On September 18, 1873, the announcement of Jay Cooke and Company's bankruptcy sent Wall Street to a panic, and the country to a long, harsh depression. Americans interpreted this economic crisis in the light of the acrimonious financial debates born of the Civil War—the money question chief among them. The consequences transformed American politics. Ideologically ill-equipped to devise cohesive economic policies, political parties split dangerously along sectional lines (between the Northeast and the Midwest). Particularly divided over President U.S. Grant's veto of the 1874 Inflation Bill, the Republican Party decisively lost the 1874 congressional elections. As a Democratic majority in the House spelled the doom of Reconstruction, the ongoing divisions of both parties on economic issues triggered a political realignment. The dramatic 1876 elections epitomized a new political landscape that would last for twenty years: high instability in power at the national level and what has been described as the “politics of inertia.” Therefore, by closely following the ramifications of the 1873 panic, this article proposes an explanation of how an economic crisis transformed into a pivotal political event.

This article examines the transformation of American gift giving in the early twentieth century, using prescriptive and trade literature, as well as individual stories. This transformation occurred within the context of the transition from a Victorian to a modernist ethos and from a production to a consumption orientation. Changes in gift-giving practices were shaped by Progressive Era hygiene and home economics reformers and by aesthetic movements such as Arts and Crafts and interior decoration. Gift reformers divorced the gift from the Victorian ideal of ornamental and sentimental items, asserting that a gift's beauty lay in its functionality. This transformation fostered a second shift in the ideology of the gift. Rather than the giver's knowledge of and sentiment toward the recipient determining gift selection, the recipient's needs and desires increasingly dictated the choice. The gift thereby became more consumer-oriented. This change paved the way for the gift registry, which provided a commercial forum where prospective gift recipients could list their preferences.