Every Man a Speculator : A History of Wall Street in American Life

Amazon.com
Wall Street is a window into the soul of America and a battleground for a clash of the nation's values. So writes Steve Fraser, author of the epic book Every Man a Speculator. Fraser sets out to chronicle not so much the history of the "Street" itself, but its place in American society. Since the founding of United States, he says, Wall Street has been the place where Americans have wrestled with their beliefs about work and play, democracy and capitalism, gambling and investment, equality and freedom, God and mammon, heroes and villains.

This is an ambitious, fascinating tale peopled with infamous confidence men, cold-hearted fraudsters, and ruined speculators, through whose eyes Fraser tells virtually an alternative history of America. The 721-page book starts with William Duer, the country's original market swindler, who manipulated government bonds after the Revolution and died in debtors' prison. Duer's frauds left a deep suspicion of Wall Street among many of America's Founding Fathers and the general public. That suspicion only intensified, Fraser writes, after the panic of 1873, which Mark Twain satirized in his novel The Gilded Age, and the 1929 crash, after which Wall Street came under public supervision for the first time. After World War II, the Street staged a remarkable turnaround, as its "wise men" became key figures behind the Marshall Plan, NATO, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Today, despite the dot-com crash and corporate-fraud scandals, Fraser writes that Wall Street has still managed to retain a positive image in America's new "shareholder society." But he concludes on a dark tone expressing concerns about "gathering thunderclouds of world economic disturbance." He warns that any future market crash could plunge the Street back into disgrace while also reviving the political extremism and fascism of the 1930s. Fraser's elegantly written book manages to be both entertaining and thought-provoking. --Alex Roslin

From Publishers Weekly
Tracking the changing—and often conflicting—public attitudes toward Wall Street through myriad forms of American popular culture, Fraser (Labor Will Rule) renders two centuries' worth of opinions, and shows how the country's orientation toward "the street that runs from a river to a graveyard" has affected the nation's politics, its fashion and its morality. Fraser uses a wealth of primary and secondary sources (from the Constitution of the New York Stock Exchange and Walt Whitman to Kevin Phillips's Wealth and Democracy) to detail the first hundred years, from the Buttonwood Tree trading of 1792 (where 24 men gathered near 68 Wall Street) to J.P. Morgan. His selections from the last quarter-century result in a narrow and not very coherent opinion piece on the tech boom; the strength of the book is the period from 1890 to 1980. Fraser draws on cartoons, popular songs, promotional literature as well as more conventional material to sketch hundreds of stories detailing the image of Wall Street as it rises and falls in the public imagination. Almost every page contains wildly mixed metaphors and other excesses of enthusiasm over clarity, but Fraser tells a monumental story with real energy: moral disapproval of usury, gambling and single-minded moneymaking fade as bankers come to embody the hope and threat of the future. Careful consideration of subtle changes in popular notions makes good sense of the transformation from Gilded Age to Information Age, and of the complex conflicts many people still feel. (Feb. 1) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Writer, historian, and editor Fraser tells the story of Wall Street from its birth, where once an actual wall was erected by Dutch colonists to stave off invasion by the British. From the beginning, public culture alternately reviled and embraced the financial goings-on in this district, its people seen as confidence men trading on the misery of others more often than as prodigious builders of wealth. Fraser wisely treads softly on the machinations of late to focus, for instance, on the Gilded Age, where those men known as the Four Horsemen--Cornelius Vanderbilt, Daniel Drew, Jay Gould, and James Fisk--became scoundrels of heroic proportion. Lest we forget, he reminds us that the panics and subsequent depressions of 1837, 1857, and 1873 were just as deeply felt as the Great Depression would be in the next century. This is one place where history repeats itself over and over: a major terrorist bomb attack occurred September 16, 1920, and the first corporate raiders were demonized as "white sharks" in the 1950s. Fraser gives a thorough analysis of this scandal-ridden menagerie as reflected in books, movies, and the political arena. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

David Nasaw, author of The Chief
"Should be widely read by scholars, students, and anyone interested in America’s ambivalent relationship with big business and big finance."

Sean Wilentz, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Princeton University
"Remarkable. . . . Fraser tells the tale in high style."

Walter A. McDougall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Freedom Just Around the Corner
"Big, boisterous, biting, and brilliant. . . . both page-turner and scholarly tour de force."

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University
"Written with verve and passion. . . . offers a remarkable array of insights into the history of American capitalism."

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Comprehensive, considered, and literate: a real accomplishment."

Booklist (starred review)
"Fraser gives a thorough analysis of this scandal-ridden menagerie as reflected in books, movies, and the political arena."

Book Description

For more than two hundred years, Americans have enjoyed a love-hate relationship with Wall Street. Long an object of suspicion and fear, it eventually came to be seen as a more inviting place, an open road to wealth and freedom. Peeling away the layers of myth surrounding this fabled street, Steve Fraser shows that the remarkable transformation of Wall Street as a cultural icon -- its odyssey from perdition to salvation, from darkness into light -- is a story that goes to the heart of the American character.

Long before we became a shareholder nation, back when only a minuscule part of the country's population invested, Wall Street had already provoked America's collective imagination. From the days when Alexander Hamilton was forced to confess his marital infidelities in order to defend his vision of the Republic's financial future, to Gordon Gekko's mantra "Greed is good" in the movie Wall Street, Americans have always been preoccupied with the virtues and sins of the stock market.

Indeed, Wall Street is the place where we have constantly returned to wrestle with our ancestral attitudes about work and play, equality and wealth, God and mammon, heroes and villains, national purpose and economic well-being. Beginning in the Revolutionary era, Every Man a Speculator reveals the extraordinary power of Wall Street and its impact on our democracy; the moral dilemma posed for a society committed to the work ethic yet lured by the promise of instant wealth; and the chronic tension between our native egalitarianism and the forces of social hierarchy unleashed by the Street. In doing so, it spans the ages, from Captain Kidd's sojourn on the Street through the Civil War and Great Depression to the present day, when power brokers stalk the canyons of lower Manhattan speculating on the fate of whole nations.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Beginning in the Revolutionary era, Every Man a Speculator reveals the extraordinary power of Wall Street and its impact on our democracy; the moral dilemma posed for a society committed to the work ethic yet lured by the promise of instant wealth; and the chronic tension between our native egalitarianism and the forces of social hierarchy unleashed by the Street. In doing so, it spans the ages, from Captain Kidd's sojourn on the Street through the Civil War and Great Depression to the present day, when power brokers stalk the canyons of lower Manhattan speculating on the fate of whole nations.

FROM THE CRITICS

Sir Harold Evans - The New York Times

This is not so much a financial as a cultural history. Fraser's ambition is to examine ''how Wall Street has entered into the lives of generations long passed and those alive today . . . the way the character of America has changed.'' He recognizes the dubiousness of fixing a unitary character on a polymorphous people, but argues that if you distill all the histories, all the satiric cartoons, the brimstone sermons, the exposes, the Horatio Alger storybooks -- all the Wall Streets of the mind -- Wall Street becomes ''a window into the souls of Americans.''

Publishers Weekly

Tracking the changing-and often conflicting-public attitudes toward Wall Street through myriad forms of American popular culture, Fraser (Labor Will Rule) renders two centuries' worth of opinions, and shows how the country's orientation toward "the street that runs from a river to a graveyard" has affected the nation's politics, its fashion and its morality. Fraser uses a wealth of primary and secondary sources (from the Constitution of the New York Stock Exchange and Walt Whitman to Kevin Phillips's Wealth and Democracy) to detail the first hundred years, from the Buttonwood Tree trading of 1792 (where 24 men gathered near 68 Wall Street) to J.P. Morgan. His selections from the last quarter-century result in a narrow and not very coherent opinion piece on the tech boom; the strength of the book is the period from 1890 to 1980. Fraser draws on cartoons, popular songs, promotional literature as well as more conventional material to sketch hundreds of stories detailing the image of Wall Street as it rises and falls in the public imagination. Almost every page contains wildly mixed metaphors and other excesses of enthusiasm over clarity, but Fraser tells a monumental story with real energy: moral disapproval of usury, gambling and single-minded moneymaking fade as bankers come to embody the hope and threat of the future. Careful consideration of subtle changes in popular notions makes good sense of the transformation from Gilded Age to Information Age, and of the complex conflicts many people still feel. (Feb. 1) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Writer, historian, and book editor Fraser (The Bell Curve Wars) presents a monumental cultural history of speculation in the United States as played out on the stages of Wall Street. Informing this rich chronicle are authentic newspaper reports, magazine pieces, letters, movies, novels, plays, transcripts, and other eyewitness accounts dating from Dutch Colonial times to the present. Fraser's painstaking research reveals much about the major players of Wall Street, from Cornelius Vanderbilt to Michael Milken while shedding light on minor characters (e.g., Hetty Green, a.k.a., "The Witch of Wall Street") and historical events like the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression. Given how speculative the early Colonists were, the invention of Wall Street was certainly no accident; the author suggests its growth paralleled that of America itself with a similar "manifest destiny." This scholarly and entertaining encyclopedic history documents an important part of U.S. business history, which makes it an essential purchase for all libraries.-Richard Drezen, Washington Post/New York City Bureau Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews