On the eve of the 1873 depression, many among the city's mercantile elite and its rising manufacturers had moved away from their universalist belief in a society without class divisions and from their competing and antipathetic particularist identities rooted in the distinct kinds of capital they owned. But it was only when the years of plenty came to a sudden halt in September 1873 that upper-class New Yorkers began to consolidate their class institutions and to see themselves and at times act as a class. In the next half decade, the city's economic elite formulated a collective identity whose main elements were a theory of (often racial) hierarchy, a recast relationship between state and economy, and ambivalence about democracy.

The end, in 1873, of the years of plenty set the scene for this reorientation and accelerated it by sharpening social conflicts and by furthering reorganization of businesses. The depression that began in September of that year was the most severe economic crisis the United States had experienced in its short history, a crisis that later historians would term the “Great Depression.” On September 8, 1873, the New York Warehouse and Security Company failed. Five days later, Kenyon, Cox & Co. went out of business, and on September 18, Jay Cooke & Co., the banking house which had symbolized the rise of financiers during the Civil War like no other, went bankrupt.