Four days after the Williams House meeting at which Secretary Carlisle was present, the New York banks began to call in their loans with brutal vindictiveness.
We are not left to conjecture the effect of such a policy on the New York Exchange. By the 5th of May the strain had become intense. The New York Tribune of May 6, referring to the condition of the market, said: “The enormous losses of the last week, the utter demoralization of the buying power in the market and the practical paralysis of credit, promised a liquidation that, unless stayed, would have swept them all off their feet.”
On May 7 the same paper said: “The effort of the Administration to bring the South and West to a full realization of the inevitable consequences of compulsory purchases of silver bullion has brought distress and perhaps ruin to many innocent persons—but there is no reason to suppose that it will be relaxed.”
Within ten days from the time of the Williams House meeting between Cleveland’s Secretary of the Treasury and the National Bank Presidents the panic had spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and for forty days it continued with unabated fury. On the 9th of May several Western banks were forced to close their doors.
“There is no lack of pressure,” said the New York Tribune on the 22d of May.
On the 6th of June—six weeks after the Williams House meeting—the New York Sun, in its money article, said: “The Presidents of the New York National Banks think that the so-called “Object-Lesson” has been carried far enough. They see nothing to be gained by a further shrinkage of values and unsettling of credits.”
It is useless for me to detail the results of the panic.
From May 9 to 30, inclusive, sixty banks were forced to suspend, and fifty-eight of them were in the doomed section—the South, West and Northwest.
From the time of the Williams House meeting, April 27, to December 30, 1893, a period of eight months, more than fifteen thousand bankruptcies and suspensions had occurred. Over six hundred banks had been driven to the wall, and the loss to the country in round numbers was seven hundred and fifty millions of dollars.
But the National Bank Presidents had won their fight. They had carried out the program laid down in the Panic Bulletin, an extra session of Congress had been called and the purchasing clause repealed.