The Freaks of Fortune: Moral Responsibility for Booms and Busts in Nineteenth-Century America

In the 19th century, the term "freaks of fortune" had a wide currency in discussions of economic affairs. Focusing on the American scene, this paper examines the rise and fall of the expression. Doing so, it probes the vexatious subject of moral responsibility for the market's booms and busts. The word "freak" only began to appear in English texts in the 16th century, meaning "sudden change of fortune." In the 19th century, "freak" also came to mean "unnatural." A "freak of fortune" was a sudden, extreme turn of wealth, a turn in either direction. By definition, the "freaks" came so fast they could not possibly be attributed to human striving -- they were freakish because they fell outside the scheme of effort and reward, or even risk and reward. Indeed, this was not about reward, or even retribution (divine or otherwise, as the "freaks of fortune" for some time had a fleeting religious connotation). Rather, seemingly, something else other than human agency was responsible for the freaks. But what? And what could or should be done about them? The paper focuses on the intersection of competing religious and scientific approaches to evaluating the "freaks of fortune" with competing political-economic strategies for containing, or perhaps eliminating them. But it also speculates as to why, by the mid-20th century, the term "freaks of fortune" had all but dropped from the language.