 Many members of the Populist Party took the Jewish ancestry of the Rothschilds as a negative and a wave of antisemitism emerged within the party.During the Panic, the national unemployment rate increased from 13.7% in 1895 to 14.5% in 1896, which persisted until 1898.A series of high-profile banker suicides took place in December 1896 and January 1897 in Chicago in the wake of the failure of the National Bank of Illinois.