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As Harvey Dent once said, “Either you die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” When it comes to Black Friday, a day that has come to symbolize the excess of American capitalism, there is a whole series of fallout: Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday.
Black Friday took so many iterations that it’s hard to track them all. And while the term Black Friday has been used to describe a number of events, several threads lead to the Gold Panic of Friday September 24, 1869.
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The gold market collapsed on Black Friday following a conspiracy by financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk, according to historians. The United States stopped using the gold standard during the Civil War, but gold was still the official currency of international trade. Cue the California Gold Rush in 1848 when hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the West Coast in search of gold.
But by the mid-1850s much of the gold had been mined and what was left was increasingly difficult to recover. After the Civil War ended a decade later, federal debt was growing and the new US currency was still unstable. Gould and Fisk, who had ties to the federal government, conspired to corner the gold market, according to The New York Times Archives, buying what they could.
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On Black Friday, the price of gold hit between $ 160 and $ 162 before Treasury Secretary George Boutwell sold $ 4 million in gold, after realizing what the two were doing. The price dropped to $ 133 within minutes, causing stock prices to drop 20%, agricultural exports by 50% and the total bankruptcy of some brokerages.
The negative connotation of the term “Black Friday” continued for decades, until the mid-1900s, when it was used by the Philadelphia and Rochester police to describe the onset of holiday crowds and traffic, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was picked up by The New York Times and then suddenly – it was everywhere.
Retailers weren’t thrilled with the name’s common explanation: that retailers were in the red until the holiday shopping started, when they went “black” and made a profit. But somehow it stuck. Hero or villain? It’s hard to say.
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