At a crisis conference in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, bankers, brokers, merchants, manufacturers, and railroad men—laissez-faire scruples jettisoned for the moment—pleaded with Grant to deposit twenty to forty million greenbacks in the city’s banks. The administration judged that such an action would exceed its authority, but it did agree to buy government bonds in the open market, injecting some currency into the system.

It wasn’t enough. Next week the Exchange stayed closed, but crowds bought and sold sinking securities on the streets. Bank runs multiplied (as did defalcations by bank officials). Brokerage houses collapsed. By the following Friday, most of the major banks and insurance companies, and almost all the second-rank institutions, had shut down. The panic spread rapidly from New York to the rest of the country. Chicago, its banks paralyzed,