1 phone 5 million artifacts. take the tour at 1:30 p.m. eastern. visit the discover lab at 2:00. and then join in the conversation with william kelso, answering your questions, live at 2:30 eastern. part of american history tv this weekend on c-span 3. the organization of american historians and the national council on public history recently held their annual meeting in milwaukee, wisconsin. american history tv spoke with several of this year's attendees. next, jessica lepler of the university new hampshire discusses the panic of 1837 and other economic crises, and explain how they relate to the 2008 financial crisis. this is about a half hour. >> american history tv is at the annual meeting of the organization of american historians in milwaukee. and we are joined by two

historians who will be speaking about economic crisis, and american history. jessica lepler teaches history at the university of new hampshire, and alice o'connor, a historian, at the university of california santa barbara. thanks for being with us. >> thank you. >> thank you. let's start early in history with the panic of 1837, professor lepler. what was that panic of 1837? >> well, the panic of 1837 was really that phrase of a rather long period of time. it referred to seven years of both a financial crisis and really hard times that followed it, well into the 1840s. but my focus has really been on the experience of panic which happened between march and may of 1837, and was rather remarkably similar to our own crisis in a lot of ways. it was a credit crisis built out of real estate speculation, and consumption of goods and sort of

very similar experience. >> and similar also in that it was an inherited crisis for martin van buren? >> so andrew jackson was president and then his vice president, martin van buren took office on march 4th, 1837, which is the same day in london and new orleans the panic began. so, yes, it was an inherited crisis, but it was a crisis inherited within an administration. martin van buren was andrew jackson's right-hand man, so he wasn't exactly ignorant of the situation going on. >> what would the economy have been like in 137? what was the driving engine of the u.s. economy? >> well, the period between the 1820s and the mid 1830s was one of enormous growth. it was an unbelievable period of american economic development. and the backbone of it, really, was cotton. the slave plantations of the south expanded west at a remarkable rate on to land that

had been confiscated from native americans, and that cotton engine connected to the markets of liverpool and the textile factories in england really drove the economy. england actually supported the american economy in the 1820s and 1830s as the sort of financial backers. so internal improvements, building of canals and railroads in the north, and the cotton markets of the south drove the american economy. >> when students try to draw parallels between a crisis of 1837 and the 2008 crisis where do you see the best merging of the paths? were the two similar? >> well, they're similar in a bunch of ways. in some ways, i think it's more interesting to think about how they were different. because they're remarkably similar. there are credit crisis built on property, and new forms of credit instrumentation. but they're very different in that the slave economy is really

behind the engine of the 1830s version. it's interesting, because the language people used to describe the crisis that they were living through is in some ways remarkably similar to our own. when we were living through the 2007-2008 sort of early periods of our own hard times, i kept seeing references to meteorological crises and medical crises, and this is the same sort of language that 19th century americans used, except 19th century americans didn't yet have a sense of capitalism or the economy, or a gdp, or anything that we use as markers to try to figure out how our own economic system works. so it's both similar -- people grappling with the problems of losing their fortunes overnight and incredibly different. >> professor o'connor, for the session on economic crisis in america, what do you bring to the discussion?

>> in my particular contribution, the panel itself is talking about why it is not only that economic crises matter in history, but -- and what they are and how they relate to one another, but why is it that narratives of economic crisis matter? and some of the things jessica was just saying i resonate with. and are part of the rationale for this panel. partly because it's our way, i think, of acknowledging that historians have something unique to bring to the understandings of economic crises. and why they matter. not only in the degree to which historians can really step back and get a fully contextual sense of the big structural transformations that are underlying these moments of panic and moments of crisis. but historians, you know, narrative is our tool. narrative is our tool for making sense of the past. so we have a particular

understanding of why it is that narratives matter in helping people to make sense of in all sorts of different ways the very bewildering events that are happening all around them. and helping people to in that way try to rest some control, whether they really can or not, over, again, these bewhich wouldering events that are disrupting their lives, possibly, but also in bringing some understanding to how narratives are used for political purposes. not just narrow electoral purposes, although they absolutely are used for electoral purposes, the politics of blame is something that is a big theme in jessica's paper. and you can't avoid it in thinking about, you know, the upcoming election. who is to blame? whose crisis is this? suddenly, the crisis has become barack obama's crisis.

suddenly, it became martin van buren's crisis. that's a political process. >> well, one of the common themes in the narrative is the banks. >> absolutely. >> this time around and in 1837 and, of course, in 1933 under fdr, right? >> of yes, absolutely. i mean, banks are -- and not only have banks been at the core of these crises, but at many moments of crisis. and panic in particular. economic crises that begin with moments of financial panic or financialized panic, you know, have banks at their core. and have different aspects of the whole banking system and the whole system of global finance at their core. in fact, one of the themes, really, that sort of draws all these together is the global nature, the global origins of these crises, which is often a revelation to students. because they think, well, globalization, that happened yesterday. you know? >> and professor lepler is

talking about the slave trade and the textile trade from england. >> oh, yeah, and the credit that sort of enabled canals to be built and railroads to be built and lands to be purchased and slaves to be purchased. >> did that come from foreign -- >> it came from england. i mean, it came from banks, like the rothschilds and the bearings and the banks of england and the bank of england controlled the credit markets for all of that. but banks are an interesting part of the panic of the 1837 crisis, because for a long time, historians have focused on the bank runs at the end of the panic period as the sort of start of the panic. but that actually was the end of when people were panicked. the bank runs are the culmination of a long period of people being really uncertain. and banks as an argument for causation were just as political as arguing that martin van buren was somehow responsible. the whigs argued, and the

democrats argued for banks and merchants. so when we think about it as banks being at the center of it, that's the argument that got shaped during the financial crisis. >> in the 2008 crisis, we didn't really have too many runs on banks, per se. the government stepped in largely to rescue a number of financial institutions. i was struck by in 1837 that there was certainly a call for the government to step in. is that a common theme throughout the -- throughout the financial crises in history? >> well, it's interesting. in 1837, it's often thought there were these big bank runs, but there actually weren't that many bank runs. the banks shut themselves down in terms of trading paper money for gold and silver coin before there could be widespread bank runs. so there weren't that many bank runs either. but the call for government intervention was again a politicized argument in the 1830s. those who wanted government intervention were those who disagreed with martin van buren

and andrew jackson's policies. those who didn't want government intervention agreed with the existing policies which were already an interventionist sort of measure to try to bring back a more gold and silver currency. so i do think calls for government intervention in one way or another are sort of transhistorical. but the 1830s moment is different. because political parties are new. the idea that the federal government had any role in this banking system was relatively new. i mean, even financial crises were not new, but in a very booming economy of the 19th century, which was going to transform america. the scale was really different. >> going back to 2008, this narrative that you talked about in terms of what history -- focus specifically on the banks' role in 2008 and how that fits into the narrative of past economic crises. >> well, interestingly, holding the banks accountable and essentially framing this as a

crisis that began as a financial crisis and that remained in some ways as a financial crisis that can be resolved through fixing the financial system through bailing out the banks or stabilizing the banks or somehow stabilizing our system of finance and reforming it, is in itself a somewhat narrow way of framing the issues, even though very, very big issues are involved. but what that doesn't pay attention to is what is it that caused this financial instability in the first place? absolutely, that's connected to the banks and the larger process of economic reform and financial deregulation over the course of several years and the restructuring of capitalism that we've been seeing over the course of several decades now. but it's also absolutely deeply rooted in these problems of inequality that essentially put people in a position of being so

vulnerable themselves to this whole process of subprime lending, this whole process of essentially debt financed ways of getting by. not just ways of getting ahead, simply ways of getting by. that remains really unaddressed when you simply frame the crisis as a crisis of credit, as a great gigantic credit crunch that somehow has to be fixed through government intervention. >> i wanted to ask you about -- do you have something to add? >> yeah, i was just going to say that this idea of people not being able to sort of deal with the crisis as it's happening is something that in 1837 was really remarkable, because it ended up shaping the way people thought about economics for the next century and a half. they started the crisis with strong arguments that individuals are responsible for their economic lives.

the self-made man of 1830s was sort of important, and played a really big role in getting people to invest in the economy. but during the crisis start to argue they are not responsible. that self-made failure is sort of divorced from self-made success. and so it's -- in some ways, the reverse argument happening in the 1830s. whereas during the crisis, they start to look for bigger forces. and that process kind of leads to changes in economic thought. >> it leads me to ask you both, it came out of the depression, because we all had parents who largely went through the depression, although memories are fading. but among the sort of social things that you hear, the lessons of the depression -- i'm not talking about the economic lessons, but sort of the frugality, the idea of resilience, of building savings, did those still exist today? are we -- are there social

lessons that we're learning from the 2008 crisis, for example? >> well, i mean, i think that is another story in many ways of historical revisionism. i mean, we are still finding out what the lessons are. >> of the depression. >> and the nature of the great depression was. so you see literally this debate happening before our very eyes. one version of the great depression, which traces its roots to a whole series of structural problems in the economy that had to do with what's, you know -- what's happening in the agricultural sector, with what's happening in the global economy. versus a version of, you know, what happened to cause the great depression that says, no, actually, it started as kind of a credit crunch, you know, the great contraction as milton friedman put it, and then through a variety of mistakes on the one hand on the part of the federal reserve, which mismanaged the crisis from the

get-go. and then government so called interference which prolonged the crisis is that's what caused the great depression. so that version of the great depression is being replayed right now in arguments that say, well, what happened was, government stepped in and bailed things out, and then the obama administration made things worse by this economic stimulus package, by not allowing the free market to reign. and therefore, the crisis become's obama's crisis. so in many ways, we're still fighting out the so-called lessons of the great depression in the way we're managing the crisis now. i point to one other thing i think that's very, very important. you might recall that at the very beginning of the great recession and what to do -- >> 2008. >> in -- yeah, really actually there's a big question of when all this started. but, early on in the obama

administration, there was a lot of talk about 1937. and there's -- the great lesson of 1937, supposedly the consensus lesson of 1937 is that what you do not do in times of great, you know, economic recession is go too quickly to the politics of austerity. that's the great lesson of the roosevelt recession in 1937. and for a while, for quite a while, early on, you know, that was -- seemed to be the prevailing consensus. that has clearly disappeared as we have turned to the politics of austerity. as the politics of austerity have really become dominant, certainly in our own political discussion, and absolutely in the broader global political discussion about the european debt crisis and what to do about that. so it's interesting to see how lessons kind of rise and fall in the course of a few short years, as the -- as, especially,

economic crises extend. >> but it -- >> or months, in my case. >> months, yes. >> as the panic of 1837 intensified because there was no communication, and in those months, narratives of even the same author changed from a novel called "three experiments of living." living within the means, living up to the means and living beyond the means. >> personal means. >> this is about an individual family and how you should govern your finances and it comes out in december of 1836, and it's a run-away best seller in the spring of 1837. and then at the end of the crisis in may, she comes up with another book, and the lesson of the second book isn't about how your individual choices can prevent your family's downfall. it's about how you're trapped in a big net, a big spider, cob web she calls it, and you can try to do things to help your family,

but you can't control the system. so even in a few months, the same author could change her mind. >> you touched on this a little bit earlier. has the way we measure economic success -- both individually and -- mainly let's focus as a nation. has that changed over the course of 180 years, 175 years? >> of course it has. it's hard for me to talk in the course of a nation, because in the 1830s, they didn't think in those terms. so political economy as a failed hadn't developed into economics yet. and they didn't measure economic growth as a component of what they were supposed to be studying, what counted as a successful nation. they were still thinking in individual terms, generally. and so domestic economy, political economy, novels, there's been a lot of work in the last few years about how all these genres of measurement, genres of discussion, are really narrative in form, and are intertwineded with one another. it hasn't become the model that we think of today.

so when historians apply the models of today on the 18130s to try to figure out whether the economy was successful, it's sort of a fiction. because it's just -- there's no way for us to know. they didn't collect the data that would be useful for us. >> certainly by 2008, we have got plenty of ways to figure this out, unemployment and tdp and things like that. >> well, also recession. i mean, literally, the definition of recession in terms of the length of time one is in periods of economic growth and, you know -- and there are debates among -- remain debates among economists about how you should measure, how you should date recessions when they begin and when they end, but also how they should be measured, as well. >> if i could just jump in, i think that one of the most interesting things i've read recently is about stature as a measure of economic success. >> social stature? >> no, people stature. actual height. literally height. >> really? >> yeah, because in the -- people born in the -- late 1830s

and early 1840s were actually shorter than people who would come before them and people who had come later. so hard times actually took a physical toll, we think, on people's bodies. >> well, one of the measures is unemployment, and you wrote an article recently about the myth of man's session, dealing with women and the economic crisis. and this has come up as an issue in the campaign. >> it certainly has. >> what do you mean by when you -- when you use that term, man's session? >> this is one of the things, going back to this whole idea about how individuals, but also at a more kind of structural and political level, how economic crises are narrated. so early -- again, fairly early on, in the great recession, there was a lot of talk about this being unique, and being a so-called man's session. and the idea was that, well, generally speaking, in economic downturns, you do see a period in which men are, you know, oh -- are the first to lose

their jobs, in part because, you know, they're the ones who hold the jobs. especially if it's an industrial downturn. but, again, the argument is that in the past, men also are early -- the first to recover. and the argument was that what makes this great recession unique is that men -- not only are they suffering more, but their economic hardship is more prolonged and more severe than the economic hardship being suffered by women. again, this is how the argument went. and this is how this whole notion that this is unique in being a man's session as opposed to somehow a woman's session. >> it's a bizarre term, quite frankly. >> yes. >> and also, it's a way of playing politics. it's a way of furthering other agendas. because in many hands, the so-called man's session was a way of drawing attention to the way the economy, but also politics have become item

femininized, and how special interests, women in particular, were making a special claim on the administration to need -- supposedly to need special assistance in the great recession. none of which was particularly true. i mean, i think the whole man session idea is not a very helpful way to thinking about the economy. but what it does draw our attention to is something that we frequently see in the experience of severe economic downturn, long-term economic hardship. and that is that it has tremendous -- it's tremendously disruptive of family life, of individual lives in terms of the way they think about their place in the world, in the way they think about where they should be, and the way they think about bread winning and their own sense of responsibility, absolutely their own sense of manliness. but frankly, their sense of, you know, women hood, as well at this point, because so many women are bread winners in their own family.

and so i -- i argued this in that piece, but also think this is the case, a lot of cultural anxieties about changing gender roles are being played out in the way we frame the current recession, just as they have been played out over and over and over again in the way people make sense of these big economic crises. i know jessica -- >> absolutely. >> in her work, as well. >> in the 1830s, same situation. crises caussin credible disruption in people's lives. and they struggle to try to figure out how to make sense of them. and gender is one way in which these gender roles change as a course of financial crisis. in the immediate -- immediately preceding the panic of 1837, a bunch of new york working men had a big flower riot. they literally threw flour out of the windows of warehouses,

and as my friend josh greenburg argues, it's because their sense of masculinity was threatened. they couldn't provide for their families. >> they were arguing over wages? >> they were arguing over the price of flour, so they were being paid less and less proportiona proportionately, and people ate mostly bread. this is the era before people expected to have square meals, balanced diets. and an era before, any sort of social safety net. so if a working man didn't make a wage that could buy barrels of flour to feed their family, there was no food. and people just starved. that was part of life in the free market world of their early 19th century. >> it would be another 20 years before the civil war would start after the panic of 1837, right? how long did the effects of that crisis impact american life? >> well, you know, there's some argument among economists over exactly when it ends. some people say it ends in 1843

or so. some people say it ends with the mexican war a little later on, big expansionist boom brings more land and a lot of federal spending into the economy. but, you know, i think it hurt people for a really long time, and it didn't just hurt people in america. it was a global economic sort of turning. and in england, the 1840s were known as the hungry 40s by the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, because it was such a period of starvation. >> where are we now, taking up to the 2008 crisis? >> well, in fact, this is, again, yet another theme. i mean, we keep drawing attention to the continuities, and i think we all want to caution that this is not the same thing happening. >> sure. >> but, again, very, very important theme are the long-term impacts, especially about -- of these extended periods of crisis. in fact, there's a lot of research being done now about the effects -- especially for young people who are about to

enter or who have recently entered the labor market who have lost their jobs, who have had to take, you know -- have had to downsize early on in their career. there's a lot of research done about how the impact of that is not just felt for a couple of years. it's literally follows you throughout your career, especially -- especially the experience of long-term unemployment. but i would argue, you absolutely see it -- the end of life -- at the end of the working years, as well. people who are close to retirement age who have had to kind of throw that out the window whose economic security has been completely undermined. and who find themselves -- i mean, really on the brink of experiencing hunger. rates of hunger have gone up tremendously over the past few years, as has reliance on what used to be called food stamps.

but rates measured and measurable rates of hunger have actually gone up, which, again, has long-term impacts. especially in terms of child nutrition. so there are many things that we can glean from the past, but now we're paying closer attention to the long-term impact, i hope. >> we have a couple minutes left. and i'll ask you both more broadly, and if you want to add on to that, that's fine. i'll ask you, we're here with historians at the annual meeting. what people ask, why should we study history, why is it important? >> why should we study history? well, i think history provides us with a way of understanding the world. a way of paying close attention to the sources of the past, and trying to figure out how people in the past framed their own lives. i think that's really important to think through for ourselves. and to see that we actually have power over the way we think through our lives. not just how we live our lives, and in some ways the structures that frame our lives. but also in the sort of cultural

implications of what we think about what we do every day. i think it matters quite a lot. and i really think it's very important that i teach my students to see similarities and differences when they study the past. this issue of college kids leaving school without employment, which comes up in my classroom. i would say, like, at least every other day in the semester. you know? especially because i'm teaching a course on the long 19th century economic history of the semester. you know, it's a major issue in these students' lives. and so i'm constantly trying them to get to see the similarities of the people we're studying and the sources that we're probing for information. and at the same time, to recognize that the past is actually rather different, and their own lives can take different forms. they should be slightly empowered by this thing. i mean, not every financial crisis is a golden opportunity, but there are moments when we actually have some control over how we shape the future, and

that i think that they ought to seize those reins of power for themselves if they can. >> alice o'connor, why study history? >> so many reasons. but just to really add on to that, i think what history does, it's not uniquely necessary, but history is in a very good position to draw attention not only to the structural dimensions, right, of things that people often experience on very individualized and in some ways in very isolated and isolating ways. but i think history also draws attention to thee ethical dimension of what is happening right now, and draws attention -- enables students to get a way of understanding how what's unfolding now is what's the happy to of this conference are very big changes and very big questions about the relationship between capitalism and democracy. that has changed over time. and that