1881-82 Comic Strips featuring William Vanderbilt, Episode 5: Wall Street Frauds Make Wonderful Cartoons, Part 47
In the years 1881 and 1882, artist Charles Jay Taylor created a series of approximately one dozen sequential comic strips featuring monopolist and stock market manipulator, William H. Vanderbilt. These appeared on the front page of the New York City’s Daily Graphic newspaper, usually with a gap of months between each stand-alone episode. To find the prior episodes, click here.
In Episode 5, Taylor gives us The House that Vander-built, becoming one of numerous artists, before and after him, to utilize the nursery rhyme This is the House that Jack Built, in a pointed satire on a political or public figure, or situation.
In the second panel, note the sign hanging near the well, reading “Stock Watered Here”. “Watering stock” is Wall Street parlance for artificially/falsely swelling the value of a stock, to sell it off to suckers, then sell your own stock, rake in the money, and let everyone else’s investment crash. The water metaphor continues forward into several of the other panels. Note that in the left-center panel, the bulls (i.e., bull market — buyers) are looking at the water, and getting dry. In the panel beneath, a bruin (bear market — sell out) shows up, scaring the bulls, who run away. The three bottom-right corner panels, meanwhile, involve the crashing market/cutting of stock values, while simultaneously referring to railroad baron Vanderbilt’s controlling of prices of goods/supplies, via his control of the railroad. In the center panel, we see Vanderbilt standing in front of a billboard reading “Buy the New Watered Stocks”. Atop it, is his Egyptian obelisk, from Episode Zero, and a sign reading “Art Gallery Spaces to Let”, referring to his accumulation of art (which we’ll see in several future episodes).
The House that Vander-Built appeared on September 12, 1881.
Click on picture, to open a large enough version to read.
Click here to find prior Wall Street Frauds Make Wonderful Cartoons entries, and related I.T.C.H. posts. This series will continue, so long as the debate on financial reforms continues in Congress (except Mondays and holidays, during which I’d already had other material planned).
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— Doug
