Wall Street: America's Dream Palace

Icons of America

by Steve Fraser

Meet the imperious aristocrat, the wily confidence man, the Napoleonic hero, and the soulless sinner—iconic figures on the Street since the days of the Revolution

Wall Street: no other place on earth is so singularly identified with money and the power of money. And no other American institution has inspired such deep moral, cultural, and political ambivalence. Is the Street an unbreachable bulwark defending commercial order? Or is it a center of mad ambition?

This book recounts the colorful history of America’s love-hate relationship with Wall Street. Steve Fraser frames his fascinating analysis around the roles of four iconic Wall Street types—the aristocrat, the confidence man, the hero, and the immoralist—all recurring figures who yield surprising insights about how the nation has wrestled, and still wrestles, with fundamental questions of wealth and work, democracy and elitism, greed and salvation. Spanning the years from the first Wall Street panic of 1792 to the dot.com bubble-and-bust and Enron scandals of our own time, the book is full of stories and portraits of such larger-than-life figures as J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Michael Milken. Fraser considers the conflicting attitudes of ordinary Americans toward the Street and concludes with a brief rumination on the recent notion of Wall Street as a haven for Everyman.

Genres: History, Finance, Economics

208 pages, Hardcover

First published April 22, 2008

About the author

Steve Fraser is an author, an editor, and a historian whose many publications include the award-winning books Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor and Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. He is senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and cofounder of the American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books. He has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and the American Prospect.

Reviews

[Foppe · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ridiculously metaphore-ridden, pointless drivel. Appears to have been written so the author can ride the criticize-wallstreet wave and make a quick buck, but I couldn't find a single interesting thought in the book in the 50 pages I managed to read. The author enjoys 'being poetic' very much, but the metaphors and analogies, as well as the flowery descriptions meant to evoke emotion are sophomoric at best, and mostly just pedantic.
Some of the turns of phrase he starts off the book with:

The Street gives off an incandescent glow fired not simply by wealth but by wealth burnished with a patina of prudential sobriety and social preeminence.

Yet Wall Street also evokes a radically different set of symbolic associations as the center of mad ambition. Fevers, manias, and frenzies race up and down its pavement like hysterics in a lunatic asylum. Life on the Street cycles between irrational ecstasies and depressive panics.

In a culture preoccupied with questions of sin and salvation, Wall Street has served as a protean metaphor. At various times and places, it has stood in for the rich, big business, the “money power,” parvenu greed, financial piracy, high society on parade, moral and sexual prostitution, Jewish or Anglo-Saxon or capitalist conspiracy, Yankee parasitism, the American Century, the land of Aladdin, and a good deal more. Its truths have been multiple and self-contradictory: deviant and legitimate; heroic and villainous; aristocratic and plebian; rational and insane; anarchic and orderly; liberating and oppressive; muscular and unmanly; libidinal and inhibited; corporate and freebooting; patriotic and treasonous; indispensable and profligate.

And last and - sadly - worst:

During the imperial age of J. P. Morgan, opposition fixated on Wall Street’s frightening omnipotence; after the Great Crash of 1929, however, it was instead the Street’s omni-incompetence that made it seem a contemptible as well as a despised and illegitimate aristocratic elite. Indeed, the obloquy that blanketed Wall Street like a funeral shroud consigned it to cultural exile for a long generation, silencing its metaphorical resonance in the public imagination until the age of Reagan. If the aristocrat seemed a noxious import from the Old World, the confidence man was a native son, born and raised within the American grain. He frequented a different Wall Street, a zone of libidinal desire, a seductive underground peopled by

And the book goes on like this one vapid statement or metaphor after another, with no explanations offered anywhere, preferring vague references to 'the American mindset' or 'American cultural expectations' (such as the American Dream, I suppose).

[Tom Mackay · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very readable cultural history of Wall Street. It is succinct, especially compared to Fraser's Everyman a Speculator (180 pages before notes rather than 500+), but remains to be informative and fascinating. Prior to reading, I figured that Wall Street was going to be a condensed version of Everyman. While this is true to an extent, it is organised thematically rather than chronologically, and narrows the focus to the Street's four major characterisations - the aristocrat, the confidence man, the hero, and the immoralist. I found this structure to be original enough, and believe that it retains Fraser's analytic depth. Everyman remains the prevailing cultural history of Wall Street, but this one deserves to be read in conjunction. If you don't have the time to commit to about 700 pages of reading, then Wall Street will suffice as a brief introduction.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderfully written book that gets deep into much interesting history of "the Street" and it's place in U.S. culture. I loved the hideous details about Henry Ford's awful anti-Semitism and Ford's linking of Bolshevism to Jewish bankers, what a nutcase.

The only reason I didn't give this 5 stars is because it's too short. If Fraser writes a sequel soon I'll go back and give this another star. To quote the human eating plant in Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors, Feed Me More!

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the author’s perspective especially the way the book is broken down into the Aristocrat, Confidence Man, etc…. Although many of his stories were not knew to me I still found it enjoyable. The book will definitely shed light on today’s recent “economic downturn.” The stories undeniable show human nature, bigotry, and emotional exuberance. Or is there a sucker born every minute?

[sima · Rating 1 out of 5]

more rambling thoughts than historical narrative. worth a skim for interesting tidbits, but otherwise the description had more potential than the book actually realized.

[Ldrutman Drutman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lively and wonderfully-written essays about the many different and conflicting roles that Wall Street has played in the American imagination. A fun and quick read.

[Mehriban Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

An easy read book about the most influential street of the world. It has provided a brief summary to its rich, eventful and scandalous history. It has helped me to put things into a different perspective and view the history of Wall Street from a different angle.