The tulip superhighway, page 2
They took to wearing clothes and hats monogrammed with the name of their favorite tulip purveyors. They put tulip decals on their milk pails and their horses' bumpers. Business and civic dreamers dreamed of creating a great globe-encircling flower network, which they called "the tulip superhighway," and in their speeches they were always yammering about how, as soon they got the gaudy bulbs in every home, school, store and bank, things were going to be eternally okey-dokey for the human race. Many intelligent people believed them!Pretty soon people throughout the land were spending most of their days and nights staring into tulips. And when they weren't gazing at them or fondling them or extolling their many virtues, they were reading and writing about them. They'd talk about them at breakfast and lunch and at parties until they nearly bored each other to tears on the subject. And during their rare moments of reflection they'd go for walks in the tulip fields. Of course the tulips were so precious they had to take special care on those meditative strolls -- generally they tiptoed.
So pathologically tulip-maniacal did the Dutch become that the entire population came to resemble the plump little tubers, turning into terminally cheerful, ruddy-cheeked butterballs of the type you see in paintings by Franz Hals or Rembrandt. Even the fashion designers got in on it by creating those flop-over-at-the-top boots styled to look like elongated leather flower pots. The whole scene was kind of eerie.
Lest you think I'm jerking you around, here, according to Charles Mackay's splendid 1840 book, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," is what one "investor" in 1636 during the Tulipomania (Mackay's term) paid for a single Viceroy tulip bulb: "Two lasts of wheat, four lasts of rye, four fat oxen, eight fat swine, twelve fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four tuns of butter, four tuns of beer, one thousand pounds of cheese, a complete bed, a suit of clothes and a silver drinking cup." And if you doubt Mackay, get a load of the prices of P. Cos, a florist in Haarlem at the time. For the "Wit en Rood Boode" bulb Mr. Cos was charging 2000 florins, while he was pulling down 2025 florins for the "Bruine purper" and a staggering 4200 florins for the regal "Viseroij."
As time passed, the price of tulip bulbs continued to climb and a few cunning souls got rich as kings. Finally, the things had to be priced not by the root but by the "perit," a unit of weight less than a grain. By 1636, you could speculate in tulip bulbs at the Amsterdam, Haarlem, Leyden, Alkmar and Hoorn stock exchanges. "At first," Mackay wrote, "confidence was at its height, and everybody gained... A golden bait hung temptingly out before the people, and one after the other, they rushed to the tulip marts, like flies around a honey-pot." People of every station were feverish to convert whatever they could into cash and put that cash into tulips. And as the price of tulips ascended, so did the price of everything else. "For some months," Mackay observed, "Holland seemed the very antechamber of Plutus."
You'll never guess what happened next.
Right. Some killjoy pointed out that the country was trading its farms, beer, livestock, windmills, silver, gold and you name it for a small bulb that had little intrinsic value. As 1636 drew to a close, the officials assigned to straighten out the mess decided that tulip bulb contracts would be honored at ten percent of their original value. That lasted about 20 minutes before the prices dropped off the edge of the Earth. Finally the government admitted it couldn't solve the problem. All it could offer its citizens was either its heartfelt sympathy or hearty congratulations -- depending on whether or not they'd been caught holding bulbs when the dark Dutch sky fell into the tulip fields.
