Panic of 1907 - in Fiction

In Fiction

Upton Sinclair's The Moneychangers is an expose of the Panic of 1907, in which J.P. Morgan is described to be a lascivious old man who in fact started the crash and was later heralded for its rescue. The book is thinly veiled as fiction but is obviously intended to be read as fact. Robert A. Heinlein was a good friend of Sinclair's, an association Heinlein later tried to obscure, and which may have influenced To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

In October 1912, Owen Johnson commenced a serial novel about the Panic in McClure's, entitled the Sixty-first Second. McClure's published many of the works of the muckrakers and other progressives, and Johnson's novel mirrors many of the criticisms that the progressives expressed concerning the Panic and the Money Trust in general. J. P. Morgan appears under the name of "Gunther." The scene at the Morgan Library, which is quite effectively drawn, is in Chapter XVIII. The novel was republished in book form by Frederick A. Stokes in 1913.

More recently, the Panic of 1907 has been described in the central chapters of Richard Mason's History of a Pleasure Seeker (2011).

The Panic is also mentioned in Robert A. Heinlein's To Sail Beyond the Sunset as protagonist Maureen Johnson Smith has trouble withdrawing her savings of $300+ in gold and silver coins from her bank, mentioning that J. P. Morgan saved the banking system but was later vilified for it.