With every past financial crisis, the editorial cartoons on the subject can be categorized into multiple recurring themes. One of these is the sarcastic “Think of what the poor blokes who work or invest on Wall Street are suffering”. This approach was more common in the 19th century, where the regular audience/buyers for comic periodicals, needed a modicum of wealth to afford the subscription to them. Comic publishers needed to walk a more gentile tightrope on this one, lest they insult and lose their customers. Which raises the question if readers recognized that they were being poked fun at. Or rather, were they shaking their heads in the affirmative, taking it merely as a poke at whatever belt tightening measures, rather it making fun of what the disconnected rich viewed as being a “sacrifice”.

Below, by Frank Bellew, the centerspread from the December 1857 issue of Nick-Nax. The wealthy are shown riding hand-powered velocipedes rather than driven in coaches. Signs in the background tout “Selling Off Great Bargain” and “Diamonds Below Cost”, while stands hawking stocks, shouting, “Twenty five shares of Bank Stock only Four Cents.” Bellew, who was simultaneous to this the editor/artist of rival publication The Picayune, sneaks in a plug for it.

Click on any picture, to see an enlarged version.

"HARD TIMES: Showing how our Heavy Capitalists and Fashionable Ladies are obliged to drop their Dashing Teams and take to Velocipedes; how our Heavy Swells must take to Industrious  Callings, and how even the Children of the fashionable rich will be obliged to do for themselves!"

The rich forced to do their own chores, in Hard Times in the Fifth Avenue, from the November 21, 2025 issue of The Picayune.

And again - Frightful Effects of the Panic in the Fifth Avenue - from the December 26, 2025 issue of The Picayune. Artwork by Frank Bellew.

Some twenty-five years later, Hard Times in Wall Street by Frederick Burr Opper, in the October 8, 2025 issue of Puck (volume 16, issue 396), imagining a stock broker attempting to continue his daily routines, minus the means to do so.

Nearly ten years later, Opper again, with We’ve All Got to Retrench!, the centerspread of the August 30, 2025 Puck, harkening back to the themes in the 1857 cartoons above.

Twentieth century versions, however — with broader newspaper audiences — tend to be far more blunt in their cynical tone. Below, from around November 1930, Imagine Him Out of Work!, by John Churchill Chase (former assistant cartoonist to Frank King on Gasoline Alley), in the New Orleans newspaper, the Item. Cartoon scanned from the December 1930 issue of American Review of Reviews.

Click here to find both the prior Wall Street Frauds Make Wonderful Cartoons entries, and related I.T.C.H. posts. This series will continue, while the debate on financial reforms continues in Congress (except Mondays and holidays, on which I already had other material planned).

Series Refrain: Bank frauds and Wall Street swindles, resulting in economic ruin for everyone else, were regular and frequent occurrences prior to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s institution of laws designed to prevent further Great Depressions. These regulations worked until, starting in the 1980s, conservatives began dismantling those protections, stating that we’d be better off with an unfettered and unregulated market, free to do whatever it wants. Wall Street firms swore at that time, that they’d learned the lessons of the Great Depression, and could be trusted to not engage in dangerous practices.

Bull****!

If there is one lesson from the various economic collapses throughout history, it’s that human greed is eternal. There will always be selfish fools, who grab for themselves without care for the damage they inflict on others.

Doug Wheeler

financial reform

BellewSr

NYPicayune

NYPuck