Wall Street

Wall
yale university press new haven & london
Street
America’s

Dream Palace

Steve Fraser
 Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this
book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip

Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.

Copyright © 2008 by Steve Fraser.

All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fraser, Steve, 1945–
Wall Street : America’s dream palace / Steve Fraser.
p. cm.—(Icons of America series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-11755-4 (alk. paper)
1. Capitalists and financiers—United States—Biography. 2. Wall Street
(New York, N.Y.)—History. I. Title.
HG172.A2F72 2008
332.64⬘273—dc22 2007035453

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The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
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Illustration credits: p. viii: New York Stock Exchange © 2007 Jupiterimages

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 Contents

Introduction 1

one
The Aristocrat 11

two
The Confidence Man 55

three
The Hero 97

four
The Immoralist 135

Epilogue 175
Notes 181
Acknowledgments 193
Index 195
Image not available
 Introduction

It seems like a dream to me.

daniel drew

Wall Street. No other place on earth is so singularly identified

with money and the power of money. Wall Street is not a street;
it is “the Street.” To invoke its name is to conjure up capitalism
in all its imperial grandeur. It stands as an unbreachable bul-
wark defending a commercial order that began when the nation
was born. The Street gives off an incandescent glow fired not
simply by wealth but by wealth burnished with a patina of pru-
dential sobriety and social preeminence. Deliberation and cau-
tion mark its weighty proceedings. Inside its monumental piles
of granite, steel, and glass, the equations of economic fitness are
calculated with mathematical rigor. Like its very name—the street
of streets—it exudes a certain quintessential purity. It hovers
above and at some remove from the messiness of the workaday
world, distilling its numerical truth, compelling obedience to a

1
 Introduction

higher rationality. Admired or reviled, Wall Street is the tower-

ing symbol of a cool, impregnable power.
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. This is the land of financial “wilding.” Here one
indulges all dreams. Here one gambles recklessly on the future.
No one is denied entrance to this democracy of the greedy. No one
need kowtow to the established order. Irreverence is revered. The
world is created anew each day. Wall Street is a carnival, the world
turned upside down, where today’s confidence man is tomorrow’s
financial seer, a boulevard of endless opportunity and endemic dis-
aster. A hot zone of credulous fools and knowing gamesmen, the
Street defies the very orderliness, discipline, and self-abnegating
labor of the capitalism it presumably embodies and symbolizes. It
rises up in the imagination as an urban demimonde, notorious
for its facile swindlers and lupine parasites, where the illicit dream
of effortless wealth corrupts and disorders all it touches.
Lodged deep within our collective psyche these contending
incongruent images of Wall Street illuminate its paradoxical his-
tory in American culture, suggesting that Main Street and Wall
Street have found themselves in a strange love-hate codepen-
dency for a very long time.
In a culture preoccupied with questions of sin and salvation,
Wall Street has served as a protean metaphor. At various times

2
 Introduction

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 capital-
ist conspiracy, Yankee parasitism, the American Century, the
land of Aladdin, and a good deal more. Its truths have been mul-
tiple 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. A vital part of our na-
tional iconography, Wall Street has drawn its energy from the
antipodes of our moral, social, and intellectual obsessions.
So it is that through the years Wall Street has inspired dreams
and nightmares deep inside American culture, leaving its imprint
on the lives of ordinary as well some extraordinary people. These
private reveries and collective fantasies tell us something funda-
mental about the Street and its intensely charged role in the na-
tional saga. And they do more than that: they tell us something
about the mind of Wall Street, but also something about the Wall
Streets of the American mind.
Four apparitions especially have captured the popular imagina-
tion: the aristocrat, the confidence man, the hero, and the immoral-
ist. These images, while hardly exhausting Wall Street’s metaphor-
ical mother lode, have proven the most durable and capacious. As
an ensemble they encompass the whole history of the Street, begin-
ning with the American Revolution and running through our own

3
 Introduction

vexed relationship with “the Street of dreams” at the turn of the

new millennium. Wall Street takes a look at these four faces of Wall
Street: where they came from, how they have changed along with
the country, and why they have proved so enduring.
Wall Street has long nourished its reputation as a hothouse of
aristocratic, un-American hauteur. Antipathy toward aristocracy
was always a primal element of the national credo. But if ever there
was a natural habitat for the nurturing of such an alien species,
Wall Street seemed to many to be that place. Aristocratic associa-
tions shadowed the Street from the beginning. Condemned first
by Thomas Jefferson as counterrevolutionary “tories,” denizens of
the Street were still being ostracized by FDR a century and half
later as “economic royalists.” During the imperial age of J. P. Mor-
gan, 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 li-
bidinal desire, a seductive underground peopled by the “penniless
plutocrat” and the “dream millionaire.” Flourishing first during
the Jacksonian era, confidence men shared the “dream” of instant

4
 Introduction

wealth with their credulous victims. This was Abraham Lincoln’s

land of democratic opportunity minus all the hard work, the par-
simony, the slow, laborious rise through the ranks of dependent
labor into the liberated air of propertied independence. Here de-
sires and forms of behavior that otherwise violated the norms of
respectable middle-class morality were licensed, even celebrated.
Wall Street confidence men thrived especially whenever the econ-
omy boomed, gulling low and high alike: former President Grant
in the 1880s; anonymous masses following after Charles Ponzi
during the Roaring Twenties; addictive day-traders afloat on the
dot.com bubble of the 1990s. The confidence man manipulated
the covetous impulses of his marks, encouraging an irreverent dis-
regard for the maxims of self-renunciatory work and provision for
the future. He offered a dream capitalism, weightless, without the
gravity of production to hold it down. In those innocent antebel-
lum years unlettered youths from small towns and farms in the
American hinterland, relying on their own wits, audacity, and rub-
bery ethics, could imagine standing toe to toe with baronial finan-
ciers and coming out on top. So too more than century later, during
the age of what one writer called “the dot.con,” men from nowhere,
without social pedigrees or Ivy League educations, would dream of
unhorsing Wall Street’s “white shoe” aristocrats, along the way
gulling a whole nation to buy into their improbable fantasies.
Sometimes these confidence men underwent a marvelous trans-
formation and became the colossi they adulated, emerging as an-
other Wall Street icon, the hero. The names of Cornelius Van-

5
 Introduction

derbilt (“the Commodore”), “Jubilee Jim” (also known as “the

Admiral”) Fisk, and Jay (“the Mephistopheles of Wall Street”)
Gould are legendary, the first generation of Wall Street conquis-
tadors. Often from unprepossessing backgrounds, unsavory—
shady even—they soon entered the national consciousness as
Napoleonic heroes, in part because these men from nowhere
seemed to affirm the most grandiose versions of the American
dream. Others would follow. Some, like J. P. Morgan, hailed from
the blue-blooded ranks of America’s upper class. No matter what
their origins they shared a striking profile. The Wall Street hero
was an empire builder: a conqueror of Mother Nature, of the
marketplace, of other men, of himself. He lived his life as an on-
going encounter with chance, the hot breath of disaster at his
back. These titans never blinked. They stayed cool when lesser
men panicked. When the situation demanded it they could be in-
temperate, irreverent, and implacable. The Wall Street hero em-
bodied a distinctive style of masculine prowess. The dramaturgy
of the Street, beginning with the founding generation of “robber
barons,” has always borrowed heavily from languages of warrior
cultures: cowboy colloquialisms as well as Greek and medieval
mythology. Gunslingers and mighty hunters, titans and gorgons,
barons and white knights have stalked Wall Street’s imaginary
canyons from the prehensile days of Fisk and Vanderbilt to the
cybernetic sleekness of Michael Milken, inhabiting a world
brimming over with animal virility and vitality.
Even the Wall Street hero, however—not to mention the aris-

6
 Introduction

tocrat and the confidence man—has aroused the deepest popular

suspicions. Americans were appalled by the same men they ad-
mired. Wall Street seemed to breed sinners, moral as well as so-
cial decadents, as it filled up with people who accumulated wealth
without effort. For a society profoundly, if sometimes also sanc-
timoniously, committed to the work ethic and the dignity of
labor, this was worrying evidence of a debilitating canker eating
away at the moral fiber of the republic. After all, what Wall Street
did struck most Americans as a mysterious (and secretive and
dangerous) form of gambling, itself widely treated as a fatal sin
by nineteenth-century American Protestantism. Worse than
that, the Street ran a crooked game, which favored a privileged
circle of insiders. And worse still, Wall Street amassed its fabu-
lous riches like a parasite, living off the fruits of the honest labor
of impoverished farmers, sweated industrial workers, and self-
sacrificing, frugal entrepreneurs. The Wall Street sinner occupied
a kind of moral gulag, a place where cupidity, which otherwise
ran rampant in a society given over to material acquisitiveness,
could be isolated, condemned, and exiled to psychological safety.
The Wall Street operator, given over to delusional speculation
and addictive gambling, disdainful of work, and, if rich enough,
parading his dandified manners in absurdly pretentious getups at
gilded soirees, was a perfect scapegoat for a culture steeped in
Protestant guilt yet overrun with material cravings. The visage
of the Wall Street immoralist darkened the horizon of the Gilded
Age, still haunted the American imagination a half century later

7
 Introduction

during the Great Depression, and reappeared as Gordon Gekko,

the notorious cinematic invoker of “Greed is good.”
All these Wall Street figures of the American mind—the preten-
tious aristocrat, the wily confidence man, the imperial hero, the
soulless sinner—lived at some social as well as psychic remove from
the people. By and large, until recently Wall Street was a rather ex-
clusive domain, a realm millions gazed at in wonderment or revul-
sion but rarely imagined as their own. Much has changed during
our own time. The “democratizing” of the Street happened with
lightning speed during the past half century. Suddenly Everyman
was invited to feel at home there. The triumph of free-market think-
ing prepared the way. So too did the “Wall Street ’R’ Us” mentality
first assiduously cultivated back in the 1950s by “bullish on Amer-
ica” Charles Merrill, the founder of Merrill Lynch. The deindustri-
alization of America during the last quarter of the twentieth cen-
tury diminished the cultural gravity of “productive labor,” once a
hallowed element of the national credo. For great numbers of ordi-
nary people—at least until the dot.com bubble burst—the market
had become a “living entity—ticking away at the breakfast table, at
the gym, at the office.” City streets lit up like a twenty-four-hour-
a-day theater of numbers, tracking the rhythms of the global stock
market on billboards, eye-level flat screens, and rotating digital
cryptographs: a universal spectacle and nonstop economic EKG.
Wall Street’s recent ascension in the popular mind suggests,
among other things, that the old taboos have withered—the ones
that sanctioned hard work as a covenant with God and commu-

8
 Introduction

nity. This happened once before during the Jazz Age, when a
zanily inflated stock market, together with bootleg gin and the
flapper, signaled the brief advent of a culture of sensual release.
The Great Depression put a crushing stop to that. Yet those illicit,
subterranean desires were always one secret of Wall Street’s allure.
When Wall Street rose up again during the Reagan era, they flour-
ished uninhibited. But so too did all the old mythic images of the
Street. Today’s crony capitalists can’t help but remind us of those
Gilded Age financial aristocrats whose power was so great it
threatened to undermine the basic institutions of democratic gov-
ernment. Enron and the cascade of financial scandals that followed
in its wake recall with a shudder an age-old fear of the confidence
man. During his halcyon days Michael Milken seemed to perform
the same economic heroics that made J. P. Morgan into an ad-
mired colossus. And the unabashed greediness of Carl Icahn made
it clear that the Wall Street immoralist was alive and well.
Each of the Street’s four faces shares features with his mythic
brethren: the aristocrat is a sinner, the sinner a confidence man, the
hero is a man of the people but also an elitist. For just this reason,
Wall Street stands at the metaphorical heart of American capital-
ism. As we enter America’s Dream Palace, then, we are confronted
by an enigma: How has it been possible for the Street to absorb the
honorific codes and metaphors of the warrior culture while living
under the ignoble sign of the parasite? How can it be that the same
avenue has come to stand for elite economic and political domina-
tion even as it functions as a dreamscape of plebian ambition?

9
Image not available
 one

The Aristocrat

William Duer was running for his life. An enraged mob was
chasing him through the streets of New York. If they caught up
with him they would beat him to a pulp . . . or worse. Luckily for
Duer the sheriff got there first. While his pursuers cried, “We
will have Mr. Duer, he has gotten our money,” he was hauled off
to jail, where he would spend his few remaining years. Once a
man of distinction and wealth, William Duer was now ruined,
left to contemplate what might have been.1
The year was 1792, and Wall Street had just experienced its
first crash, for which William Duer and a secret circle of New
York grandees were mainly to blame. They had conspired to spec-
ulate on the bonds just issued by the newly created federal gov-
ernment. Soon they found themselves deeply overcommitted and
forced to liquidate their holdings, causing the fledgling market

11
 The Aristocrat

to collapse and its manipulators to flee—in Duer’s case to debtors’

prison; for the more fortunate among them to safer havens out of
state. Even though there was no formal or even informal stock
exchange in those days; even though the local economy went
about its business largely unaffected by the mysterious machina-
tions of financiers, there were still plenty of ordinary people who
suffered. Real estate prices collapsed, credit dried up, house build-
ing stopped. The general distress spread from businessmen to
“shopkeepers, Widows, orphans, Butchers, Cartmen, Gardeners,
market women and even the noted Bawd, Mrs. McCarty.”2
What made Mrs. McCarty and her neighbors irate was some-
thing more than their own losses, grievous as these might be. They
and many of their fellow citizens hated Duer and his confederates
not only for what they’d done but for who they were. The Revolu-
tion had just ended, and tempers had barely cooled. Suspicions
and animosities directed against covert monarchists and Tory aris-
tocrats still electrified the political atmosphere. And Wall Street’s
first inside traders seemed to match that ignominious profile.
After all, William Duer was a merchant prince. He lived in
manorial splendor on a Hudson River estate, catered to by liver-
ied servants—this at a moment when dressing the help in livery
was considered a deliberate provocation aimed at the democratic
sentiments of American patriots. A onetime officer in the British
army, educated at Eton, Duer was the offspring of a wealthy
West Indian planter. He had migrated to colonial New York in
hope of enhancing his fortune. Once there he had married into

12
 The Aristocrat

the highest echelons of colonial society. His wife, “Lady Kitty,”

was the second daughter of General William Alexander, who laid
claim to a Scottish earldom. Lady Kitty’s grandfather was Philip
Livingston, a prominent member of New York’s most distin-
guished family dynasty. Duer’s closest friends and associates in-
cluded other great dynastic clans of old Dutch New York: the
Macombs and the Roosevelts, among others. His commercial in-
terests extended from powder-, saw-, and gristmills to distilleries
and maritime supplies.
While Duer had supported the Revolution (indeed, he was a
member of the Continental Congress and a signatory of the Ar-
ticles of Confederation), he was widely suspected of profiteering
at its expense. He sold, at inflated prices, precious supplies of
timber and planks for barracks and ships to Washington’s des-
perate army of independence. He provisioned the Continental
Army with horses, ammunition, cattle, and feed but was sus-
pected of hoarding supplies of rum and blankets, and even of
engaging in sub-rosa trading with the enemy. After the Revolu-
tion, Duer escalated his pursuit of social elevation and material
enrichment, a quest that culminated in his fateful attempt to cor-
ner the market in government securities. And here he was count-
ing on a special bit of good fortune: he was a confidant of the na-
tion’s first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton.3
Hamilton was a Revolutionary War hero and a founding fa-
ther. But by the 1790s, he was also the man most widely sus-
pected of harboring elitist sentiments dangerous to the demo-

13
 The Aristocrat

cratic aspirations of the new nation. During the Constitutional

debates he had argued on behalf of a lifetime presidency and
imagined the Senate as a kind of House of Lords. In his capacity
as President George Washington’s secretary of the treasury, he
had devised a plan for funding the national debt that had accu-
mulated during the war and in the years afterward. The federal
government would sell its own bonds to make good on the nearly
worthless securities issued by the states and the Continental Con-
gress during the Revolution. Hamilton assumed that the pur-
chasers of these new securities would be merchants, bankers, and
others of substantial means. By acquiring these bonds they would
help establish the creditworthiness of the new nation. In turn, that
would, Hamilton hypothesized, attract capital from home and
abroad which would jump-start the commercial and industrial
development of what was, after all, an underdeveloped country.
Hamilton was candid in his view that the new government
ought to rely on men of social eminence and wealth. Their re-
sources and public-mindedness made them uniquely prepared to
lead the nation, or so he thought. They would constitute a van-
guard whose financial wherewithal and disinterested commitment
to the nation’s welfare would help realize his vision of America’s
one day joining the ranks of the world’s great powers. Hamilton
himself came from inauspicious social beginnings, a West Indian
of illegitimate birth. But he felt an affinity for New York’s patri-
cians, having married Elizabeth Schuyler, the daughter of Gen-
eral Philip Schuyler, war hero and patriarch of a venerable

14
 The Aristocrat

Knickerbocker clan, one of the Hudson River patroons. Hamilton

trusted these circles implicitly, convinced of their rectitude and
devotion to the country’s future fame and glory. He was infatuated
with caste and riches. The problem was that people like Duer
turned out to be less public-spirited than Hamilton supposed.4
Duer’s ties to the Schuyler clan afforded him access to Hamil-
ton, who appointed him an assistant secretary of the treasury.
Duer and his “6 percent club” of fellow speculators hoped for
inside information on the government’s pricing of its new securi-
ties in order to get a jump on the market. Hamilton, whose in-
tegrity was irreproachable, rebuffed Duer and warned him against
gambling on the national debt. Duer, ignoring him, crashed and
burned, as would many a Wall Street inside trader over the next
two centuries. Much of Duer’s estate was liquidated at sheriff’s
sale. Lady Kitty lived out her life in severely straitened circum-
stances, dwelling at the edge of fashionable society and compelled
to take in genteel boarders. Moreover, as the struggle between
the followers of Hamilton and Jefferson over the fate of the
American Revolution grew ever nastier during the 1790s, Ham-
ilton’s rumored connection to the Duer plot kept resurfacing.5
Indeed, in 1797 Hamilton felt compelled to publicly acknowl-
edge an adulterous affair with the wife of a Duer accomplice while
passionately denying that he had ever conspired to enrich himself
or others at the nation’s expense. He denounced his “Jacobin”
enemies—Jefferson and James Madison especially—accusing
them of pandering to the prejudices of the mob and slandering

15
 The Aristocrat

his reputation in order to subvert his efforts to turn America into

a great commercial republic. And he was not entirely wrong.6
Jefferson, Madison, and other leading Democratic-Republicans
had known of the treasury secretary’s sexual transgressions for
years but never seriously suspected him of public corruption. How-
ever, they were vehemently opposed to Hamilton’s financial and
mercantile plans: to his proposals to create a national debt, estab-
lish a national bank, and subsidize manufacturing in the infant na-
tion. Jefferson and his allies were not against trade. But they envi-
sioned an agrarian republic, not a commercial one, made up of
independent middling farmers trading with Europe only for those
necessities not produced at home. In this way the new nation
would be immunized against the infection of urban luxury and
squalor, the war of class against class, and the moral rot that they
felt characterized the Old World. Those mysterious arteries of
finance, in particular, were the portals through which this politi-
cal disease could most easily penetrate the healthy social organism.
Nor was the danger strictly economic or moral. Hamilton’s
“Jacobin” enemies were not merely opposed to his plans; they saw
them as part of a malevolent conspiracy to build up a “moneyed
aristocracy” allied to the government which would inevitably
undermine the democratic accomplishments of the Revolution.
Duer was viewed as a felonious member of this anti-republican
“aristocratic faction.” In a word, Hamilton’s alleged connection
to his Wall Street confreres embodied, in miniature, the Tory
Counterrevolution.

16
 The Aristocrat

As the Democratic-Republicans saw it, this was a plot to es-

tablish a financial aristocracy like the one ensconced in England.
Looking across the ocean they could easily see how an incestuous
relationship between the money men and the central govern-
ment (in England, the monarchy; in America, presumably, the
executive branch) threatened to make the government the exclu-
sive preserve of the privileged. The great executive powers of
France and Great Britain, so the anti-monarchists believed, floated
on a vast sea of public debt. That funded debt had in turn engen-
dered big banking institutions, well-oiled markets for money,
new forms of investment, and a whole new class that traded in
public securities. An alliance between this moneyed class and the
Crown had overawed independent sources of political authority.
According to Jefferson the real sin in Hamilton’s design was that
it would “prepare the way for a change from the present republi-
can form of government to that of a monarchy of which the En-
glish constitution is to be the model.” This was perhaps the in-
evitable fate of the Old World, but it was precisely to avoid this
fate in the New that people had fought and died. Wall Street thus
found itself on the front lines of a war between aristocracy and
democracy. With stakes that high, exploiting the enemy’s sexual
peccadilloes seemed an excusable political tactic.7
Partisans of Jefferson tirelessly spread the alarm. All through
the 1790s, publicists, pamphleteers, and politicians warned about
bankers and speculators fattening on the public credit. Even
President Washington, who in the end favored Hamilton’s strat-

17
 The Aristocrat

egy, worried, and he queried the treasury secretary: Would not the
new capital ultimately pose a threat to republican government by
“a corrupt squadron of paper dealers”? Hamilton’s plan was a bo-
nanza for such people, an unholy alliance of aristocracy and money.
These speculators had bought up the securities issued by the states
and the Continental Congress at rock-bottom prices from their
original holders: desperate veterans, farmers, and other ordinary
folk. Under Hamilton’s scheme these rich bond buyers could
now redeem their once worthless paper at its full face value.8
War was waged in churches and by sensationalist pamphlet-
eers; in novels, poems, and newspaper doggerel; on the stage in
theatrical satires; and in furious political jeremiads. In his satiric
“Chronology of Facts” in the National Gazette, Philip Freneau
pronounced 1791 the “Reign of the Speculators.” He invented a
mock plan for the creation of an American aristocracy whose
meticulously graded and serried ranks mirrored rising levels of
speculative practice from “the lower order of the Leech” to
the middling “Their Huckstership” on to the sublime “Order of
the Scrip.” Jefferson inveighed against the sleaziness and injustice
practiced by those who bought up worthless “continentals”:
“Speculators had made a trade of cozening them from their hold-
ers. . . . Couriers and relay horses by land, and swift sailing pilot
boats by sea, were flying in all directions,” buying up paper secu-
rities so that “immense sums were thus filched from the poor and
ignorant.” Madison worried that “the stock-jobbers will become
the praetorian band of the Government, at once its tool and its

18
 The Aristocrat

tyrant; bribed by its largesse, and overawing it by clamorous com-

binations.” John Adams, who often allied himself with Hamilton
and shared with the treasury secretary a conservative conviction
about the inevitability of social class distinctions, nonetheless
observed that “paper wealth has been the source of aristocracy in
this country, as well as landed wealth, with a vengeance.”9
When Duer’s speculative bubble burst popular revulsion was
palpable. Speculators became derisively known as “Hamilton’s
Rangers” and “Paper Hunters.” Newssheets filled with talk of
“scriptomania,” “scripponomy,” and “scriptophobia.” A Phila-
delphian, writing to his local newspaper, anguished over his efforts
to find safe passage through the factional battlefield. Although
loath to join the local Jeffersonian Democratic Society, he still
wanted to reassure his neighbors that he was certainly “no tory,
no British agent, no speculator.” Madison summed up the moral
and political outrage: “There must be something wrong, radically
and morally and politically wrong, in a system which transfers
the reward from those who paid the most valuable of all consid-
erations, to those who scarcely paid any consideration at all.”10
There is a grand irony at the core of this political dramaturgy,
an irony that would infuse American attitudes about Wall Street
for generations to come. Both sides of this fateful confrontation
were right, yet both chased after phantoms. Hamilton had envi-
sioned enlightened men investing for the public good. Jefferson
saw “sharpers” and “gambling scoundrels.” Both turned out to
be correct, as the sad career of William Duer, an enlightened

19
 The Aristocrat

scoundrel if ever there was one, exemplified. But both founding

fathers were at the same time wrong as they prophesied a final
conflict between enemies that were more imaginary than real.
Hamilton was hardly a feudal aristocrat. Nor did he harbor se-
rious thoughts of resurrecting a titled aristocracy in the New
World. He did, however, entertain real anxieties about “moboc-
racy” and genuinely feared the leveling instincts of the “Jacobin”
democracy, which seemed to him ready to countenance the
wholesale repudiation of lawful contractual obligations. But the
respectable freeholders of town and country were hardly revolu-
tionary levelers. There were no bloodthirsty sansculottes prepar-
ing to erect guillotines; nor were farmers, however angry about
government excise taxes and other matters—as Shays’s Rebellion
suggested—ready to burn down the manorial estates of their
feudal overlords in some version of an American jacquerie. More-
over, alongside this fanciful specter Hamilton cultivated a parallel
consoling delusion that men like Duer (if not Duer himself )
were capable of a kind of disinterested behavior that is some-
times associated with an idealized version of the virtuous aristo-
crat. Funding the national debt would help nurture a national
ruling class, a regime of “the wise, the rich, and the good.” He
was convinced that “those who are most commonly creditors of
the nation, are generally speaking, enlightened men.” He said of
the rich and well born: “Their vices are probably more favorable
to the prosperity of the State than those of the indigent and par-
take less of moral depravity.” But it turned out, to Hamilton’s

20
 The Aristocrat

chagrin, that modern commercial society—the kind of society

he championed for America—bred men of commerce whose
commitment to public service often took a distant back seat to
the pursuit of the main chance. That was Hamilton’s dilemma,
one William Duer exemplified.11
So too, the Jeffersonian democrats attacked what they thought
of as an aristocracy. But it turned out to be a fledgling plutocracy.
True enough, this capitalist-minded untitled elite would now and
again try to assume the trappings of the pedigreed aristocracy, if
only to beef up its presumptive right to rule and its own social
self-confidence. In New York, the Federalist followers of Hamil-
ton formed the Knights of the Dagger to assault Democratic-
Republicans, dispersing their public rallies and tearing down their
Liberty Poles. William Duer’s son was one such Knight. Dress-
ing like aristocrats, decorating their homes, horses, and carriages
with heraldic crests, cultivating the accents of the British upper
class, hosting fancy-dress balls and fetes, and otherwise aping the
customs and mores of European gentility were very much in vogue
among the Federalists of Hamilton’s day, as they would be again,
more emphatically, during the Gilded Age at the turn of the
twentieth century. John Pintard, one of Duer’s co-conspirators
who only escaped debtors’ prison by fleeing New York, was at the
same time a man of distinctive cultural refinement, a founder of
the New-York Historical Society, an author of works on medi-
cine and topography, and an expert on Indian cultures. (He later
returned to New York and resumed a lucrative career on the

21
 The Aristocrat

Street.) Without question many a Federalist openly admired the

English constitution, especially the way it institutionalized so-
cial hierarchy. Federalists scarcely concealed their hopes—their
expectations, actually—that a similarly deferential political order
would install itself in America and that they would preside over
it. Secretary of State John Jay, Hamilton’s good friend and politi-
cal ally, candidly asserted that “those who own the country ought
to govern it.”12
In the end, however, William Duer’s insatiable acquisitiveness
gave the game away. He and his cohorts viewed the new nation as
an incomparable opportunity to indulge in the pursuit of happi-
ness. For them, as for so many of their fellow citizens, this meant
the pursuit of property. But it was precisely that fellowship of
desire uniting the aristocrat with the commoner that comprised
the Jeffersonian side of the dilemma. Smallholding farmers, arti-
sans, and shopkeepers, the living body of the Jeffersonian anti-
aristocratic persuasion, were themselves wholly invested in the
same quest for propertied independence, albeit on a more mod-
est scale. Time and again in the years that followed, struggling
farmers, anti-monopoly small businessmen, upstart entrepreneurs
in search of start-up capital, railroad workers, coal miners, arti-
sans, and laborers suffering under industrial tyranny would single
out Wall Street as their archenemy. Just as commonly, however,
they would depict those rapacious financiers as if they were not
so much a capitalist plutocracy as a blue-blooded aristocracy, an
alien species, running against the American grain.

22
 The Aristocrat

This conflation of capitalist with aristocrat would define one

iconic image of Wall Street for a century and more. It reflected
on the one hand a traditional strain in American political culture
that began with the Revolution. It was as well an evasion, also
typically American: a way to avoid condemning capitalism out-
right (when in fact so many shared a dream of some future demo-
cratic version of capitalism) while still venting enormous rage at
the inequalities and exploitation that trailed in the wake of capi-
talist development. Duer’s panic and the ferocious name-calling
between Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans
signaled an underlying ambivalence about the import of an incip-
ient commercial civilization. Wall Street seemed to epitomize that
ambivalence. Was it pimping for monarchy or incubating the
glorious birth of a rich and powerful republic? Was it a cockpit of
counterrevolution or a modern engine of revolutionary progress?
Moreover, this ambivalence was aided and abetted by the ex-
travagant aristocratic arrogance and supercilious playacting of
the country’s burgeoning class of financial-industrial nouveaux
riches. Never would this melding of aristocrat and plutocrat
leave a more indelible imprint on Wall Street than during the
heyday of America’s Industrial Revolution, its Gilded Age.

Fear of counterrevolution shadowed American politics for well

over a century. This may strike us as surprising. Nowadays we
are accustomed to thinking about the national saga as the unin-

23
 The Aristocrat

terrupted procession of democracy, first into the ranks of white

males and then to former slaves, women, minorities, and others
once excluded from its privileges. But millions of citizens con-
fronted by the earth-shattering economic and social turmoil of
America’s Industrial Revolution were filled with foreboding
about the rise of an oligarchy so powerful it seemed bent on sub-
verting and seizing control of all the institutions of democratic
government. No one doubted that the conspiracy had its head-
quarters on Wall Street. After all, by the late nineteenth century
the Street had invaded all the main arteries of the economy, its
railroads and new industrial corporations as well as the lines of
credit that kept American farmers in business.
Except for Lincoln’s victory in 1860, no presidential election
of the nineteenth century aroused as much passion or the same
ominous sense that the country’s fate hung in the balance as
did the confrontation between William Jennings Bryan and
William H. McKinley in 1896. When the “Boy Orator of the
Platte” memorably vowed that he and the Democratic Party
would not allow mankind to be crucified on a cross of gold, Wall
Street shuddered. Every dispossessed farmer and every small
businessman sinking beneath a sea of debt knew instinctively just
who and what Bryan was referring to. For two decades and more
the Street had earned the enmity of all those who sought eco-
nomic salvation through some form of debt relief. Mainly they
demanded the untethering of the nation from the gold standard
and proposed to inflate the currency by coining silver or issuing

24
 The Aristocrat

greenbacks. Dominant business interests, especially the leading

New York banks, staunchly resisted, warning that such a sacri-
lege would lead straight to economic bedlam. By the time of the
1896 election the country was suffering through the third year of
a depression more cataclysmic than anyone could remember.
The temperature of political life had reached the boiling point.
While most metropolitan dailies endorsed McKinley, the
New York editor Joseph Pulitzer opened his pages to the opposi-
tion. A month before the election, he turned over the Sunday
magazine supplement of his New York World to Tom Watson, the
firebrand populist governor of Georgia and vice presidential
candidate of the People’s Party. Watson had just visited Wall
Street, and his article, “Wall Street Conspiracies Against the
American Nation,” skewered the Street as an incubator of aristo-
cratic counterrevolution. An accompanying cartoon featured a
giant snake rising out of its nesting place in the Stock Exchange
to strangle the businessman, the farmer, and the worker. “A
name more thoroughly detested is not to be found in the vocabu-
lary of American politics”—Wall Street, in Watson’s eyes, was a
breeding ground for depression, empty houses, and barren fields.
It was a hideout for conspirators who in turn controlled Presi-
dent Grover Cleveland and his cabinet. Indeed, “since our Re-
public was founded no president has been so bland and sterile a
Wall Street tool.” The corruptor of legislatures, the bench, the
press, and the ballot box itself, “Here is Wall Street: we see the
actual rulers of the Republic. They are kings. . . . The Govern-

25
 The Aristocrat

ment itself lies prone in the dust with the iron heel of Wall Street
upon its neck.” Watson was no advocate of violent revolution; he
placed what remained of his hope in the vote. Nor did he fear, as
did sizable numbers of upper-class Americans, a “revolution ris-
ing among the poor. The revolution I fear is coming from Wall
Street.” If victorious it would crush the spirit and achievement of
1776, a tragic denouement to Jefferson’s prophetic warnings
about a moneyed aristocracy.13
Watson’s ire was felt by millions. And it was stoked not only by
Wall Street’s apparent political usurpations but also by its social
provocations. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner anointed
the moment America’s “Gilded Age” in their best-selling novel
of the same title, a hilarious send-up of the era’s mercenary mania
and political bombast. Many other social observers were struck
by the vulgarity, vainglory, and appalling social insensitivity of
what today we would call “the rich and famous.” Members of
America’s upper classes, many of them newly risen out of social
obscurity and not so sure themselves of what justified their sudden
preeminence, staged a great vanity fair, outdoing one another in
ostentatious displays of their truly enormous wealth. With some
hyperbole a contemporary observer noted, “The entire popula-
tion of the country entered the field. . . . Broadway was lined
with carriages. The fashionable milliners, dress-makers, and jew-
elers reaped golden harvests. The pageant of Fifth Avenue on
Sunday and of Central Park during the week-days was bizarre,

26
 The Aristocrat

gorgeous, wonderful! Never were such dinners, such receptions,

such balls. . . . Vanity Fair was no longer a dream.”14
All of this luxury could arouse feelings of revulsion. Harper’s
New Monthly scathingly noted that a single act of gluttony at
Delmonico’s or La Maison Dorée could support a soldier and his
family for much of a year. If people had managed to gratify their
greediest appetites even during the Civil War, then the outbreak
of peace relaxed all remaining restraints. The lavishness of the
social scene bordered on the grotesque. Mrs. Hamilton Fish
hosted a party for her friends’ dogs in which the “guests” were pre-
sented with diamond necklace party favors and a place of honor
at the table was reserved for an ape. The financier Leonard Jerome
erected a palace on Madison Avenue equipped with a theater to
seat six hundred and carpeted stables paneled in black walnut. The
“flash age” had arrived, its gaudy show presided over by August
Belmont of the Rothschild bank and his Wall Street cronies.15
Wealth alone, however, was not enough to shore up a shaky
sense of entitlement. America’s nouveaux riches, so many of whose
overnight great fortunes derived from Wall Street, made up for
their lack of familial lineage, social breeding, and cultural bona
fides by pretending to be an aristocracy. Ensconced in fortress-
like urban mansions and country villas, decked out in the latest
continental fashions (British for the men, French for the women),
riding about in thoroughbred-driven equipages bearing counter-
feit coats-of-arms, ministered to by liveried servants, hunting to

27
 The Aristocrat

hounds, gathering at costume balls festooned with exotic orchids

and jeweled party favors where they feasted on nightingale
tongues and rare forms of animal and vegetable life, America’s
social elite erected an elaborate and deliberately visible feudal
fantasy world. That the country’s upper classes went around
masquerading as Henry VIII, Louis XIV, and Marie Antoinette;
confecting aristocratic genealogies; marrying off their daughters
(dubbed “dollar princesses” by mesmerized journalists) to bank-
rupt, frequently dissolute, but titled Europeans; transplanting
castles, stone by stone, from the French countryside to Fifth
Avenue; and buying up a millennium’s worth of high art from a
half dozen civilizations and setting it all down helter-skelter in
drafty auditorium-sized living rooms may strike us as farcical.
And certainly such theatrics expressed their own transparent so-
cial and cultural insecurity, an attempt to find a toehold in a re-
markably vertiginous society. But this social masquerade could
also be galling beyond endurance.
Wall Street’s flirtation with aristocracy had changed funda-
mentally since Hamilton’s day. Beneath this veneer of heraldic
pomp and clubby exclusivity something irreducibly fake showed
through, leaving these nouveaux riches ripe for ridicule. An artist’s
rendering of “one of the Upper Ten Thousand” sketched a risible
image of a strutting, pouting, pompous, top-hatted New York
swell. After all, it was an American birthright to distrust and un-
mask aristocracy. This rising elite was not only privileged, like
the old one, not only arrogant, like the old one, but carried with

28
 The Aristocrat

it as well newer attributes of financial jobbery and reckless specu-

lation that were peculiarly associated with a Wall Street that had
become in the eyes of one reformer, “a Street of Palaces.” Re-
ferred to over and over again as a “shoddy aristocracy”—the in-
tent was to compare these parvenus to the cheap fabric made from
reclaimed wool—it was a class whose bona fides were forever
under scrutiny. Even a Wall Street insider like William Fowler
found himself appalled, writing an exposé of the typical denizen
of the Street, dressed in purple and fine linen, gorging on delica-
cies and “wines of the vintage of Waterloo,” drinking out of cut
Bohemian glass; a creature who “produces nothing, . . . drives no
plough, plies no hammer, sends no shuttle flashing through the
loom.”16
Families like the Duers and the Rennselaers were both more
credible and less powerful than pretend aristocrats like the Van-
derbilts and the Goulds. Back then Wall Street still moved to the
stately rhythms of the gentlemen’s club, trading with prudential
deliberation small quantities of government bonds and the im-
peccably safe securities of dowagers. Its influence on the sur-
rounding economy was measurable but not decisive. The men
who worked there may have lacked medieval family pedigrees,
but they were classically educated, managed their landed estates
while dabbling in financial affairs, were bred to assume positions
of social leadership, and lived amid a political culture where it
was still the custom to defer to one’s “natural” betters.
Much of that world had vaporized in the industrial and finan-

29
 The Aristocrat

cial revolution that followed the Civil War. Wall Street had be-
come a zone of frenzied speculation, of monomaniacal exaltation
and panic: a hypnotic spectacle of moneymaking and money los-
ing watched by millions. Many of the men who drove the coun-
try’s economic revolution from Wall Street—people like Cor-
nelius Vanderbilt, Daniel Drew, Jim Fisk, Russell Sage, and Jay
Gould—were instant millionaires who could make no plausible
claim to social or political entitlement, unlike their Federalist
era forebears. Even if they tried to, which they sometimes did,
they were usually unsuccessful: Americans had long ago jetti-
soned their earlier habits of political deference. Indeed, as the hi-
erarchies of wealth and income grew ever steeper in the late
nineteenth century, the democratic sentiments of the populace
only grew stronger. Political life in the United States, at least on
the surface, was emphatically anti-elitist, run by urban machines
and professional politicians who made it their business to cater to
the egalitarian instincts of their constituents.
But the sheer economic throw weight of the new Wall Street
was immeasurably greater than anything the old Federalist gen-
try had exercised or even imagined. The Street ran (and occa-
sionally mismanaged or deliberately looted) the national railroad
network, the country’s single most important industry and the
strategic heart of its infrastructure. More than that, Wall Street
housed the engine room which transformed the structure of
industry, providing the capital resources and organizational in-
ventiveness that gave birth to the modern, publicly traded corpo-

30
 The Aristocrat

ration and thereby to the modern economy. United States Steel,

General Electric, and International Harvester were but a few of
the household names of American business midwifed and often
controlled by the Street’s great investment banks. It was on the
Street that the nation’s great undertakings—its coast-to-coast
railroads and stupendous agricultural output; its gigantic steel,
oil, and raw materials industries; its pioneering technologies in
electricity and chemicals—were alchemized. It was there that all
the critical capital transactions originated, where the shrewdest
political advice was available, where new insights into cost account-
ing were devised and revised. Here New York’s investment bankers
and brokers turned the tangible wherewithal of the country into its
paper facsimile, a virtual economy whose very liquidity made pos-
sible the mobilizing of ever greater capital funds to further enlarge
the scope, efficiency, and power of the whole U.S. economy.
A select circle of great New York banks—the House of Mor-
gan first of all, but also Kuhn, Loeb; Harriman Brothers; Dillon
Read; Brown Brothers; the Belmont-Rothschild interests—were
themselves linked to a network of other financial institutions (in-
surance companies, investment trusts, commercial banks). Con-
sequently, they occupied a commanding position over much of
the country’s reservoir of liquid capital. Access to that pool was a
matter of life and death for modern industrial enterprises in-
creasingly dependent on larger and more technically complex
units of production. Wall Street became the new economy’s
gatekeeper. It could to some substantial degree determine what,

31
 The Aristocrat

how, and where business thrived or died, whether a region pros-

pered or was passed over, and whether a new technology was de-
veloped or was instead allowed to languish.
Naturally, many resented such fateful power concentrated in a
handful of private institutions. Why should the dreams of aspir-
ing entrepreneurs, the homesteads of struggling family farmers,
the livelihoods of impoverished industrial workers depend on
the imperious whim of some distant New York bank? Moreover,
the Wall Street cabal had apparently managed to kidnap the Sen-
ate, the Supreme Court, even the presidency itself. The Senate
was widely thought of as “the millionaires club,” its members
representing impersonal corporations rather than flesh-and-blood
voters. Henry Demarest Lloyd, whose Wealth Against Common-
wealth (1894) served as the bible of the anti-monopoly move-
ment, echoed a widely shared conviction that the major political
parties were done for: “The Republican Party took the black
man off the auction block of the Slave Power, but it has got the
white man on the auction block of the Money Power.” The na-
tion’s highest tribunal had hijacked the 14th Amendment—the
Civil War’s bloody legacy to the civil liberties of all American
citizens—and converted it into a means of protecting corporations
against any regulation of their affairs by local and state govern-
ments. Every president beginning with Ulysses S Grant opened up
the public treasury to railroads and other business interests and
made the country’s armed forces available when those same circles
found themselves under siege by enraged communities. It was

32
 The Aristocrat

widely noted that in the interregnum separating his two presiden-

cies, Grover Cleveland worked for a Morgan-affiliated law firm.17
The Adamses, Charles Francis and Henry, published Chapters
of Erie (1871), a devastating indictment of the whole Wall Street
scene. Thinking of Vanderbilt especially, Charles Francis wor-
ried about the creation of great financial combines that would
overwhelm the state and its citizenry, gloomily forecasting the
advent of a corporate imperialism. Describing the seduction of
the judiciary, he likened it to a “monstrous parody of the forms of
law; some saturnalia of bench and bar.” The whole legislative
process was in immediate danger of being transformed into “a
mart in which the price of votes was haggled over and laws, made
to order, were bought and sold.” Although most exercised about
the unchecked power of the railroad barons, the cousins felt that
the integrity of the entire republic was in jeopardy, thanks to a
breed of swindling “moneycrats.”18
All of this seemed illegitimate; a privileged elite unsanctioned
by law or custom exercising dominion over the commonwealth
smelled suspiciously like an aristocracy. Wall Street especially
seemed to fit this profile. Like that of all previous aristocracies,
its wealth was deemed unearned, leeched from those who toiled
on the country’s farms and factories, ships and railroads, from all
those who still kept faith with the moral strictures of the work
ethic. The image of the aristocrat as a noxious parasite was in-
delibly imprinted on the American political consciousness. Wall
Street’s arcane and often secretive dealings in mere paper forms

33
 The Aristocrat

of wealth constituted compelling evidence of its estrangement

from the virtuous world of productive labor. Wall Street specula-
tors made up a rentier class on steroids, one that lived not only
off the fruit of the land (like feudal lords of old) but off the entire
material output and inventive genius of the nation.
So it was that the last third of the nineteenth century was filled
with insurgent movements and political parties—the anti-trust
movement, the Grange, the Greenback-Labor Party, the Farm-
ers’ Alliance and the People’s Party, the Knights of Labor, as well
as workers’ militias and dozens of anarchist and socialist sects—
that together singled out Wall Street as the organizer and head-
quarters of a ruling class, a distinctly un-American and malig-
nant growth on the body politic. In a society dedicated to the
proposition that classes did not exist in the New World—or if
they did they were fast going out of existence—Wall Street’s
power was an alarming phenomenon, approaching sacrilege.
One final ingredient made this brew of economic overlord-
ship, backdoor political wire-pulling, aristocratic social preten-
sion, and democratic resentment especially toxic. In Europe it was
not uncommon to find aristocrats with a well-developed sense of
their social responsibilities. Noblesse oblige or what in Britain
came to be known as “Tory socialism” sometimes softened class
antagonisms. The breeding and education that went along with
heredity privilege could supersede purely self-interested mone-
tary considerations. Even the Federalist gentry adopted this stand-
point of disinterested social obligation, although, as was the case

34
 The Aristocrat

with all nobilities, concern for the general interest was never per-
mitted to run up against the needs of the ruling elite. Matters were
quite otherwise in late-nineteenth-century America, however.
William Graham Sumner, the Yale sociologist and celebrated
proponent of Social Darwinism, published an extended essay in
the mid-1880s called What Social Classes Owe Each Other. In the
new world of free-market competitive capitalism, Sumner argued,
the cold hard answer to that question was, “Essentially nothing.”
Many a newly enriched financier and industrialist emphatically
agreed. Those who, like themselves, finished first in the race for
survival, were by definition fittest to do so. Since few of these
men trailed behind them family traditions, educational accom-
plishments, careers in public service, or other credentials that
might anchor their sudden social preeminence, mountainous
piles of cash would do, indeed would have to do. Social Darwin-
ian ideology turned that lone criterion into a moral sufficiency. It
served at the same time as a justification for unprecedented and
unaccountable power and as consoling eyewash for the less fit. If
everyone deferred to the same iron laws of the marketplace, they
all would, in the long run, come out ahead—or at least come out
where nature had destined them to finish. Progress was assured
in this fable, even if its benefits were unevenly distributed. This
wondrous system of automatic social regulation perfectly suited
the natural instincts of the new tycoonery. Since they wanted
nothing to interfere with their moneymaking, they were not in-
clined to busy themselves with politics, which could be an irritat-

35
 The Aristocrat

ing distraction. Faith in the inexorable mechanics of the free

market excused their abdication from public life (except for those
lucrative interchanges with the government Land Office and the
Treasury Department). It might be said that this was a “ruling
class” that, Bartleby-like, preferred not to . . . unless it had to.19
As things evolved it did have to. A growing premonition of
impending social cataclysm shadowed all sectors of American so-
ciety beginning not long after the Civil War and culminating in
the election of 1896. From the pinnacles of wealth and prestige
on Fifth Avenue’s Millionaires Mile to the squalid urban barrios
and bare-boned sharecropper cabins, people feared that the coun-
try was once again dividing in two, that it faced a second civil war
while the memory of the first was still fresh in everyone’s mind.
Only this time a financial aristocracy had supplanted the van-
quished slavocracy as the primal threat to the country’s democratic
and egalitarian birthright. Social upheaval, often accompanied by
deadly violence, began with the nationwide railroad strike of
1877 and continued with frightening regularity over the next
twenty years. Even today we remember the starkest and most in-
cendiary of those social tragedies: the cruel confrontation in
1885 between Jay Gould and his employees on the Missouri Pa-
cific Railroad when Gould boasted he could hire half the work-
ing class to kill the other half; the “Great Uprising” for the eight-
hour day and the Haymarket bombing of 1886 that ended with
the judicial lynching of the Chicago anarchists; the Homestead
Strike of 1892 against Andrew Carnegie’s steel works when the

36
 The Aristocrat

Monongahela River ran red with the blood of Pinkerton strike

breakers; the Pullman Strike of 1894 during which George Pull-
man’s utopian exercise in industrial paternalism crashed head-on
into the realities of industrial depression, workplace rebellion,
and federal bayonets; the populist uprising that spread from the
desolate cotton fields of the South to the parched and locust-
plagued prairies of the Midwest and promised to “raise less corn
and more hell” unless the Wall Street snake was defanged.20
In an age characterized by apocalyptic premonitions, the most
horrific vision of this final conflict was captured by populist trib-
une Ignatius Donnelley in his dystopian novel Caesar’s Column
(1891). Along with Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Donnelley’s
novel was one of the biggest sellers of the nineteenth century.
Grim beyond compare, Donnelley’s picture of Armageddon even
included the logistical details of hunting down the beast in its
lair. The Brotherhood of Destruction, a conspiratorial band of
brutalized proletarians, driven over the edge by merciless op-
pression and resentment, initiates its assault on the Oligarchy by
barricading the area around Wall Street. This counter-conspiracy
succeeds—if success can be measured as a nineteenth-century
version of mutual assured destruction—and then the true horror
begins. “Caesar’s Column” turns out to be an infernal obelisk
named in honor of the commanding general of the Brotherhood,
Caesar Lomellini. It is a giant pyramid erected in Union Square
following the insurrection made out of cement and a quarter of a

37
 The Aristocrat

million corpses of the vanquished Oligarchy and their minions.

Built by the forced labor of surviving merchants, politicians, and
clergy, it commemorates the “Death and burial of Modern Civi-
lization.” To ensure its permanence Caesar’s Column is rigged
with explosives at its center; should anyone try removing the
corpses the monument will blow up.21
What this pattern of carnage and irreconcilable confrontation
confirmed was that the nouveau aristocracy lacked the training,
experience, and ideology (or, for that matter, the inclination) to
react in any other way. When faced with challenges to its politi-
cal, economic, and social presumptions this elite’s first and last
resort was to one or another kind of blunt instrument. This in
turn only exacerbated its reputation as a heartless aristocracy,
or, rather, as an aristocracy whose black heart could be found
thumping away on Wall Street.

The defeat of populism in 1896 signaled a shift in the wind. The

election was a decisive victory for the country’s business classes.
Wall Street, particularly J. P. Morgan, had invested heavily in a
Republican triumph, viewing the election as a kind of final con-
flict between that “awful democracy” and the forces of law and
order. The stock market soared soon afterward, indicating its
pleasure with the outcome. Then the depression lifted. At the
same time, elements within the upper reaches of American busi-

38
 The Aristocrat

ness, chastened by the experience of the previous two decades,

searched for less inflammatory ways of defending their hege-
mony. Again, Morgan was chief among them. But try as he and
others might they emitted an aroma of aristocratic hauteur no
matter what they did.22
Two stories about Morgan are telling in this regard. The Mor-
gan bank led the great merger movement at the turn of the century.
It had multiple objectives, but chief among them was to end the
chaos that was an inescapable feature of internecine competitive
capitalism. Folding dozens of separate firms into single consoli-
dated corporations all beholden to and supervised by a gentlemen’s
club of white-shoe investment bankers would, or so it was assumed,
tame the inherent anarchy of the free market. Economic orderli-
ness would in turn quiet the incessant demands for political and
social reform. The underlying conceit of this Wall Street regency
was that it would steer the economy in the general interest: that
it could be trusted to function as a kind of disinterested elite,
drawing on its broad knowledge and Olympian vantage point.
Skeptics were everywhere, however. Teddy Roosevelt was first
among them. Not long after assuming the presidency following
the assassination of William McKinley, he issued a series of jere-
miads condemning “malefactors of great wealth” and warning
about the “baleful consequences of over-capitalized trusts.” A
descendant of the old Knickerbocker gentry in colonial and
Federalist-era New York, he made no secret of his dubious re-

39
 The Aristocrat

gard for the captains of finance and industry. He was not about to
abdicate his role as the nation’s elected chief executive in favor of
a self-appointed circle of financiers.23
Matters came to a head in the government’s prosecution of the
Northern Securities Company for violating the Sherman Anti-
trust Act. Northern Securities was a concoction of the Morgan
and Kuhn, Loeb banks, a typical device for bringing to an end a
nasty conflict among competing railroads that was proving not
only self-destructive but a generator of wider economic instabil-
ity. When the Justice Department filed its lawsuit, Morgan was
irritated. Why, he asked Roosevelt, hadn’t the president sent his
man to meet with Morgan’s factotum to work out the problem in
private like two gentlemen? “If we have done anything wrong . . .
send your man to my man and they can fix it up.” After all, the
banker had long ago concluded that “the community of inter-
ests” was merely “the principle that certain numbers of men who
own property can do what they like with it.” Here was the nub of
the matter. White-shoe Wall Street implicitly considered itself
the president’s peer. In this view of the world, Morgan and Roo-
sevelt were to treat each other like two heads of state. The presi-
dent found this aristocratic presumption intolerable.24
While his reputation as a trust-buster has been greatly exag-
gerated, and while Roosevelt harbored his own elitist distrust of
“awful democracy,” he acknowledged what Morgan’s Wall Street
world did not: that anyone exercising broad powers over the pub-

40
 The Aristocrat

lic welfare had to be held publicly accountable. Roosevelt ignored

Morgan’s insolence and allowed the lawsuit to proceed, ending in
the dissolution of Northern Securities. But the incident only re-
affirmed his conviction that although the titans of business and
finance might possess great commercial and organizational acu-
men, that did not qualify them as trustworthy guardians of the
nation’s well-being. His belief that these financial plutocrats
constituted the “most sordid of all aristocracies” was bred in the
bone, part of an upbringing that dismissed materialistic strivings
as unworthy, debilitating, and even effeminate. He worked at
showing respect toward them but confessed: “I am simply unable
to make myself take the attitude of respect toward the very
wealthy men which such an enormous multitude of people evi-
dently feel. I am delighted to show any courtesy to Pierpont Mor-
gan or Andrew Carnegie or James Hill, but as for regarding any
of them as, for instance, I regard . . . Peary, the Arctic explorer, or
Rhodes the historian—why I could not force myself to do it even
if I wanted to, which I don’t.”25
The irony here was palpable. From the president’s vantage
point he was the true Brahmin in the best, disinterested sense of
that category: someone who was prepared to elevate the national
interest above the interests of all other more parochial groups.
Morgan was a mere plutocrat concealing his purely mercenary mo-
tivations behind a facade of white-shoe sangfroid and statesman-
like solemnity. For his part, Morgan reciprocated the president’s

41
 The Aristocrat

keen dislike. When Roosevelt set off on his African safari follow-
ing his second term in office, Morgan was alleged to have said, “I
hope the first lion he meets does his duty.”26
Both men nurtured illusions about themselves and each other.
While he kept up the rhetorical heat, Roosevelt came in time to
an understanding with the Wall Street regency and allowed his
administration to enter into precisely the kinds of gentlemen’s
agreements about financial and corporate affairs that Morgan
took for granted. Morgan, on the other hand, persisted in think-
ing of the president as more of a rabble rouser than he really was.
Instead, the most serious assaults on Wall Street’s presumptions
came from other quarters.
The second story about Morgan involves his encounter with
Arsène Pujo, an obscure congressman from Louisiana who in 1912
found himself presiding at the climax of a great national contro-
versy over the power of Wall Street. Pujo chaired a congressional
investigation into what was notoriously depicted as “the Money
Trust.” Antitrust sentiments had roiled the waters since the late
nineteenth century. John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil had
aroused the most sustained public ire. But during the Progressive
era muckraking journalists, politicians, and hard-pressed mer-
chants and manufacturers—not to mention struggling farmers
and striking workers—had fired away at trusts in every conceiv-
able field, from copper and linseed oil to steel and street railways.
Towering above them all, however, was the Money Trust, the
mother of all trusts. For men like Louis Brandeis, crusading ju-

42
 The Aristocrat

rist and future Supreme Court Justice, this dense network of in-
vestment banks and their financial satellites threatened to crush
the life out of economic and political democracy. Brandeis pub-
lished a series of celebrated exposés in Harper’s under a rubric,
“Other People’s Money,” which to this day remains a part of our
national vocabulary. It was a journalistic tour de force, an armada
of data anatomizing the intricate web of connections linking the
Wall Street fraternity to the country’s major corporations, de-
scribing its chokehold over access to capital and economic op-
portunity for outsiders, and alerting readers to Wall Street’s hid-
den political influence and subversive threat to the democratic
process. In language echoing Jefferson and Lincoln, Brandeis
went so far as to call the conflict with the Money Trust “irrecon-
cilable,” cautioning that “our democracy cannot endure half free
and half slave.”27
Brandeis was also a close confidant of soon-to-be President
Woodrow Wilson. The Democratic candidate adopted the muck-
raking lawyer’s point of view and promised throughout his 1912
campaign to take on the Money Trust and prevent it from usurp-
ing the democratic birthright of the American people. In his ac-
ceptance speech at the Democratic Party convention, Wilson
delivered an ominous broadside: “There are not merely great
trusts and combinations . . . there is something bigger still . . .
more subtle, more evasive, more difficult to deal with. There are
vast confederacies of banks, railways, express companies, insur-
ance companies, manufacturing corporations, mining corpora-

43
 The Aristocrat

tions, power and development companies . . . bound together by

the fact that the ownership of their stock and members of their
boards of directors are controlled and determined by compara-
tively small and closely interrelated groups of persons who . . .
may control, if they please and when they will, both credit and
enterprise.”28
A showdown of sorts occurred at the Pujo hearings. Witnesses
from the highest circles of the financial establishment like the
“Silver Fox,” James Keene, seemed to confirm the existence of the
Trust and its extraordinary plenipotentiary authority. George M.
Reynolds of the Continental and Commercial National Bank of
Chicago confessed, “I believe the money power now lies in the
hands of a dozen men. I plead guilty to being one of the dozen.”29
Others testified adamantly to the contrary, Morgan most fa-
mously. His appearance at the Capitol was treated by the media
as if he were a visiting dignitary from abroad. Flanked by a bat-
talion of lawyers, partners, and family members, Morgan coolly
denied that he possessed any special influence over economic
affairs while a standing-room-only crowd looked on entranced.
Interrogated by chief counsel Samuel Untermeyer, who came
armed with piles of damning documentary evidence, the testi-
mony ran like this:

untermeyer : You do not have any power in any depart-

ment of industry in this country, do you?
morgan : I do not.

44
 The Aristocrat

untermeyer : Not the slightest?

morgan : Not the slightest.
untermeyer : And you are not looking for any?
morgan : I am not seeking it either.
untermeyer : This consolidation and amalgamation of
systems and industries and banks does
not look to any concentration, does it?
morgan : No, sir.
untermeyer : It looks, I suppose, to a dispersal of inter-
ests rather than to a concentration?
morgan : Oh, no, it deals with things as they exist.

On the face of it Morgan’s know-nothing obtuseness was plainly

preposterous. What also stands out, however, is his self-assurance
and studied aloofness, his indifference to this public interroga-
tion, and his genuine conviction that he was member of a finan-
cial gentry which conducted its affairs on the basis of trust, a world
run by codes of honor where commercial muscularity didn’t figure
in. Jacob Schiff, Morgan’s near equivalent at Kuhn, Loeb, took a
different tack, admitting the concentration of power but finding
it no cause for worry: that power, he claimed, was in “good hands.”
These men saw themselves as the living embodiments of pre-
cisely that aristocratic caste which many found infuriating but
which they themselves knew in their hearts to be benign.30
Morgan died just months after the Pujo Committee concluded
its affairs. Despite the hearings and the long decade of political

45
 The Aristocrat

denunciation of Wall Street’s transgressions that preceded them,

the passing of the financier was likened to the loss of a Shake-
speare or a Lincoln. “J. P. Morgan will rank in the history of the
Republic as one of the greatest men God has yet raised to serve
it,” eulogized the Reverend William Wilkinson in the somber
stillness of Trinity Church. So, too, the world he represented
continued its iconic career as the country’s unofficial aristocracy,
not a beloved one but admired, feared, and deferred to enough to
sustain its preeminence until a crisis descended over the nation
that was grave enough to unseat it.31

The Great Depression was that crisis. Only the Civil War pre-
sented a greater traumatic shock to the nation’s psyche, not to
mention its material well-being. Whether the stock market crash
of 1929 was responsible for the total economic collapse that
followed has been debated by historians and economists ever
since. For the generation that lived through this cataclysm, how-
ever, there was no doubt that Wall Street was guilty as sin. All the
suspicion and animosity that had accumulated since Jefferson’s
day descended on the Street.
In his first inaugural address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt an-
nounced that “the money changers have fled from their high
seats in the temple of our civilization.” Those “unscrupulous
money changers,” he confidently averred, “stood indicted in the

46
 The Aristocrat

court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of

men.” In his first “fireside chat,” he promised to pursue a final
reckoning with the illegitimate and overbearing financial aris-
tocracy that had shadowed the nation since at least the days of
Andrew Jackson. “The day of the great promoter or the financial
titan to whom we granted everything, if only he would build or
develop, is over.” Invoking the language of the Pujo Money
Trust investigations to excoriate his enemies, the president con-
firmed a suspicion running back to the Gilded Age that “fewer
than three dozen private banking houses and stock selling ad-
juncts in the commercial banks have directed the flow of capital
in the country and outside it.” Along the way they had erected
pyramids of watered stock, milked subsidiaries, and choked off
new avenues of property holding and mobility.32
FDR possessed a more genial temperament than his fire-and-
brimstone cousin Theodore, one less imperious and bullying.
But their regard for the plutocracy was the same. Like Teddy,
Franklin hailed from the world of Hudson River valley gentle-
man farmers; he knew a true aristocrat when he saw one, and the
men from Wall Street did not qualify. The president wrote to his
close adviser, “brains-trust” member Adolph Berle, that “the fun-
damental trouble with this whole stock exchange crowd is their
complete lack of elementary education. I do not mean lack of
college diplomas, etc. but just inability to understand the coun-
try or public or their obligations to their fellow men. Perhaps you

47
 The Aristocrat

can help them acquire a kindergarten knowledge of these sub-

jects. More power to you.” Roosevelt was prepared, with a great
deal of political tacking, to put the pretenders in their place.33
The severity of the crisis made that possible. Wall Street had
proved itself not only ethically challenged and dangerously om-
nipotent but, more damning than that, omni-incompetent. Dur-
ing the boom years of the 1920s, the white-shoe world of J. P.
Morgan had accepted credit for the nation’s good fortune and
been portrayed as a conclave of wise men. Now, under the new cir-
cumstances of economic ruination, that same world was treated as
criminally irresponsible, pathetic even, an object not only of cen-
sure but of mockery. And there is perhaps nothing more fatal for
the life expectancy of an elite than to be viewed as ridiculous.
Defrocking the Wall Street regency was a pastime enjoyed by
many. The president’s excoriating rhetoric was seconded by con-
gressional investigations which embarrassed the most dignified
financiers and turned up multiple cases of financial whistling in
the dark, malfeasance, and sheer larceny. Senators fumed about
the way “the lambs have been sheared” by the “rascals on Wall
Street”; others compared Wall Street’s inner circles to the gang-
land world of Al Capone. Father Charles Coughlin, the charis-
matic and notoriously anti-Semitic radio priest from Detroit,
with millions of listeners, ridiculed “the divine intelligence of the
international bankers,” which, he proclaimed, “has found its de-
served place with the theory of the divine right of kings. Both are
putrid corpses.” The populist demagogic governor of Louisiana,

48
 The Aristocrat

Huey Long, railed against bloated, sybaritic plutocrats. Early on

in the New Deal he charged that the Treasury Department had
fallen into the clutches of the House of Morgan and the “heeled
headman of Wall Street Bernard Baruch.” Meanwhile, New Deal
legislation—the Glass-Steagall Act (the Banking Act of 1933),
securities laws including the creation of the Securities and Ex-
change Commission, the Wealth Tax Act, the Public Utility Hold-
ing Company Act—established public supervision and regulation
of the Money Trust. Brandeis’s bête noire came away weakened if
not exactly leveled.34
Journalists and practical jokers had a field day. Edmund Wil-
son sketched an acidly humorous portrait of onetime Wall Street
legend “Sunshine Charlie.” Charles Mitchell had been president
of the National City Bank, the country’s largest. He was the mas-
termind of the bank’s headfirst plunge into the mass marketing of
Wall Street during the Jazz Age and won a reputation as a finan-
cial guru. But in the aftermath of the crash word leaked out that
it was also Mitchell, that “banker of bankers,” who had played
fast and loose with depositors’ funds, investing them in wobbly
stocks and bonds that the bank’s investment affiliate was busy
hawking. It was Sunshine Charlie who had speculated in the
stock of his own bank. In court the man who had inspired awe
looked “cheap.” His ruddy face, his high stiff collar, blue serge
suit, and white breast-pocket handkerchief were all that was left
of “those millennial boasts of the bankers, the round-eyed hopes
of the public.” His sangfroid evaporated on the witness stand.

49
 The Aristocrat

Mitchell broke down in the middle of sentences, his pointing fin-

ger robbed of its former conviction and power to command.
From Wilson’s vantage point, Sunshine Charlie belonged to a
species of imperial fakes: “Enormous with no necks, they gave
the impression of hooked, helpless frogs, or fat bass or leggy
groupers hauled suddenly out of the water and landed on the wit-
ness stand gasping.”35
Of course the House of Morgan was a favorite target. In one
instance, Jack Morgan, who had run the bank since his father’s
death, arrived in Washington to be grilled by congressional in-
quisitors. Lost in his own oblivious self-regard, he made unin-
tentional fun of himself and the hermetically sealed world he
came from. Following his testimony he lectured reporters: “If
you destroy the leisure class, you destroy civilization. By the
leisure class I mean families who employ one servant, twenty-five
to thirty million families.” Delighted with this factoid, commen-
tators rushed to their typewriters and microphones to report
Morgan’s wacky view of the nation’s domestic life, pointing out
that the 1930 census revealed there were fewer than thirty mil-
lion families in the whole country, and, sadly, fewer than two
million cooks and servants to tend to them.36
As it turned out, hapless Jack’s roasting was hardly over with.
At another appearance before Congress, and before he could even
begin testifying, just as he was getting himself settled, surrounded
by advisers, family, and a horde of newspapermen and radio com-
mentators, a young, rather attractive midget, one Lya Graff, was

50
 The Aristocrat

plopped down in the august banker’s lap, placed there by two PR

flaks with profoundly bad taste and an acute sense of how the
times were changing. Photographs of the portly, bushy-eyed,
white-mustached banker, a look of bemusement on his face, Miss
Graff perched beatifically on his knee, circled the globe. It was a
small but transformative moment in popular culture; the epit-
ome of aristocratic banker villainy was suddenly made to appear
about as dangerous as an old fogy. The House of Morgan, more
than any other establishment, had been the emblem of Wall Street
dignity, wisdom, and statesmanship for three generations. When
Lya Graff cozied up on Jack’s lap that aura evaporated in a burst
of laughter that dissolved the intimidating solemnity and exclu-
sivity of the Morgan bank and the elite conclave it stood for.37

Wall Street’s iconic status as the nation’s enduring emblem of

aristocracy came to an end with the New Deal. The ignominy
heaped upon it was deep and long-lasting, so much so that it
faded from view as a central metaphor in the nation’s political
imagery, no longer the magnetic center around which the politi-
cal symbolism of rich and poor, class versus class, orbited. When
that long silence did finally end, beginning in the Reagan era,
Wall Street had undergone a makeover. It no longer wore the
face of the aristocrat but on the contrary came forward as a rebel
against the establishment. Michael Milken, Carl Icahn, Ivan
Boesky, and others fancied themselves and were treated by the

51
 The Aristocrat

media as warriors against sclerotic corporate management, hyper-

cautious, elitist financiers in pinstripes and pince-nez, and suffo-
cating, overly nosy government bureaucrats.
Wall Street would be accused of many wrongdoings in the years
to come. Milken and others would serve time in jail once the junk
bond merger and acquisition mania of the 1980s ran its course. A
decade later Enronization entered the national vocabulary after
the bursting of the dot.com bubble; a new noun to capture a level
of white-collar criminal chicanery by the nation’s corporate and
financial elite that would have astonished William Duer. So too,
a degree of extravagantly conspicuous consumption—the New
York Times Magazine annual “Fashions of the Times” gushed
after Reagan’s inaugural ball that “at long last” luxury was back—
and gross disparities in the social division of income and wealth
turned the Reagan era into a second Gilded Age. But with an
odd-ball exception here and there, the new tycoonery did not
fancy itself an aristocracy, did not dress up like or marry its
daughters off to European nobility. On the contrary, it dressed
down, in blue jeans, and affected a faux populism or nerdy di-
shevelment in the way it presented itself. Although the political
power of Wall Street was arguably as great as or even greater
than it had been in the halcyon days of J. P. Morgan, both the
Street and the country’s political culture had evolved. Fear of a
moneyed aristocracy, which had first alarmed Jefferson and con-
tinued to fire up political emotions for another century and a
half, was apparently a thing of the past.38

52
 The Aristocrat

Wall Street’s career as a stand-in for an American aristocracy

had never felt quite right anyway. The Street’s single-minded fix-
ation on moneymaking made it too irreverent, too chronically
unsettled to harbor a true aristocracy, one bound by tradition
and fixed social position. Anger directed its way secretly or not
so secretly reflected more the country’s anxieties about the pre-
cariousness and inequities of capitalism, less its real fear of some
feudal counterrevolution. Moreover, when William Duer or
Sunshine Charlie Mitchell behaved badly, they resembled some-
thing deep in the American grain more than they did titled aris-
tocrats. Supremely confident men and alluring ones, they were
also given to overreaching, secrecy, and deceit, and to living on
the borders of illegality. Over the years Wall Street gave off the
seductive yet sinister aroma of the confidence man.

53
Image not available
 two

The Confidence Man

Mark Twain once described a mine as “a hole in the ground with

a liar standing next to it,” which neatly summed up his attitude
toward Wall Street: it was not to be trusted. And as a matter of
fact, just around the time Twain voiced his cynicism about the
country’s penchant for financial high-jinks in his first best-selling
novel, The Gilded Age, written with Charles Dudley Warner, news-
paper readers everywhere were mesmerized by the story of the
Great Diamond Hoax of 1872.1
Bogus gold and silver mines had been springing up all over the
place, but this was the biggest fraud to hit the American West. Two
confidence men—Philip Arnold from Harlan County, Kentucky,
who had done some small-time gold prospecting in California,
and his partner, “Silent” John Slack—ran the operation, taking
advantage of the chronic outsized optimism prevalent among

55
 The Confidence Man

prospectors and investors back East, as well as of the recent dis-

covery of diamonds in South Africa. The partners boned up on
their technical knowledge of diamonds, put together a sackful
of uncut jewels purchased in London, and concocted a story
about a mother lode they had come across in Apache territory in
Arizona. The sack and the story were enough to rope in a couple
of San Francisco bankers (one of them a former wild-cat mine
promoter and filibuster in Nicaragua). Arnold and Slack con-
vinced them that sizable capital was required to mount an armed
expedition to secure and exploit the cache. Not entirely gullible,
these initial investors insisted on some proof of the mine’s exis-
tence. In response, Arnold and Slack concocted an elaborate
ruse that included taking the blindfolded bankers’ agent on a
long trek into the wilderness, ending up a few miles outside Den-
ver. There the confidence men had seeded a mesa with various
precious stones that the agent dug up with his fingernails. In a
state of high excitement, he reported back to his employers that
Arnold and Slack had discovered an “American Golconda.”
Now New York money became interested. A corporate lawyer,
General Benjamin Butler (a powerful congressman), and two of
the nation’s most prestigious investment bankers, August Bel-
mont and Henry Seligman, formed a group to pursue the proj-
ect, appointing General George B. McClellan (commander of
the Army of the Potomac until Lincoln fired him for his passiv-
ity) as the new company’s figurehead, hoping thus to inspire fur-
ther confidence in the undertaking. What residual skepticism re-

56
 The Confidence Man

mained was eliminated when Charles Tiffany, the country’s most

renowned jewelry expert, testified to the mine’s bona fides. Tif-
fany was a bit of a blowhard who had begun his business career as
a Yankee notions peddler and knew precious little about uncut
stones. But he had what so many of his on-the-make countrymen
shared: a superabundant confidence in himself and the American
cornucopia, and a great capacity for self-delusion. With Tiffany,
Belmont (the Rothschilds’ agent in America), and McClellan in-
volved, Arnold and Slack had no trouble collecting well over half
a million dollars (a very handsome sum in those days) in “earnest
money” for their “labors.” They then decamped to Quebec,
where they gathered some new gems with which to re-seed the
mesa. A new exploratory expedition dug up the seeded jewels
with shovels, and the delirious news drifted back East that the
mesa would yield $5 million per acre and contained 3,000 acres.
Wall Street went crazy. The San Francisco and New York Min-
ing and Commercial Company began its short life by issuing
100,000 shares, and from Paris, Baron Rothschild sententiously
observed, “America is a rich land. It has given us many surprises.
It reserves many more.”
Surprises indeed! Soon enough the confidence game was ex-
posed by Clarence King, a government geologist and close friend
of Henry Adams’s. He wrote to the board of directors to tell
them that “the diamond fields upon which are based such large
investment and such brilliant hope are utterly valueless,” and
that the investors were the victims of “an unparalleled fraud.”

57
 The Confidence Man

Meanwhile Silent John Slack disappeared. Arnold returned to

his Kentucky homestead, where he remained wealthy and be-
came a sort of local hero for putting one over on the Wall Street
Yankees. Later, however, he overreached—always a fatal flaw in
the makeup of the confidence man—and tried starting a bank to
compete with a local nabob. He received a shotgun blast in the
back of the head for his temerity.2

The confidence man is endemic to market society. First of all this

is because market society rests on confidence: confidence that
strangers can be relied upon to live up to agreements, made often
at long distance and extending over long periods of time; confi-
dence too that contractual relationships will bind people to-
gether on the basis of mutual self-interest. The confidence man
trades in that trust, takes advantage of it. His basic traits are fa-
miliar to us all. He is charming, glib, seductive, even charismatic,
often sexy. He is a trickster, to be sure. But what is most notable
is that his trick depends on the willing collaboration of his vic-
tim, or mark. The mark indulges in an act of faith born out of cu-
pidity: the belief that there is a way to fast money that skirts the
rigors and renunciations of the work ethic. Cupidity is a loaded
word. The mark’s motivation may be ingenuous, idealistic even,
amounting to a buoyant optimism about the future. Still, even
the most innocent approach the confidence man with a certain
foreboding: something feels not quite right, something illicit hov-

58
 The Confidence Man

ers nearby, something echoes danger—but that same something

is very hard to resist.
Confidence men appear particularly at the frontier zones of
market society, at those times and places where the unknown
beckons even as it frightens. Capitalism, in its surges of creative
destruction, is always producing new frontier zones, fields of such
expansive opportunity they are virtually impossible to map. Just
because they are boundless, they present raw material for the
commercial imagination as well as the criminal imagination of
the confidence man. Confidence men show up throughout the
history of Wall Street. In the world of the Street, where specula-
tors live in a limbolike state of permanent impermanence, a weird,
alluring, menacing landscape without end or resting place, there
is always an open invitation to the confidence man.
During certain moments in American history, however, confi-
dence men seem to breed in alarming numbers. Or at least the
level of popular preoccupation with their presence rises notice-
ably. Twain tracked them during the Gilded Age. The Jazz Age of
the 1920s and the dot.com mania of the 1990s were similarly
overrun. Strikingly, these periods coincided with high levels of
technological innovation, with a kind of techno-futurism that
promised not just some new gadgetry but a whole new way of
life. For the Jazz Age that was best represented by aeronautics
and the radio; in the 1990s by the Internet. In such eras mere
matters of dollars and cents are transmogrified, become incon-
gruous forms of commercial exaltation, drawing on subterranean

59
 The Confidence Man

energies that are not part of the normal trucking and bartering of
market society. A kind of giddiness pervades the air, an atmo-
sphere of excitement, of living large and dangerously—the oxy-
gen on which the confidence man thrives.
America’s baptismal experience with the topsy-turvy world of
the confidence man occurred a generation before Twain’s prevar-
icating mine promoters appeared on the scene, in the Jacksonian
era. If it is right to say that confidence men crop up on the fron-
tiers of market society, then it is arguably the case that the whole
country represented such a frontier in the antebellum years. It
was then that a society based on the marketplace began its long
march through the corridors of American life. The rise of the
paper economy was a particularly strange and forbidding develop-
ment. Banknotes, bonds, mortgages, bills of exchange, and stocks
seemed to form a spider web of poisonous paper, ensnaring and
devouring the hard-earned fruits of honest labor. Intangible, yet
powerful, this paper system produced social, even intellectual
vertigo. It unsettled all previously existing social relations: fam-
ily lineages, ancient homesteads, local loyalties, honored occupa-
tions, patriarchal deference, venerable institutions of church and
community, cherished beliefs about the natural sources of wealth
and the springs of virtue—all that had served to fix identities of
person and place for generations. All this and more could be in-
stantly disordered, deranged by the madness of an economy that
was no more stable and enduring than the paper it chased after.
Upheavals were felt on the land, in towns, and in the city.

60
 The Confidence Man

Alongside and endemic to this commercial upheaval the coun-

try underwent a veritable orgy of speculation: in new lands, in
the canals and turnpikes and railroads of the transportation revo-
lution, in the infrastructure of the water-borne mercantile econ-
omy, in new towns and cities that seemed to spring up overnight
(at least in the imaginations of their promoters). For people with
either limited or no contact with the marketplace and its imper-
sonal relationships—its indifference to customary ways of doing
things, all values not readily monetized, and moral prohibitions
that got in the way of business—the world began to feel stranger,
more fluid, promising yet uncertain. Jacksonian America over-
flowed with confidence about the future of the country, a much-
celebrated indigenous national character trait that only the most
traumatic blows—the Civil War, the Great Depression—could
deflate. Yet it was obsessed with the confidence man. In a word,
Jacksonian Americans experienced a great crisis of confidence.
Some observers took the measure of this new risk-prone way
of life and pronounced it good. Washington Irving, for example,
who for a long time deplored the awakening spirit of avaricious
self-seeking, later discovered its metaphysical justification. Mere
trade might be grubby and pedestrian, but speculation was its
“romance. . . . It renders the stock jobber a magician and the
[stock] exchange a region of enchantment.” Irving himself be-
came a propagandist for the western imperial schemes of John
Jacob Astor and a speculator in railroads and land, in which he
lost heavily. In his own way, Ralph Waldo Emerson agreed with

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Irving. While he resented the new order of things that deferred

to wealth and nothing else, he drew a connection between the
popular passion for speculative risk taking and what he consid-
ered the American genius for enterprise, innovation, and great
projects. Even Horace Greeley, who could turn apoplectic about
the depravity of gambling, nonetheless found it in him to offer
up an apologia for speculation as inherent in the national charac-
ter and expressive of a democratic social order, a form of equal
opportunity open to the bold.3
Ordinary folk like Jeremiah Church saw things the same way.
He noted in his diary that in America, “everyman [sic] is a specu-
lator from a wood-sawyer to a President, as far as his means will
go, and credit also.” In one way or another, he and many of his
fellow citizens were swept away by what was quickly becoming a
national faith, reiterated endlessly in newspaper editorials, politi-
cal stump speeches, a burgeoning self-help literature, and the
everyday promotional rhetoric of commercial life: that what
really distinguished the American spirit was its audacity, its ea-
gerness to venture into the unknown, its inspiring confidence
that what lay beyond the borders of the familiar was bound to be
good, not only for the individual seeking his fortune but also for
a nation growing more muscular and with its eyes on glory.4
Confidence this outsized left the nation ripe for the picking,
though the harvesting might be relatively benign. Americans
began congratulating themselves on a certain native capacity for
commercial guile captured in the figure of the peddler “Yankee

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 The Confidence Man

Jonathan.” He looked a bit like Uncle Sam—lean, angular, sly

but friendly—and was charming, full of folktales and good humor.
He had a way with country wives and knew how to strike a sharp
bargain but stopped just this side of the felonious. A more malig-
nant figure, however, began to command attention. Confidence
men were abroad in the land, concocting and hawking illusory
agricultural Arcadias, gossamer towns and paper cities, bone-dry
canals to nowhere, railroad lines consisting of “two streaks of
rust,” as the popular phrase had it.
Charles Dickens (who traveled to the United States in 1842
and disliked most of what he saw, especially the rampant money
mania of New York) provided one of the most searing and hilari-
ous depictions of the fatuousness and hypocrisy that lurked be-
neath the surface of this romance of risk. Martin Chuzzlewit,
the hapless hero of the novel of the same name, is seduced by the
huckstering riffs of New York land promoters—an irresistible
blend of high-falutin’ democratic egalitarianism and unblinkered
covetousness—almost as soon as he gets off the boat from En-
gland. Martin asks “The General,” the confidence man who en-
tices him to invest in his cleverly named Eden Land Corporation,
if there is anything in his scheme for the buyers. Puffing himself
up impressively the General replies: “For the buyers, sir? . . . Well!
you come from an old country, from a country, sir, that has piled
up golden calves as high as Babel and worshipped ’em for ages.
We are a new country, sir; man is in a more primeval state here,
sir; we have not the excuse of having lapsed in the slow course of

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 The Confidence Man

time into degenerate practices; we have no false gods; man, sir,

here, is man in all his dignity. We fought for that or nothing.
Here am I sir, . . . with gray hairs, sir, and a moral sense. Would
I, with my principles, invest capital in this speculation if I didn’t
think it full of hopes and chances for my brother man? . . . What
are the Great United States for, sir, . . . if not for the regenera-
tion of man? But it is nat’ral for you to make such an enquerry for
you come from England and you do not know my country.” Soon
afterward, shown a map depicting “banks, churches, cathedrals,
market-places, factories, hotels, stores, mansions, wharves, an ex-
change, a theater, public buildings of all kinds,” Martin takes the
plunge and invests his meager capital in the Eden Land Corpora-
tion, only to discover, after schlepping out to a remote corner of
Illinois, that Eden is nothing more than a hellish, fetid swamp,
where Martin nearly loses his life, not to mention his life savings.5
Wall Street was not yet at the center of this vertiginous new
world. Dealings on the recently created (1817) New York Stock
and Exchange Board involved a tiny number of people. It was out
in the countryside where the new obsession with speculating on
a rising market took root. The era is infamous for wagering on
the commercial future of new lands and the farms and towns that
were supposed to spring up there and sometimes did, but often
did not. Indeed, matters grew so out of control that they led to
a devastating depression, which lasted from 1837 into the early
1840s. Wall Street was certainly implicated, the precipitating event
being the fatal overreaching of a rather conservative New York fi-

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 The Confidence Man

nancial institution. But what is most relevant is that the Street

soon emerged as a site, and an increasingly prominent one, where
people wrestled with this more widespread crisis of confidence.
The city, new to the American scene, fascinated people then as
a realm of mystery and transgression. Wall Street was of course a
quintessentially city place. George Foster, who became perhaps
the best-known chronicler of the urban demimonde in the ante-
bellum years, sketched the urban scene in his New York by Gas-
light (1850), which included expeditions onto the Street. Foster
and others painted the Street in lurid colors, seeing it at bottom
as a site of depravity, but they were alert enough to the cross-
currents of popular emotion to recognize how alluring it was to
many. The dream of instant wealth was part of that allure. But
Wall Street’s inscrutable doings, its flirtation with the illicit, and
its crossing over the boundaries of conventional morality gener-
ated their own attraction. Foster and other amateur anthropolo-
gists of the urban experience provided their readers with a
sneaky thrill. They likened the Street to the valley of riches de-
picted in the tale of Sinbad the Sailor, “where millions of dia-
monds lay glistening like fiery snow, but which was guarded on
all sides by poisonous serpents, whose bite was death and whose
contact was pollution.” The Street beckoned as “a place of deep
and dangerous mystery, a region of dens and caves and labyrinths
full of perils.” For Foster the Street was above all a boulevard of
masquerade and hidden realities, a zone of tempting transgres-
sion, romantic but full of risk.6

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 The Confidence Man

A criminal case that would be considered so ordinary today

that it probably would be ignored by the newspapers became a
national sensation in 1849. A confidence man, one William
Thompson, operating in New York, gulled his victims into be-
lieving that if they lent him a valuable belonging—a gold watch,
for example—he would let them in on a surefire but highly secret
deal. His pitch—common in this line of work—stressed that what
was important was not the monetary value of whatever his marks
were loaning him but rather its significance as a token of their
confidence in him, which in turn would give him confidence in
them. This is the classic psychic economy of the confidence
game. Eventually Thompson was arrested. He became famous
overnight as “the Confidence Man,” written about in newspapers
and periodicals all across the country. He was an early form of
celebrity, who really enjoyed his sudden notoriety, happy to
grant interviews from his jail cell in New York’s notorious and
aptly named “Tombs.” He was also Exhibit A for demonstrating
how fascinated people had become with the confidence man, and
how worried they were even as they indulged in their new pas-
sion for speculation. Some Pollyanna-ish types actually found in
the Thompson case confirmation of the indefatigable optimism
of the American spirit. Others were less sanguine. And so the
confidence man became emblematic of a suspicion that would
shadow Wall Street for generations to come.
One newspaper account is worth inspecting more closely. First
it lets us see why when some people turned their gaze to Wall

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 The Confidence Man

Street they saw there the face of the confidence man. More than
that, it is an early and vivid, even overwrought, expression of what
would become a long-lived piece of Wall Street cultural iconog-
raphy, the conflation of the image of the aristocrat with that of
the confidence man, a conflation that worked to subvert the
Street’s loftier claims to social esteem.
James Gordon Bennett, the publisher of the New York Herald,
a pioneer of sensationalist journalism, and a precursor of William
Randolph Hearst, used the occasion of Thompson’s arrest to
anathematize the Street. He was brutally direct. Thompson was
a petty swindler. But “those palazzos, with all their costly furni-
ture and all their splendid equipages, have been the produce of
the same genius in their proprietors, which made the ‘Confidence
Man’ immortal and a prisoner at ‘the Tombs.’ His genius has been
employed on a small scale in Broadway. Theirs has been em-
ployed in Wall Street. . . . He has obtained half a dozen watches.
They have pocketed millions of dollars.” Bennett questioned the
country’s moral compass. Thompson “is a swindler. They are
exemplars of honesty. He is a rogue. They are financiers. He is
collared by the police. They are cherished by society. He is a
mean, beggarly, timid, narrow-minded wretch. . . . They are re-
spectable people, princely, bold, high-soaring ‘operators,’ who are
satisfied only with the plunder of the whole community.” Thomp-
son ended up in jail rather than some “fashionable fauborg” be-
cause he aimed too low. He should have gone to Albany instead
and secured himself a railroad charter or issued a “flaming pro-

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 The Confidence Man

spectus of another grand scheme. . . . He should have brought

the stockholders into bankruptcy” and then “returned to a life of
ease, the possessor of a clear conscience, and one million dollars.”
But the hapless Thompson wasn’t up to it, so “let him rot, then,
in ‘the Tombs’ . . . while the genuine ‘Confidence Man’ stands
one of the Corinthian Columns of society. . . . Success, then, to
the real ‘Confidence Man.’ Long life to the real ‘Confidence
Man’ . . . the ‘Confidence Man’ of Wall Street—the ‘Confidence
Man’ of the Palace uptown.”7
James Gordon Bennett traded in demagoguery. Herman Mel-
ville did not. But they shared a mordant fascination with an
emerging commercial civilization which seemed fraudulent at its
core. Melville’s was a remorseless gaze. That vision achieved a
certain black density in what is certainly his most allusive and
recondite novel, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade. It has been
alleged that the germ of the idea for the novel was inspired by
William Thompson’s notorious arrest. True or not, the book is a
veritable compendium of confidence men: religious and philo-
sophical confidence men, literary and political confidence men,
crooked businessmen and crooked philanthropists, peddlers of
nostrums and miracle cures for the ailments of body and soul, all
masquerading together on the steamboat Fidele as it floats down
the arterial heart of the country, the Mississippi River.
Among the passengers, predictably, is a speculator, experienced
in the ways of the stock market. He encounters a young man to
whom he seeks to sell stock in the Black Rapids Coal Company.

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 The Confidence Man

Negotiations shrouded in mystery proceed; tempting allusions

are made to the stock’s unavailability, suggesting its precious-
ness. The young man turns out to be less callow than he seemed
and skeptically inquires about why the stock’s price has been de-
pressed of late. The speculator–confidence man blames it on the
“growling, the hypocritical growling, of the bears.” Why “hypo-
critical,” the young man asks. Now the modality of the negotia-
tion shifts; it becomes a metaphysical jeremiad against specula-
tion delivered in the interests of speculation. It is a send-up of
Emerson’s optimism, of a more pervasive culture of optimism.
“Why the most monstrous of all hypocrites are these bears: hyp-
ocrites by inversion; hypocrites by all the simulation of dark in-
stead of bright; souls that thrive, less upon depression, than the
fiction of depression; professors of the wicked art of manufac-
tured depression, spurious Jeremiahs . . . who, the lugubrious
day done, return, like some sham Lazarus among the beggars, to
make merry over the gains got by their pretended sore heads . . .
scoundrel bears!” Bears, like gloomy philosophers, are destroy-
ers of confidence, avers the speculator, “Fellows who, whether in
stocks, politics, bread-stuffs, morals, metaphysics, religion—be
what it may—trump up their black panics in the naturally quiet-
brightness solely with a view to some sort of covert advantage.”
With this reasoning the young man is in perfect emotional
sympathy, as are, presumably, most of his countrymen in their
quest, undertaken in guilty innocence, for the main chance. His
confidence won—he naturally gravitates to “fellows that talk

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 The Confidence Man

comfortably and prosperously, like you”—the young man saun-

ters off to conclude the transaction, not, however, in the “bright
sunlight,” but in a “private little haven” hidden from view. And
there the game continues as the speculator–confidence man, his
thirst for mercenary deceit unquenchable, entices his young con-
vert with talk of stock in a “New Jerusalem, a new and thriving
city, so called, in northern Minnesota.”8

By the 1870s, Wall Street had become a regular stop for tourists
to the city, mentioned in all the travel guides not only because of
its growing economic throw weight but because it was becoming
a more and more conspicuous arena in which what might be
called a “risk society” acted out its ambivalence, ready to chance
all but anxious about being deceived. Even as the established ex-
changes in New York and Chicago, especially, became more im-
posing, rule bound, and presumably on the up-and-up, an under-
ground, delusional economy flourished, exploiting the cravings
of would-be or used-to-be big-time speculators. “Bucket shops”
were walk-in-off-the-street, one-room affairs in small cities and
towns across the country, housed in dingy, ill-lit, dilapidated build-
ings, and equipped with a ticker and chalkboard. Gathered there
was a picturesque brotherhood of greed, bound together by fevered
emotions and small passions: a man with a “tip” from a “Trolley
insider” or an unassuming barber who had happened to trim the
beard of some “Napoleon of finance” or perhaps an eccentric

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 The Confidence Man

loaded down with elaborate charts of some infallible mathemati-

cal system; characters of infinite hope and desperation, a confi-
dence man’s delight. Bucket shops (also known colloquially as
“funeral parlors”) conducted a shady business wagering on the
ups and downs of stock prices, often without any stock changing
hands, and frequently without the benefit of a real wire reporting
real prices of real securities, run by pretend brokers unconnected
to any stock or commodity exchange, who rigged the local mar-
ket until suspicions heated up and they fled into the night.9
Wall Street tried to keep its distance from this subterranean
world. It even lobbied to outlaw these fringe establishments. But
much of what went on among the Street’s most conspicuous
movers and shakers so closely resembled the confidence rackets
of the bucket-shop operators that for many it was a distinction
without a difference. One heartrending case involved Civil War
hero and former president Grant at a time when he was both
deathly ill and verging on poverty. Grant had been gulled into a
fraudulent investment scheme run by his guileless son, Ulysses
“Buck” Grant, Jr., and a wily Wall Street speculator, Ferdinand
Wood, a man of “an insinuating and plausible demeanor.” When
the firm failed, so too did the rest of the Street, and the nation’s
favorite general was left a bankrupt.10
This coming together of financial hanky-panky and great do-
ings was particularly the case when it came to the railroads, the
technocultural equivalent of the Internet during the Gilded Age.
No sector of the economy invited more speculative fervor. The

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 The Confidence Man

roads were bound up with the manifest destiny of the country,

promising to link the coasts, settle and civilize great tracts of
wilderness, and provide the iron sinews of a continental empire.
Consequently, they inspired sound as well as addle-brained com-
mercial schemes and dreams. The railroads were also enormous
enterprises requiring great infusions of outside capital. Because
Wall Street pooled together and mobilized much of the country’s
liquid capital, it functioned as the midwife for the birth and de-
velopment of the nation’s principal means of transportation.
This combination of great expectations and financial depend-
ency was ripe for exploitation, including forms of exploitation
that hovered close to or sometimes crossed the border into ille-
gality, or at least into the shadowy world of the confidence game.
Jay Cooke was without question the most widely respected
banker in America during and after the Civil War. His reputa-
tion was securely anchored in the national mythos, where he was
heralded as a special kind of patriot for keeping the Union sol-
vent by single-handedly disposing of the government’s war bonds.
It would be hard to exaggerate the high regard for Jay Cooke at
the end of the Civil War. He had become a confidant of presi-
dents, a war hero whose sense of duty and financial integrity were
universally acclaimed.
But then he embarked on his grandest undertaking, the cre-
ation of the Northern Pacific Railroad, which promised to blaze
a path through the vast, untracked wilderness of the American
Northwest. It was a daunting project, launched with the best of

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intentions. Soon enough, however, its prospects darkened. The

vastness and complexity of the road required enormous sums of
money, both public and private. Cooke relied on political influ-
entials to pump up enthusiasm. After completing a portion of the
railroad, up to the Red River (so that it wouldn’t seem purely
chimerical), he petitioned the government for land grants and
bond guarantees, in part to induce European immigrants to settle
along the route, in part to persuade wealthy continental investors
to buy the company’s bonds. (The capital of North Dakota was
called Bismarck because Cooke was trying to peddle bonds in
Germany.) His claims for the road’s progress and future prospects
became more and more extravagant. It would be a great civilizing
project that would populate the wilderness, carrying people and
ideas and goods into a rich and unexploited part of the continent.
Along with Northern Pacific bonds his sales agents carried maps,
posters, and pamphlets extolling the bonanza to come. Celebri-
ties were taken on excursions; traveling exhibits of products
from the hinterland were staged around the country.
Slowly the aroma of corruption filtered through. Stories of
fraud and thievery surfaced. There were derisive allusions to “Jay
Cooke’s Banana Belt,” mocking the promotional literature that
portrayed the region’s arid emptiness as a lush tropical paradise.
Cooke found himself dangerously overextended. The collapse of
Northern Pacific securities in 1873 was responsible, more than
any other single event, for the next great Wall Street panic and
the most severe depression of the nineteenth century. All the

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hoopla surrounding the hyping of the railroad—the celebrity

testimonials, the patriotic cant about progress and the taming of
the continent, the lavishly illustrated, fantastical brochures de-
picting Duluth as the Paris of the Prairies, the expeditions to Vi-
enna and other European capitals to drum up bond sales and im-
migrant settlers for hypothetical towns in a tropical outback—all
this now seemed like a malignant form of make-believe con-
cocted by a patriot turned confidence man.11
Other notorious Wall Street railroad financiers, though with
less imposing reputations than Cooke’s, encouraged a similar over-
zealousness among potential investors and sometimes indulged
in conspiratorial acts designed to cheat them. The names of Cor-
nelius (“the Commodore”) Vanderbilt, “Jubilee Jim” Fisk (also
known as “the Admiral”), Daniel Drew (referred to far and wide
as “Unc’l Dan’l”), and Jay (“the Mephistopheles of Wall Street”)
Gould are legendary. These men speculated in railroads with a
vengeance, most lavishly the Erie Railroad, notorious as the
“scarlet woman of Wall Street.” They were associated with the
primordial age of the Robber Barons, the country’s true immer-
sion into the Industrial Revolution, and they were identified in
particular with Wall Street’s formative role in that upheaval. As
their monikers suggest—grandiloquent, folksy, and cartoonish
but with a touch of evil—they had about them the aura of the
confidence man. And as a matter of fact, they began their careers
in ways not far removed from the sort of dealings Dickens’s Gen-
eral and Melville’s riverboat speculator trafficked in. As young

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 The Confidence Man

men Fisk and Drew both spent their time earning a living in
traveling circuses, learning the con games common there. The
Mephistophelean Gould was alleged to have made his initial
stake cheating a partner in the tannery business, driving the poor
fellow to suicide. And “the Commodore” started as a ferry-boat
captain, a legitimate enough business, but was well known as a
razor-sharp wheeler and dealer with minimal scruples.
During the “Erie wars,” these men resorted to every imagi-
nable device and stratagem. When Drew, Fisk, and Gould faced
off against the Commodore for control of the Erie, they brazenly
printed up as much stock as was necessary to keep their enemy at
bay. Company reports, to the degree these men even deigned to
issue them, were full of lies, half-lies, and gross omissions, par-
ticularly regarding the decrepit state of the Erie. British inves-
tors later spent decades suing the road to recover funds these
Wall Street titans had in effect absconded with. When Fisk and
Gould tried to corner the market in gold, they nearly succeeded,
in part by circulating made-up stories about President Grant’s
plans to hoard some of the Treasury Department’s gold stock so
as to boost the prices abroad for American farm products. Like
many a confidence man, they often found themselves outrun-
ning the law or a posse of enraged investors. When the “corner
in gold” collapsed crowds gathered, hoping to catch a glimpse of
the renegade conspirators. Spotted, Fisk and Gould were chased
through the streets to Jubilee Jim’s Grand Opera House, where
they lived under siege for days. During the Erie wars Fisk and

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 The Confidence Man

Gould, along with Unc’l Dan’l Drew, compelled the Commodore

to engorge limitless quantities of Erie stock at ever escalating
prices, which his rivals were simply printing up at will. When
Vanderbilt bribed a pliant judge to issue a warrant for the arrest
of Gould and Fisk, the two shanghaied a small skiff at midnight
just in time to make a fog-enshrouded and nearly catastrophic
voyage across New York Harbor to a safe haven on the Jersey
shore, the cops in hot pursuit.12
All this derring-do, subterfuge, and artful dodging were com-
bined with conventional business practices—sharp financial deal-
ings to be sure, but otherwise normal and legal, if not exactly
exemplary. And that is just the point. These men were not oper-
ating bucket shops. To the contrary, they were among the most
respected, if feared, men on Wall Street; it would be fair to say
they personified the Street. Yet their apparent lack of scruple,
their willingness, even eagerness to hoodwink the public, strongly
suggested in the eyes of many that the Street itself was running a
confidence game.
About this Mark Twain had no doubt. He knew it in his bones
in part because he was himself the perfect mark, very much a kin-
dred spirit of Melville’s young man on the Fidele. Twain was an
incurable speculator and had, it seems, a special knack for failure.
At one time or another he took fliers on timber and mining
claims, a steam pulley, a new means of marine telegraphy, an en-
graving process, an invention that vaguely resembled a televi-

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 The Confidence Man

sion, a self-adjusting vest strap, and the Paige compositor, on

which he managed to lose two hundred thousand dollars. His
own proclivities probably helped him train a gimlet eye on the
spirit of the age, a pervasive gullibility, greediness, and ethical
negligence. The Gilded Age, written with Warner, was his hilari-
ous send-up of this state of the union, especially the scandal sur-
rounding the Crédit Mobilier and the construction of the Union
Pacific Railroad. Not only was it an instant best seller, it went on
to become a Broadway smash that then toured the country. The
novel’s title has remained with us as the apt characterization of
the period’s essential fakery.
Colonel Sellers is Twain and Warner’s memorable creation of
an all-American confidence man. The Colonel, an irrepressible
optimist and infectiously charming fraud who manages to delude
himself even while fooling others, dabbles in speculations of all
sorts, land and railroads especially, but always driven by the na-
tive instinct for the main chance, the ever-renewable dreamscape
of his countrymen. The Colonel (a self-appointed title) com-
bines a capacity for gargantuan exaggeration with a remarkable
faith in his most preposterous schemes; he is a catalogue of home-
spun American foibles. The pure enthusiasm with which he
manages to envision luxury amid the most miserable discomfort
mirrors perfectly the perverse optimism, the ingenuous zeal, that
marked the national character and made it so readily mulcted.
Casualties pile up as the novel rolls along. Democracy is dis-

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 The Confidence Man

graced, workers are left unpaid and abandoned to their fate, inti-
mate feelings among lovers, family, and neighbors are prostituted
or silenced—all the collateral damage of the confidence man.13

At no time in the subsequent history of Wall Street did it ever

manage to shed the image of the confidence man. But this was
emphatically the case during the Crash of ’29 and the Great De-
pression that followed. The impact of those events was so power-
ful that for a long generation the Street lived in the shadow of a
profound distrust. It had earned that obloquy through its assidu-
ous milking of the public confidence all through the boom years
of the 1920s.
Jazz Age confidence men came in two flavors. There were men
like Charles Ponzi, risen out of social obscurity, light-years re-
moved from the elite, white-shoe world of the Morgans, Bel-
monts, and Seligmans. A former vegetable dealer and onetime
forger and smuggler, forty-two, handsome, and glib, Ponzi made
his sensational debut in America just after World War I ended.
The scam he invented was stunningly simple. Investors loaned
him ten dollars without collateral and he promised to pay back
fifteen in ninety days. To the legions who lined up to join his
scheme, he explained that he would invest their money in buying
up International Post Union reply coupons overseas and redeem
them in various markets around the world to take advantage of
fluctuations in the value of foreign currencies. Money rolled in at

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 The Confidence Man

the rate of a million dollars a week. Ponzi bought a controlling

interest in the Hanover Trust Company to enhance his liquidity,
as well as his legitimacy. He moved into a fancy house and drove
around in a flashy “Locomobile.” By the early summer of 1920,
he was famous. By the end of the summer he was in jail for fraud,
where he stayed until 1934, when he departed for Italy and the
life of a minor fascist government official. He died a pauper in
Rio de Janeiro in 1949.14
There were others like Ponzi, also outlanders, though more
closely tied to the Street. Ivar Krueger, the “Match King,” was
the idol of Sweden and the financial savior of a brace of central
European nations in the 1920s. He was a titan whose empire
stretched around the globe. One country after another granted
him a match monopoly in return for life-preserving loans.
Krueger and Toll securities traded everywhere. After the crash,
however, it all went up in smoke: the Krueger kingdom rested on
fraud and deceit—$100 million in forged bonds—not detected
by the company’s negligent investment bankers from the venera-
ble firm of Lee, Higginson. Ivar Krueger committed suicide in
Paris in 1932.15
Michael Meehan was an Irish upstart, part of a cadre of ambi-
tious Irish speculators that included “Sell-’em” Ben Smith and
Joseph Kennedy. Meehan was a onetime theater-ticket agent
who first made an impression securing aisle seats at Broadway
hits for his aristocratic Wall Street clientele. Later he struck it
rich running an inside trading operation in RCA stock. He car-

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 The Confidence Man

ried on his manipulations after the crash, even after the creation
of the Securities and Exchange Commission, when he faked in-
sanity to avoid prosecution. But he was eventually expelled from
all the exchanges.
And there were notorious lone-wolf speculators like Jesse
Livermore, Joseph Kennedy, and others who fit perfectly that
frightening specter of those “scoundrel bears” mocked by Mel-
ville’s riverboat confidence man. Livermore, “the man with the
evil eye,” was a practicing Calvinist and a lecher who had been
around since the war. Supremely vulgar—he called Wall Street a
“giant whorehouse” and brokers “pimps”—he was also cagey, su-
perstitious, and a show-off, flaunting his yellow Rolls Royce,
steel yacht, and huge sapphire pinky ring. Reduced to penury by
1940, a two-time bankrupt, no longer taken seriously by anyone,
Livermore shot himself in the cloakroom of the Sherry Nether-
lands Hotel. A rambling eight-page suicide note intoned a stark
judgment: “My life was a failure.” Kennedy, pilloried like Liver-
more for his vampirelike conspiracies, amazingly enough became
the first head of the SEC under Franklin Roosevelt.
Even when these men were riding high in the 1920s, their
Wall Street speculations were considered so devious, so premised
on creating false illusions among naive investors, that even if
strictly speaking what they did was legal, it didn’t smell that way.
People like Jack Morgan wouldn’t deign to do business, much
less engage in social intercourse, with men like Kennedy. Yet

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after the crash it turned out that many of the nation’s leading
Wall Street bankers were involved in schemes no less unsavory.
Investment pools were conspiracies of inside traders designed to
pump up the price of a chosen stock. Pool members would then
dump it on an unsuspecting public as the price collapsed. Pools
were essentially legal conspiracies of market professionals and
their privileged clients which manipulated the market through
carefully planted rumors and quick, concentrated infusions of cash.
These pools were orchestrated by men like William Crapo Du-
rant, the era’s most notorious poolmeister and thrice-bankrupted
founder of General Motors. Invitations to join a pool were ex-
tended to a select circle of financial and political luminaries.
Pools like the famous insider group that whipped up enthusiasm
for RCA stock in the late 1920s (RCA, the dot.com of its day,
rocketed from $85.25 a share in 1928 to $549 in September
1929) were put together by distinguished circles of financiers; in
RCA’s case, Durant along with Charles Schwab of United States
Steel, John Jakob Raskob of DuPont, Walter Chrysler, and
Woodrow Wilson’s onetime aide and confidant Joseph Tumulty.
Often pool organizers were themselves directors of the corpora-
tions whose stock they were putting into play, dumping it on the
public when the time was ripe. For these select insiders pools
were sporting as well as moneymaking affairs, having about them
the thrill of hunting to hounds. One observer who tracked their
peregrinations talked of “the lure of action, of quick profit, the

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thrill of battle, the call of the chase, the glamour of admission

into a charmed circle, the attraction of mysterious enterprise.”
Such pools operated in 105 of the 550 stocks listed on the New
York Stock Exchange.16
After the crash, it turned out that a number of these same em-
inent men had been involved in tawdry schemes designed to en-
rich themselves at everyone else’s expense. So, for example, Sun-
shine Charlie Mitchell had lured thousands of National City
Bank clients into the most dubious of investments—among them
the notorious “Peruvian” bonds and the insupportable loans to
the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais that his own analysts had de-
clared destined for default. Even Mitchell’s personal financial af-
fairs were a mess. He had skirted the law prohibiting a commer-
cial bank from trading in its own stock and speculated in the
stock of his own bank. He had, moreover, concocted a transfer of
ownership of stock, at a fire-sale price, to his wife to escape the tax-
man. Other Wall Street luminaries were similarly compromised.17
Most shocking of all was the story of Richard Whitney. If ever
one man personified white-shoe Wall Street that man was Whit-
ney, an old-money thoroughbred. From his silver-haired mane
to the burnish of his Wetzel suit, he exuded the aura of com-
manding self-assurance. The scion of a family that arrived on the
Arbella in 1630, son of a bank president, educated at Groton and
Harvard, and polished at the Porceleian Club, Whitney ran his
own Wall Street firm. His brother George was a senior Morgan

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partner. His wife socialized with the Vanderbilts. His father-in-

law was a former president of the Union League Club. Richard
relaxed at the most recherché country clubs and spent weekends
hunting foxes and raising champion Ayrshire cattle on his 500-
acre New Jersey estate. Immaculately coiffed, tan, lean, and pos-
sessed of an erect gracefulness, Whitney was a specimen of
physical perfection as that new Wall Street ideal was stylized by
the white Protestant elite.
By the early 1930s, Whitney was president of the NYSE, an
exquisite embodiment of its traditional hauteur. He spent the
first half of the Depression decade declaiming from on high and
denigrating with great regularity every effort of the New Deal
administration to reform and regulate the Exchange, proclaim-
ing the purity of the ancient regime with a holier-than-thou
éclat. But the self-righteousness and aristocratic bonhomie con-
cealed a shocking secret. Whitney had been for years on a long
downslide greased by failed and sometimes whacky speculations
and had fallen desperately in debt. As he wore out his welcome,
and his last available lines of credit dried up, Whitney resorted to
embezzlement and fraud to keep afloat. He even used his posi-
tion as treasurer to misappropriate funds from the New York
Yacht Club, a favorite Brahmin hangout, and stole from the Ex-
change’s gratuity fund. Finally he was discovered, tried, and con-
victed of embezzlement, all under the hot lights of national
notoriety. FDR, who had been a classmate of Whitney’s at Gro-

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ton, registered the global shock: “Not Dick Whitney,” the presi-
dent gasped as the ex-president went off to Sing Sing dressed in
his somber black coat and bowler.18
Whether men of impeccable credentials or shady characters
like Charles Ponzi, these financiers had depended on the com-
plicity of their victims, as is the case with all confidence men.
The Roaring Twenties got its name in part because of the mass
infatuation with the stock market as a passway to instant wealth.
This delirium was fed, as stock market booms tend to be, by an
enthusiasm for the era’s newest technologies: radio, chemicals,
electronics, synthetic textiles, and aeronautics especially. Expec-
tations soon lost touch with reality. Many came to believe that
these vanguard inventions and discoveries would transform not
only particular industries but the whole way of life in America, or
at the very least the nature of the economy. As the decade un-
folded, a widespread conviction emerged that the economy had
achieved a new plateau of permanent prosperity, that this was a
“new era.” The old laws of the business cycle, with their exagger-
ated booms and disastrous busts, had been abolished, so the
faithful believed. Speculation had been domesticated, even made
scientific by the application of advanced mathematics, its inher-
ent riskiness reduced to a minimum.
These were illusions. To some extent they were perhaps inher-
ent in the uniquely powerful position of the U.S. economy fol-
lowing World War I. In part they grew naturally in the soil of

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that indigenous optimism and sense of the nation as history’s (or

God’s) chosen land, a transcendent belief that has always seemed
an American birthright. And, too, they drew on that instinct Jer-
emiah Church had early identified as pervasive among his coun-
trymen, that in America “every man is a speculator.” But in part
these illusions, which in turn pumped up a stupendous overcon-
fidence, were deliberately fostered by those who hoped to take
advantage of it. Wall Street financiers and industrialists, distin-
guished economists, print and radio journalists filled the air with
predictions of an endless boom. John J. Raskob, for example,
reared in a cold-water Hell’s Kitchen tenement but more lately
of DuPont and General Motors, as well as head of the Demo-
cratic National Committee, raved, “Everybody ought to be rich,”
in a widely circulated article in the Ladies’ Home Journal. His
plan pivoted around an Equities Securities Company run by a
trusted board of directors that would buy common stocks and
turn over the profits to average working people. One might in-
vest as little as fifteen dollars a month and, if the dividends were
left to accumulate, eighty thousand could be collected in twenty
years. The nationally renowned Yale economist Irving Fisher fa-
mously prophesied on the eve of the crash that “stock prices have
reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Thomas
Lamont of the House of Morgan told newly elected President
Herbert Hoover that “the wide distribution of ownership of our
great industries should go a long way to solve the problem of so-

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cial unrest” and that “the future appears brilliant.” Just in case
there were any Doubting Thomases left, Wall Street operators
bribed radio commentators to whip up enthusiasm for their fa-
vorite stocks.19
For all of this flim-flam and airborne enthusiasm to take root,
there needed to be a willing suspension of disbelief on the part
of those being conned—what today we might call irrational
expectations. And there was plenty of that, ranging from the
ridiculous to the sublime. Predicting the market assumed a dozen
faddish forms. One “system” foretold bearish downturns in any
month containing the letter “r.” Another tracked sunspots. Yet
another derived its picks from a code assembled from comic book
dialogue. Evangeline Adams, a famous fortune-teller, held court
in her studio above Carnegie Hall, where she issued a monthly
newsletter that explained how shifts in planetary positions were
bound to affect the market: “a guaranteed system to beat Wall
Street.” In The Great Gatsby and in short stories like “Paradise
Lost,” F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the boozy eroticism that im-
plicated Wall Street in the nation’s love affair with bootleg gin,
jazz, and the “flapper.” The Street itself became glamorous and
sexy, a site of universal intoxication. Financiers, once depicted as
stodgy, obese, and aged, received a makeover in national maga-
zines, reemerging as lean, fashionably dressed, and alluringly
youthful. The Street’s elders were treated as wise men, accorded
the status normally reserved for great philosophers or statesmen.
The ignominy that washed over the Street in the aftermath of

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the crash was as deep and long-lasting as it was just because mil-
lions had so recently placed their unreserved confidence in its
sagacity. It was reviled not only for its aristocratic arrogance but
for its sleaziness and its abuse of the nation’s confidence.20

It could be said that much of what went on in the 1920s repeated

itself in the 1990s. This is true, but also not entirely true. Mem-
ories of the dot.com bubble, its calamitous bursting, and the cas-
cade of Wall Street and corporate scandals that followed for
years in its wake are still all too fresh in the public mind. Once
again average folk were swept up in techno-messianism, this time
connected to biogenetic and information technologies. (A scien-
tist interviewed in Forbes magazine described Interferon—a fam-
ily of proteins once thought to be a cure for cancer and Wall
Street’s first wonder drug—as “a substance you rub on stock bro-
kers.”) Once again the media jettisoned their native skepticism
and contributed to the mass credulity. Just as in the Roaring
Twenties the air filled with talk of a new era, justifying strato-
spheric stock prices for Internet companies that were more vir-
tual than real (often merely the fever dream of some Silicon Val-
ley postgrad) that had not even brought a product to market
much less realized a profit. So, for example, the Wall Street Jour-
nal could gush about the Netscape IPO (initial public offering)
that launched the Internet stock bubble: “It took General Dy-
namics Corporation forty-three years to become a company worth

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today’s $2.7 billion in the stock market. It took Netscape Com-

munications Corporation about a minute.” Wall Street media
stars like Abby Joseph Cohen of Goldman Sachs issued warnings
against what she called FUDD—fear, uncertainty, doubt, despair.
After some initial reservations about “irrational expectations,”
Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and
the nation’s chief economic guru, began issuing blue skies assur-
ances that this new age economy and booming stock market had
limitless potential. The “information superhighway” was the
twentieth century’s fin de siècle version of Melville’s “New
Jerusalem . . . so called.”21
Moreover, the ballyhoo bucked up everyone’s confidence with
the fatuous assurance that confidence games by insiders were a
thing of the past thanks precisely to the advent of the World
Wide Web, which presumably made information transparent
and available to everyone. What had still seemed visionary dur-
ing Wall Street’s Jazz Age season in utopia now appeared immi-
nent; namely, that indeed everyone could safely become a specu-
lator, that Wall Street ’R’ Us.
Just as in the 1920s, however, there were confidence men
aplenty ready to seize the moment. And once again they came
from both the periphery and the pinnacle of society. Young men
and women on the make mastered the essential credo of the con
game, that appearances are everything. A movie aptly named
Boiler Room depicted a world of high-pressure, seductive stock
promotion and fraud that in its essentials would have seemed fa-

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 The Confidence Man

miliar to Martin Chuzzlewit. Ambitious young men, trained in

emotional thuggery and motivational overkill—they had memo-
rized all of Gordon Gekko’s lines from the film Wall Street—
scam the innocent if covertly covetous citizens of “shareholder
nation.” The psychic economy had not changed in three-quarters
of a century. The head honcho in Boiler Room instructs his ap-
prentice con men that above all they must always “act as if . . .”
They are Melville’s “knaves, wrong-side out” playing upon the
malignant innocence of the credulous. And their marks were
themselves seduced by the sexiness and adventure of high-risk fi-
nancial escapades. For day traders and others this world offered a
playful escape from the deadening routines of workaday life, a
revivifying sneaky thrill whose intensity was accentuated be-
cause the stakes were so high.
Some operators went too far, an occupational hazard. Online
investing had vastly expanded the capacity to run confidence
games en masse. In one case, a pimp whose day job was managing
an escort service used his off hours to fleece wire victims. In an-
other, two men running an Internet penny-stock fraud were
shot. And in one instance a confidence man from cyberspace
found himself hanging by his heels out the ninth floor window of
an office building, left there by rival stock promoters.22
Since the days of the bucket shop, Wall Street had struggled to
distinguish itself from the world of the “boiler room.” But as the
1990s wore on that became harder and harder to do. One satiric
novel, Bombardiers (1995), by Po Bronson, captured the atmo-

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sphere of outrageous and cynical hyping of dubious securities by

prestigious investment banks and brokerages. This had already
become a notorious Wall Street pastime during the Reagan years.
The savings and loan industry debacle of the late 1980s smelled
fishy enough as Wall Street sucked up the assets of the nation’s
most prudential and cautious financial institutions, inveigling
them into outlandishly risky, even reckless speculations. Michael
Milken, indicted on ninety-eight counts of racketeering, fraud,
and insider trading; Ivan Boesky, who assured the graduates of
Berkeley’s business school that “greed is healthy”; and others did
time in jail for their more flagrant junk bond deceptions. Drexel
Burnham Lambert pled guilty to six felony charges of mail, wire,
and securities fraud and paid $600 million in fines, leaving the firm
bankrupt by 1990. Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker (1989) made fun
of the ethos of macho bluffing and sly manipulation that fired up
the bond trading departments of houses like Salomon Brothers.
By the mid-1990s, things had gone so far over the top that
only satire could penetrate the lunacy. Bombardiers is a send-up of
the stressed-out world of the Wall Street bond trader. Its charac-
ters are ridden with neurotic compulsions. They are almost ludi-
crously competitive. And they are ready to gull their customers
into precarious investments without a scintilla of remorse. They
prate about freedom while panting after every disaster as a po-
tential source of booty, and see the government as a gigantic slush
fund. For these hyped-up salesmen, “Democracy is an obsolete

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 The Confidence Man

form of management.” The new era is “a propaganda economy, an

advice economy, a possibility economy, a rumor economy—an
economy of tall tales, fish stories, and oral folklore.” But they re-
ally outdo themselves and enter fully into the antic utopianism of
the moment when they concoct schemes to securitize whole na-
tions, planning to charter the Dominican Republic as a Delaware
corporation and auction it off as an IPO, bundling its bad debts
to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the
United States together into a corporate shell whose bonds can
then be dumped on the unsuspecting public in a kind of “share-
holder democracy” and “dollar diplomacy” for the new millen-
nium. The heroes foresee investment banks and military con-
tractors foreclosing on whole countries. “Coyote Jack,” head of
the sales force, wants to put capitalism to work in the Dominican
Republic, “turn it around and then sell it. We’ll make a killing. . . .
In a few years the world is going to thank us for getting rid of
government.”23
When Enron collapsed at the end of 2001, not long after the
stock market bubble burst, even the absurdist shenanigans imag-
ined by Bronson seemed to pale in comparison. With the active
connivance of many of the Street’s most powerful investment
houses, not just Enron but a slew of major corporations—
Tyco, WorldCom, Adelphia, Qwest Communications, Arthur
Andersen—turned out to be little more than stupendous confi-
dence games designed by top management to defraud the invest-

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 The Confidence Man

ing public, loot their own company treasuries, bankrupt their

employees’ pension funds, and rig the market, leaving entire com-
munities prostrate. Analysts from prestigious financial institu-
tions who presumably functioned to supply impartial assessments
of company stock instead hyped the securities their firms either
already did business with or hoped to do so as underwriters. The
complexity and deviousness of the subterfuges deployed by Wall
Street firms and their corporate co-conspirators to conceal the
machinations at Enron and elsewhere made them worthy succes-
sors of Philip Arnold and Silent John Slack. Corporate insiders
of the top twenty-five bankrupted companies made off with $3.3
billion in stock sales and bonuses as their firms went belly-up.
Until these firms were exposed as frauds, their self-promotion as
harbingers of unprecedented economic opportunity, even eco-
nomic democracy, rivaled anything concocted by Colonel Sellers
or Jazz Age enthusiasts of the “new era.”24
Yet despite the chilling similarities, public reaction to Wall
Street’s transgressions was more muted than might have been an-
ticipated, especially given the scale of the abuses, their organic
connection to the implosion of the stock market, and the fact
that they continued to surface with mind-numbing regularity for
years after the original Enron scandal. Certainly, compared to
the aftermath of the Crash of ’29, Wall Street escaped severe
censure for its systematic betrayal of public confidence. The sole
legislative response, the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Bill, only

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 The Confidence Man

demanded a modicum of new information from the securities in-

dustry. Some Wall Street houses were forced to pay substantial
fines for their misbehavior, and a number of corporate officers
and financial industry executives ended up bankrupt and behind
bars. But no one, for example, called for the renewal of the Glass-
Steagall Act, the New Deal’s principal regulatory protection
against the inherent conflict of interest between commercial and
investment banking operations housed within the same enter-
prise. Instead, its repeal in 1998 signaled the ongoing national
infatuation with the free market that had taken root in the Rea-
gan years. Nor were there any information-age “money trust”
investigations; even the level of moral outrage seemed tepid
compared to what had nearly befallen William Duer or the pool-
meisters of the 1920s. Indeed, Lewis Lapham, in Harper’s maga-
zine, characterized the government agenda as an act of “class
warfare . . . not the angry poor sacking the mansions of the rich,
but the aggrieved rich burning down the huts of the presumptu-
ous and trouble-making poor.”25
At the outset of his second administration, when new revela-
tions of Wall Street skullduggery were still commanding regular
front-page coverage in the nation’s metropolitan dailies, President
George W. Bush proposed the privatization of Social Security—
proposed, that is, entrusting the material well-being of retired
Americans to the same financial institutions that had just been
found guilty of gross negligence and often criminal misconduct.

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 The Confidence Man

The president had mistimed his proposal and overreached him-

self. The proposal died in Congress, strongly suggesting that the
visage of Wall Street as the confidence man still haunted the
public imagination. But the fact that the president chose to en-
gage in this battle at what seemed a peculiarly unpropitious mo-
ment also suggests something else. Faith in the free market had
grown remarkably resilient, so much so that it could tolerate, or
at least make allowances for, behavior that would have sparked
widespread outrage and calls for decisive action by earlier gener-
ations of Americans. Conversely, the public reaction signaled an
abiding distrust of government as an economic regulator and
protector. There once was a time when citizens mobilized in the
political arena to police it and eliminate abuses by private centers
of overwhelming economic power. By the turn of the new mil-
lennium, however, millions of Americans were persuaded that
government bureaucracy inhibited rather than facilitated eco-
nomic opportunity, democracy, and justice. The kind of democ-
racy many now placed their confidence in might be summarized
as “one share, one vote.” A great many people had come to think
of the market as the medium through which one discovered free-
dom. Moreover, no major depression followed the meltdown of
the dot.com bubble, further diminishing any sense of urgency
about mounting a frontal assault on Wall Street’s latest reincar-
nation as the confidence man.
Until such an emergency arises—if it ever does—public alarm
and readiness for more drastic measures may remain low. Re-

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 The Confidence Man

gardless of whether that proves to be the case, market society will

continue to release passions and irrational expectations that Wall
Street is bound to exploit. What is noteworthy is how often those
who have abused the public trust were at one time or another
public heroes of quite an extraordinary sort.

95
Image not available
 three

The Hero

When “the Commodore,” Cornelius Vanderbilt, died in 1877,

the outpouring of grief was exceeded only by the lavishness with
which he was eulogized. Flags flew at half-mast at City Hall, at
the Stock Exchange, at Grand Central Station, and along the
routes of his railroads. Journalists and politicians hailed him as
“one of the kings of the earth” and depicted him as an engineer-
ing visionary, a manager of operations so vast and complex they
required a kind of military genius to master. One British ob-
server who otherwise viewed the world of Wall Street with bot-
tomless contempt, excepted the Commodore, who “assumes the
royal dignity and moral tone of a Gaetulian lion among the hye-
nas and jackals of the desert.” The New York Herald summed him
up: “It was one honest, sturdy, fearless man against the world,
and in the end the man won.”1

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 The Hero

Writing within a few years of Vanderbilt’s passing, his first bi-

ographer, who considered the Commodore’s story a “model for
boys and young men,” described his character and accomplish-
ments in terms normally reserved for men of genius, warriors of
extraordinary courage and improbable triumphs, or statesmen of
surpassing wisdom. Without the Commodore, he concluded, “no
railroads or steamships or telegraphs; no cities, no leisure class,
no schools, no colleges, literature, art; in short no civilization.”2
Vanderbilt had enjoyed this legendary reputation long before
he died. Stories—some true, some half true, some pure fable—
circulated widely celebrating his rough-and-ready vigor and dash,
his commanding presence, his extraordinary valor, his sexual
prowess, and his insouciant irreverence. One such tale depicted
him at the helm of his yacht during a terrifying storm, the ship
floundering, a collision imminent, captaining the boat to safety
while all aboard froze in panic. This tale reeks of mythmaking,
but another comes closer to being genuine, an anecdotal account
of the Commodore’s frontier brashness, for which he was some-
times condemned but more often admired. Confronted by a rival
to his Nicaraguan Steamboat Company, Vanderbilt disdained any
resort to the legal system and bluntly told his competitors,
“Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you
for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you.”
This image of the Commodore as a man’s man of implacable
force, someone prepared to act outside the law who would brook
no interference with his imperial will, was the stuff of dime nov-

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 The Hero

els, penny newspapers, and schoolboy hortatory, but also of more

staid editorials in middle-class periodicals. Moreover, it evoked a
kind of masculine aggressiveness and sexual potency that added
to the Vanderbilt legend. Father of twelve, six feet tall, red-
cheeked, with a shock of white hair and flowing sideburns, the
Commodore was reported to be a man of gargantuan appetites
and especially seductive to women. Whether the latter was true
or not—and the evidence suggests it was—the aura of machismo
further burnished Vanderbilt’s public presence as a hero steeped
in the deepest reservoirs of American folklore.
Nor did the Commodore consider mythic self-promotion be-
neath him. In 1869 he had erected, partly at public expense, a
monument to be known as the Vanderbilt Memorial Bronze. It
was a stupendous piece of masonry located at the depot of the
Hudson River Railroad in Saint John’s Park in New York City.
The depot itself was nothing short of colossal, an ornate building
whose huge pediment was capped by a 12-foot-high statue of
Vanderbilt. The Commodore’s fur-coated, stony likeness was
surrounded by bas-reliefs depicting his fabled career on land and
sea. A 50-ton cyclorama included carvings of steamships and lo-
comotives, Neptune and a sea monster, boilers, birds, machin-
ery, cows, pineapples, and railroad tracks. The monument’s un-
veiling unleashed florid Hosannas to the Commodore and his
“luminous sagacity.” One newspaper noted that while it was per-
haps “not so prodigious as the Pyramid of Cheops, nor so lofty as
the Colossus of Rhodes . . . it will do.”

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 The Hero

Public reaction to the Bronze was by no means universally fa-

vorable. Some were appalled by its vulgarity, its egocentric hyper-
bole, and its transparency as a form of self-exculpation. After all,
for large numbers of the urban and rural middle and working
classes (and, for that matter, Knickerbocker patricians and New
England Brahmins), Vanderbilt remained a figure of insatiable
greed and lawless deceit, a confidence man writ large and so a moral
stench in the nostrils of polite society. A whole generation of
his fellow Wall Street Robber Barons—including Russell Sage,
Daniel Drew, Jim Fisk, and Jay Gould—suffered the same fate.
Nonetheless, as the Commodore’s miraculous elevation sug-
gests, in the years following the Civil War these men managed to
shed their less savory associations with the suspect world of the
confidence man. Many of their countrymen began to think of
them as Napoleonic. This division of opinion reflects the am-
bivalent sentiments Wall Street has always provoked; indeed,
there were plenty of people who were simultaneously awestruck
and repelled by what they saw. The New York Herald, a paper
otherwise critical of the Erie Railroad debacle, nevertheless felt
compelled to acknowledge that the schemes devised by Fisk and
Gould “exhibit Napoleonic genius.” Moreover, it is not inciden-
tal but on the contrary essential to their mystique that many
of these men began life as men from nowhere. They underwent a
transmutation—with some poetic license one might describe an
arc stretching from confidence man to colossus—which cap-
tured a primal feature of the country’s democratic faith.3

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 The Hero

Napoleon gripped the popular imagination all through the

nineteenth century. His legendary status naturally was largely
owing to his military genius and imperial omnipotence. But what
also counted heavily in the way people reacted to men like Van-
derbilt or Fisk was a plebian assertiveness that was also part of the
Napoleonic mystique. Their unprepossessing backgrounds, their
earthy irreverence toward established ways of doing things or es-
tablished social authority, their audacity in taking the law into
their own hands, their fearless embrace of the risky and the un-
known reminded people of the French emperor. Napoleon, that
Corsican upstart risen out of social obscurity, was after all a hero
of the democratic revolution, his whole life a monument to a
supreme act of self-creation. It was in that spirit that these new
Wall Street conquistadors were welcomed into the pantheon of
native heroes.
“Jubilee Jim” Fisk, for example, presented himself as a living
caricature of the conquistador as commoner. His Wall Street
wheelings and dealings kept him always one step ahead of offi-
cers of the law and placed him perpetually on the precipice of fi-
nancial disaster; he had an infatuation for risky undertakings, the
riskier the better. But the braggadocio with which he carried
them off left people gasping. When caught red-handed trying to
rig the market for gold, Fisk’s aplomb was breathtaking: “Noth-
ing lost save honor,” he is reported to have said with a grin meant
to provoke. Half the time he dressed like a race-track tout, the
rest of the time as a naval admiral, a title he bestowed on himself

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 The Hero

to go with the captaining of his ocean-going steam yacht. The

old Grand Opera House on 27th Street and 8th Avenue where he
set up his headquarters—known as “Castle Erie”—was extrava-
gantly remodeled until it looked like a cross between an upscale
bordello, a Broadway palace, and a museum of medieval knick-
knacks; it included a throne cobbled together with gold-studded
nails and represented a kind of corporate Xanadu, gaped at by
throngs of passing New Yorkers. There he carried on a flamboy-
ant and adulterous affair with a former showgirl, a scandal he
did nothing to conceal from his wife, who remained silently se-
questered at home in Boston. Indeed, his sexual passions would
prove his untimely undoing when he was murdered by the new
lover of his onetime paramour in the lobby of the Grand Central
Hotel.
By the time that happened, however, Fisk had already achieved
wide popular acclaim as a kind of Wall Street Robin Hood. In
part this was thanks to his immediate and generous response to
the great cataclysm of the Chicago Fire in 1871 when he com-
mandeered his railroads to rush emergency supplies to the devas-
tated city. A ballad celebrating that feat remained a barroom fa-
vorite for many years after Fisk’s death. But the reason thousands
turned out in New York to mourn his passing and lined the
tracks running to his final resting place back home in Vermont
had as much to do with his meteoric rise from circus barker to
champion Wall Street speculator and railroad impresario, a dare-

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devil trip taken in high hilarity and with a hero’s disdain for the
conventions that stifled the desires of littler men. He was the
Donald Trump of the nineteenth century, a vulgar and vainglori-
ous spectacle, but a man whose ascent excited a sneaky thrill
among legions of spectators who secretly wished they could be
so bold. Fisk, who had a way with words, put it best: “I was born
to be bad,” he once said; and who could entirely resist that?4
This was a peculiarly American form of cultic idolatry in which
men of suspect reputation morphed into heroic scoundrels or
heroes of irreverence. The mountebank had become king, but an
irregular, eccentric kind of king. Freebooting, skirting the law,
or living beyond its reach, this new hero was half warlord, half
Everyman, yet, like Napoleon, not altogether either. He was a
hybrid character in a raw, hybrid economy, enmeshed in a society
obsessed with the infinite possibilities of uninhibited beginnings:
a pathfinder and a mogul at one and the same time. With the
grime of fishing boats and circuses still clinging to them, these
heroes built themselves grandiose palaces staffed by liveried ser-
vants and paraded about in the finest European equipages. But
they fooled no one. Beneath that gilded veneer they remained the
ruffians they started out as . . . and that was a vital part of their
heroic charm.
The conjoining of such disparate, even paradoxical, traits cre-
ated a Wall Street confection (although one by no means confined
to Wall Street) that fascinated the generation that straddled the

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Civil War. This figure left a legacy that still colors our sense of
the Street. “Diamond Jim” Brady, Charles Yerkes, Joseph Ken-
nedy, Michael Milken, and Ivan Boesky all belong to a larger
gallery of Wall Street Napoleons stretching from the Gilded Age
to the age of the dot.com billionaire. Each in his own way confirms
a cultural image of the gunslinger financier: imperious, self-made,
ruthlessly ambitious, and full of masculine bravado. They were and
still are perceived as outlanders: outside the law, outside estab-
lished institutions, outside the conventions of normal social be-
havior. Indeed, it was because they were not to the manor born
that their rise and mastery have the romantic aura of democratic
adventure, turning roguishness into heroism.
Still, despite this cultural continuity, Wall Street as a theater
of the heroic has undergone its own historic makeover. What its
protagonists have set out to conquer, what they have risked, how
their daredevil doings have affected the rest of us, how Ameri-
cans have measured their exploits, even the way they have pa-
raded their masculinity, all these and more have registered the
profound upheavals over the past century and half in the struc-
ture of the economy and the character of American culture.

Wall Street’s first heroic age coincided with the birth pangs of
the country’s economic modernization, a ferociously competitive
undertaking accompanied by stupendous technological achieve-

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ments, unimagined changes and improvements in everyday life,

and great social suffering.
Conquistadors from the Street had much to conquer, Mother
Nature for one, for they were involved in the single most chal-
lenging enterprise associated with this formative phase of the In-
dustrial Revolution: the crisscrossing of the continent’s vastness
with the world’s most formidable railroad network. Cornelius
Vanderbilt, Jay Cooke, Edward Harriman, James Hill, and even
pure speculators like Jim Fisk and Jay Gould were involved, some
more intimately than others, in the planning and execution of
enormously complex engineering marvels. They needed to know
at least something about constructing bridges and tunnels and
overpasses, about the complexities of iron and steel rail produc-
tion, about the vagaries of the weather and the geological eccen-
tricities of largely unexplored terrain. Andrew Carnegie, before
he became a steel manufacturer, grew rich selling railroad bonds,
not by building railroads. Still, to convince investment houses at
home and abroad to buy the securities of new railroad ventures
he had to make a persuasive case that the road’s planners were ca-
pable of hurdling the technological and natural obstacles that
stood in their way. For a layman, his knowledge of the arcana of
bridge construction, in particular, was impressive.5
Subduing mountains and deserts and trackless wilderness was,
however, merely the back-story to even more recalcitrant objects
of heroic conquest, particularly other men. All these Wall Street

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champions came equipped with a merciless instinct to dominate

that tolerated no resistance, whether from rival speculators or
duly constituted public authorities. They seemed promethean
figures, indefatigable, and, like frontiersmen, prepared to do
what had to be done in the remorseless battle to win out over
their opponents.
As their enterprises grew in scope the most intractable center
of resistance to their power emerged from among the thousands
of skilled and unskilled laborers whose efforts they sought to co-
ordinate and exploit. This confrontation was protracted and
sometimes bloody. During the Great Railroad Strike of 1877
cities from coast to coast witnessed insurrectionary standoffs be-
tween government militias and private bodies of armed men in
the employ of the railroad barons on one side and infuriated
workers and their sympathetic families and neighbors on the
other. During his war to the death against the Knights of Labor
striking against his western railroads, Jay Gould, in an outburst
of cynicism and Robber Baron braggadocio, threatened that he
could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
Domination of this kind played to mixed reviews, but by the turn
of the century most such resistance had been subdued and the
mastery of these titans confirmed.
And then there was the marketplace itself, a place so mercurial
it eluded every would-be conqueror. Beneath its prosaic exterior
of trucking and bartering, the market was a threatening zone of
chronic uncertainty, no matter how much people tried to make

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its workings predictable. This was emphatically the case in late-

nineteenth-century laissez-faire America. The market was as free
as it ever would be—free certainly of any public supervision and
free too of most of the traditional constraints and customary
rules that once limited the sovereignty of the law of supply and
demand. No one could doubt how fatally dangerous a place the
market had become. Beginning in 1837 and continuing until the
eve of World War I, panics and depressions erupted with deadly
regularity about every fifteen to twenty years. They left in their
wake a trail of bankrupted businessmen and speculators (not
to mention dispossessed farmers and unemployed workers), ir-
refutable evidence that such “freedom” bore a heavy price.
Wall Street’s heroes took the market’s dog-eat-dog impera-
tives with deadly seriousness and accepted, even welcomed, its
amorality. For them the free market was first of all free: that is, a
game whose rules were few, fragile, and meant to be bent or bro-
ken to conform to the wills of its most implacable players. Their
triumphs were therefore enveloped in a romance of industrial
privateering, as if they were reincarnations of the English sea
dogs of the sixteenth century, living on and crossing the border
of state-sanctioned piracy, who synthesized the greed for gold,
the appetite for adventure, and the love of exploration into an
unquenchable spirit of capitalist enterprise. Starting out with
little or nothing, they put together or presided over vast systems
of daunting financial, engineering, and logistical complexity. In-
dustries, towns, and cities, entire unsettled regions were given

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life (or deprived of it) as the hero financiers executed their grand
calculations. And even if in the end they were defeated by the mar-
ket’s wildness, they could be admired for their Faustian panache.
Finally, these Wall Street titans had to conquer themselves,
perhaps their greatest challenge. Everything they did—or so it
seemed to their growing armies of mesmerized spectators—en-
tailed risk. They lived their lives as ongoing encounters with
chance, with the hot breath of disaster at their backs. And they
never blinked. They remained cool when many lesser men—
Wall Street was full of them—panicked. Risk was the arena in
which they proved their manhood, in which they created them-
selves anew, in which they worked their will and exercised their
mastery over the natural world, the world of men and machines,
and the fickleness of fortune.
An aura surrounded these financial adventurers that had noth-
ing to do with whatever material accomplishments might appear
on their résumés. As great speculators they belonged not so
much to a profession or occupation as they did to a state of spiri-
tual subversion. They lived in a formless infinity of pure money,
a universe with no fixed values, where it was unwise to take any-
thing for granted. If the Wall Street hero might be likened to
Napoleon, he was also regarded as kin to the plunger, the wild-
catter, the mystic traveler to uncharted and dangerous lands of
fathomless risk. It was an exhilarating world, dizzying, and it car-
ried with it the headiness of unadulterated freedom. Those brave
enough to expose themselves to its vertiginous atmosphere broke

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free of the world of work and its strictures of inner moral disci-
pline. They recognized no authority, treated all men with egalitar-
ian indifference, and responded only to the universal mathematics
of the disembodied market. In a society that encouraged in every
man the dream of one day risking all and breaking free—“self-
reliance” as the signature American promise and imperative—the
spectacle of Wall Street’s champion gamblers walking a tightrope
with no net imparted a metaphysical thrill.
One might rightly ask, Why Wall Street especially? To be sure,
there were plenty of other Robber Barons, industrialists who
kept their distance from Wall Street or even intensely disliked it.
Andrew Carnegie was one, although he came to this position
only after spending lucrative years as a bond trader dealing with
the major American and European investment houses. Henry
Ford was another, a man who never got over his primal aversion
to financiers. And these men were, like Vanderbilt, Fisk, and
Morgan, lionized for their audacity and sangfroid and like them
lived under the sign of the Conquistador. But Wall Street’s “ti-
tans of finance” occupied pride of place. First they were deeply
implicated in the era’s signature enterprise, railroads, whose capi-
tal needs were so enormous they could not get out of the plan-
ning stage without huge infusions of money mobilized by Wall
Street. That alone left the Street’s luminaries in a conspicuously
commanding position.
Something more subterranean was at work as well. Wall Street
seemed to distill—in the mysteries of its machinations, the exoti-

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cism of its specialized vocabulary, the intangibility of what it

trucked and bartered, its unpredictability, its penchant for mas-
querade, intrigue, and dissimulation, its inscrutability, and its
capacity to derange the whole economy—the quintessence of
risk. If you could master all that you were a hero indeed. The
speculative looting and relooting of the Erie Railroad or the
bravura attempt by Gould and Fisk to corner the market in gold
were appalling and morally outrageous. But they also fascinated
the nation because they combined the mastery of an arcane ex-
pertise with dauntless bravado and were staged on the edge of a
cliff. And their timing was perfect. Just as the western frontier
was receding into the past, and with it the proving ground of the
frontier hero, that same character seemed to migrate back east to
stake out new territory in the financial badlands of Wall Street.
A distinctive vocabulary inscribed these men in the urban-
industrial legend. Popular media poured out stories of financial
titans whose traits mirrored the technologies they had come to
dominate: men of iron with wills of steel, blessed with magnetic
personalities and what might be called “titan’s eyes,” the kind
that could look right through you. The most celebrated example
of these can be found in Edward Steichen’s photograph of J. P.
Morgan, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York. Steichen was so struck by Morgan’s eyes that he compared
looking into them to staring into the headlights of an oncoming
locomotive. Contemporaries, even critical ones, invariably de-
scribed these men as “bold,” and “magnificent of view,” “full of

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verve,” capable of absorbing a hard blow without flinching, “au-

dacious,” “keen,” and possessed of that icy composure that could
stand up to the worst possible news. In James D. McCabe’s 1870
classic celebration of self-made American heroes, Great Fortunes
and How They Were Made, portraits of Vanderbilt and Drew pic-
tured them as kingly yet humble, plain but hypnotic, specimens
of men whom Shakespeare called “born great.” Though the two
were different in dozens of ways, one insider nonetheless cap-
tured what he saw as their elemental likeness: both “have the
mind of crystal, the heart of adamant, the hand of steel, and the
will of iron.”6
Treated as American primitives, these men had a plebian brash-
ness and a virility that observers marked and often envied. This
exaggerated sense of masculinity and potency was of a different
order from the sexuality of the Wall Street confidence man. If
the latter was seductive, he was so in a womanish sort of way:
wily and flirtatious, a “girly-man,” perhaps, in the eyes of the less
enamored. These Gilded Age buccaneers, on the contrary, were
Terminators. E. L. Godkin, the founder and editor of The Nation
and a passionate hater of these Wall Street pirates, was particu-
larly impressed, not in an entirely negative way, by their rough-
ness and size. Fisk dressed “like a bartender, huge in nerve as in
bulk”; Drew lied and stole his way to wealth with “tobacco juice
drooling from his mouth.” August Belmont, who otherwise af-
fected an air of social refinement foreign to ruffians like Drew
and Vanderbilt, enjoyed a reputation for sexual allure based as

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much on his immense financial and political power as on his

brooding eyes and dark good looks. So, too, Vanderbilt’s feats of
physical strength were part of his legend, as was his braving of
the British blockade during the War of 1812. Indeed, the per-
sonal triumphs of these Wall Street heroes were easily assimi-
lated into the nation’s own growing muscularity, its urge to
plunge boldly into the unknown and emerge the master, to con-
tend with the great powers of the earth for global supremacy.7
Wall Street’s heroes helped revise almost beyond recognition
an old-fashioned image of middle-class Victorian masculinity
identified with thrift, perseverance, responsibility, integrity, chas-
tity, and honesty. Over and over again a set of warrior attributes
associated with power, will, and force were singled out for special
regard, implicitly demeaning the boring utilitarianism and me-
thodical routine of the reigning version of bourgeois manliness.
A river of second-rate novels and magazine short stories circulated
this image of the financial tycoon as warrior far and wide. Theo-
dore Dreiser, who was far better than second rate, is especially il-
luminating in this regard. His reputation as a left-wing writer
notwithstanding, the awestruck vantage point from which he
viewed the financial titan in his trilogy The Financier, The Titan,
and The Stoic make of Dreiser a kind of hostile witness for the
prosecution, his work evidence of how compelling the visage of
the conquistador had become.
Dreiser was a social Darwinist, though of an aberrant sort. Or-

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thodox social Darwinism, as espoused by William Graham Sum-

ner (the Yale professor who was Herbert Spencer’s chief ex-
ponent in America) held that “the millionaires are a product of
natural selection. . . . It is because they are thus selected that
wealth . . . aggregates under their hands. . . . They may be fairly
regarded as naturally selected agents for society for certain work.
They get high wages and live in luxury, but the bargain is a good
one for society.” Dreiser, however, did not buy into Sumner’s so-
cial meliorism or moral theology. He was, rather, a Darwinian
fundamentalist. Fitness implied nothing one way or another
about social progress or moral order. It was a cold fact of nature,
barren of higher meaning, without any redeeming solicitude for
the human condition.8
The first volume of Dreiser’s trilogy opens with a Darwinian
epiphany. As a young boy, Frank Algernon Cowperwood, the
story’s protagonist, makes a life-defining observation. Watching
a heavily armored lobster devour a vulnerable squid, young Frank
discovers the answer to the question “How is life organized?
Things live on each other—that was it,” is his spare and unblink-
ing conclusion. That ethos is the thread running through
Cowperwood’s whole career as a financier, an occupation that in
Dreiser’s view is neither benign nor demonic. It is predatory, to
be sure, but so is all of nature. It can bring calamity, but the uni-
verse is not, as the social Darwinists believe, an orderly place but
inherently unstable and out of anyone’s control: in the narrator’s

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view it is a world of “jungle-like complexity . . . a dark, rank

growth of horrific, but avid life—life at the full, life knife in hand,
life blazing with courage and dripping at the jaws with hunger.”9
In the course of the first two volumes of the trilogy, Cowper-
wood abandons every vestige of sanctified convention. He be-
comes a living impiety, a defiler of Christian ethics and bourgeois
decorum, true only to the parable of the lobster and the squid.
He jettisons even a purely rhetorical deference to the ossified
maxims of competitive free-market capitalism. He mocks the cul-
ture’s pious faith in the democratic way, coolly suborning gang-
loads of public officials. And his faithlessness is all-embracing.
He cheats shamelessly on his wife, Lillian, a priggish, passionless
creature of formidable social rectitude. Unlike his peers, whose
adulteries and shady business practices are fogged over by pious
pretense and feigned shock, Frank does not work to conceal his
transgressions. Nor is his adultery a petty fling; it is a grand sex-
ual passion for an indecently young girl, herself a creature of
fecund beauty, impulsive, sexually ravenous, and highly danger-
ous to Frank’s fragile social reputation. Indeed, Cowperwood’s
eroticism is not only as potent as his magnetic attraction to fi-
nancial empire-building; it is fundamentally the same unquench-
able craving for conquest and control. It allows no compromise.
Dreiser is not squeamish about any of this. The trilogy avoids
moralizing and harbors no second thoughts. This kind of dis-
tanced view, free of irony, is at the core of what Dreiser under-
stands to be happening in a world reconstructed by the great

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forces gathering around Wall Street. Cowperwood is a mighty

player of the game: ruthless, impressively powerful—an exploiter,
to be sure, but one whose power to exploit expresses a funda-
mental law of life; an exploiter who is also a creator of wealth and
builder of cities. Cowperwood is a blunt, granitelike figure of
considerable density, not easily reducible to the moral polarities
of an earlier age. He stands at the heart of an awesome, amoral
brute matter-of-factness.

J. P. Morgan was in many ways utterly unlike Frank Cowper-

wood or the real-life financial sea dogs Frank emulated. Unlike
many of them, Morgan was an American aristocrat, steeped in
the cosmopolitan sophistication of Knickerbocker New York,
Brahmin Boston, and Rittenhouse Square Philadelphia, a world
seeded with the right clubs, the best schools, and the socially
registered. Fisk, Vanderbilt, and Russell Sage excited the public
imagination precisely because of their vulgar incivility, irrever-
ence, and appetite for risk. Morgan, on the contrary, was all deco-
rum. Prudential, circumspect, risk averse, well-bred, he was a
practicing patrician. The Wall Street that preceded him was
renowned for its speculative abandon. Its heroes were gamblers,
lone desperados stalking the financial badlands. They were in the
American grain. Morgan stood outside it. He hated speculation.
He hated the free market. Yet for those very un-American attrib-
utes and attitudes he was looked up to by millions of his fellow

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citizens. He was a Wall Street hero of a new type. Dreiser might

have recognized his special “fitness” for the latest stage in the
economy’s evolution, which seemed to demand a kind of Olym-
pian dirigisme.
When he died in 1913 Morgan was eulogized extravagantly, in
part for qualities he seemed to share with his predecessors: a cer-
tain ruthlessness, huge ambition, self-assurance, and of course
those tycoon eyes. But most of all what comes across is the sense
of Morgan as a savior. When the tales of his legendary business
deals had been recounted—of his preeminence among his fellow
investment bankers, his philanthropic generosity, his breathtak-
ing collection of art and antiquities, his confidential relations
with presidents, kings, and prime ministers the world over—
something quieter, less visible, but of even greater gravitas re-
sounded. Morgan had instilled order and integrity, or so his ad-
mirers were convinced, on an economy that seemed dangerously
without them. The nation’s preeminent banker had managed to
“bestride the world like a Colossus” not because he dominated
the stock market; that was too superficial a view. He was a preter-
natural financier for whom the ticker tape recorded not dollars
won and lost, but a “panorama of rushing trains and roaring fac-
tories.” Financial operations that when performed by lesser men
might leave one queasy were cleansed of improprieties in his
hands. “Character First Was His Philosophy,” declared a New
York Times headline. Harper’s lapidary encomium anointed him a
“matchless upbuilder of properties . . . a faithful trustee of bil-

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lions, full of faith in his country and his fellow man. . . . Above all
a true patriot.” He was, in a word, the nation’s savior.10
Chaos is the dark side of the free market. Never was that more
true than during the last third of the nineteenth century. The
fin-de-siècle economy was characterized by internecine compe-
tition and insecurity, punctuated by periodic panics and two se-
vere depressions, one in 1873 and another twenty years later,
each of which took years to lift. The urban working classes and
family farmers suffered the worst. But small- and middle-sized
businessmen as well as middle-class professionals and a growing
population of white-collar workers were hit as well. This inter-
mittent derangement of the economy had profound social and
political consequences. Relations between the rich and poor grew
more brittle and explosive. The Populist Party threatened to bring
those social animosities into the political arena. Many saw the
election of 1896, in which the Democratic candidate William
Jennings Bryan condemned the Republicans and their Wall Street
controllers for crucifying mankind on a “cross of gold,” as a day
of reckoning. A foreboding that the nation might, once again and
not even a generation removed from the Civil War, be dividing
in two gripped the popular imagination. More than any other
figure from the world of business, J. P. Morgan seemed to offer
hope, a presence commanding enough to restore order.
Three moments in particular illuminate how the country’s
most esteemed investment banker earned his reputation as a
heroic savior. The business of railroading was Exhibit A to the

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growing multitudes convinced that the free market simply didn’t

work. The record of senseless overbuilding and duplication of
lines, of overcapitalized, watered stock, of dangerously rotting rails
and capital-starved equipment, of gross corruption and incestu-
ous relations between railroad financiers and the construction
companies hired to build the roads was more than infuriating. It
was suicidal. Each new panic was prompted by a railroad bank-
ruptcy that, during the era’s more serious depressions, set off an
avalanche of others. More roads defaulted during the depression
of the 1890s than at any other time in American history.11
Beginning in the 1880s, the House of Morgan initiated a se-
ries of interventions which resulted in the reorganization of the
country’s railroad network. What today might be called financial
reengineering established a discipline through centralized man-
agement overseen by Morgan and a small coterie of white-shoe
investment bankers and lawyers. Lines were merged, water wrung
out of bloated railroad securities, slash-and-burn competition
inhibited. The new regime eliminated the worst of the old abuses.
Railroads remained objects of speculation and insider deal mak-
ing. But these innovations in corporate architecture, widely
known as “morganization,” which frowned on speculation and
the free-for-all irrationality of the free market, imposed law and
order. For this Morgan earned the sobriquet “Bismarck of the
railroads.”12
What Morgan achieved with the railroads was a prelude to his
even more far-reaching structural overhaul of the whole econ-

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omy. During a few short years, from 1897 through 1903, together
with a select circle of Wall Street investment bankers, he invented
the publicly traded corporation which we now take for granted
as the basic organizational form of economic life. These men did
not actually invent the modern corporation, but they did foster
and finance a great merger movement in these years that pro-
duced such household names as General Electric, International
Harvester, and, most famous of all, United States Steel, the
world’s first billion-dollar corporation. A century of economic
free-for-all vanished in a decade. Between 1895 and 1904, 1,800
firms were swallowed up in corporate mergers. The 1900 census
recorded 73 industrial combinations valued at more than $10
million; ten years earlier there had been none. By 1909, a mere 1
percent of all industrial firms accounted for 44 percent of the
value of all manufactured goods. The hundred largest industrial
corporations quadrupled in size. In 1909, 5 percent of all manu-
facturing firms employed 62 percent of all wage earners.13
This intense reshuffling of the economic order eliminated
a mass of heretofore privately owned, fiercely competitive com-
panies across a broad range of industries. In their place “peak”
corporations, underwritten and overseen by Wall Street’s elite
financiers—Kidder Peabody, Lee, Higginson, the Belmont in-
terests, Seligman Brothers—along with the largest commercial
banks, such as Chase National Bank, National City Bank, and
First National Bank, established their dominance. They rationed
out supplies of scarce capital and undertook to reorganize the

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core of the nation’s productive apparatus. Morgan and his col-

leagues installed a new kind of managerial cadre who came
equipped to run the sophisticated, centralized, and specialized
bureaucracies erected to ensure the durability of these colossal
corporate combinations. This new managerial trusteeship, while
mindful of its obligations to stockholders and the bottom line,
was also charged with guaranteeing stability and good order
within the corporation and in its relations with the outside world.
By 1903, the merger movement had revolutionized the econ-
omy. A genteel clubbiness dampened the impact of competitive
rivalries; they lived on, but under watchful eyes. For many who
had grown weary of the free market’s chaotic uncertainty and de-
structiveness, its chronic cycles of overproduction followed by
mass shutdowns and bankruptcies, the new order, even if less
free, was a godsend, an act of salvation whose architect deserved
the highest praise.
But the American economy was big and getting bigger. Like
any vigorous capitalist economy it continued to inspire new
entrepreneurial energies, technological breakthroughs, compet-
itive upstarts, and speculative risk taking. The reach of J. P. Mor-
gan, impressive as it was, could not encompass everything, nor
was this Wall Street world, including Morgan himself, immune
to tempting but shaky speculations and potentially ruinous con-
tests for financial supremacy. Panics, still part of the market’s ge-
netic makeup, lay in wait.
One erupted in 1907 with near-catastrophic consequences

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when a major trust company failed, threatening to bring down

the whole financial edifice with it. This turned out to be the third
and definitive step in Morgan’s apotheosis. To this day the story
of the financial panic of that year is retold every time there is a
major blowup on Wall Street. The melodrama of Morgan’s hero-
ism runs invariably like this: Those were the days when a single
man held the fate of the nation in his hands. Morgan acted with
courage, decisiveness, and cool deliberation when all around
him, dignified bankers and brokers, were frozen with fear, para-
lyzed into fatal inaction, or caught up in a cowardly race to pro-
tect themselves, no matter the consequences. If Morgan had not
intervened to quarantine the rapidly spreading contagion, had he
not by the force of his personality and his enormous moral capi-
tal as the country’s trusted, if unofficial, central banker com-
pelled his fellow financiers to pony up the necessary funds to save
key tottering institutions, there is little doubt the country would
have suffered a severe and protracted crash, a crash, indeed, not
confined to America, for the Tokyo and London markets plum-
meted at the news from New York. His heroics were evidence of
his extraordinary power and his just as extraordinary selfless de-
ployment of that power. He was a government unto himself act-
ing on behalf of everybody. Bernard Berenson, the renowned art
critic and Morgan’s chief adviser in the amassing of the world’s
most impressive private art collection, struck a note of exaltation:
“Morgan should be represented as buttressing up the tottering
fabric of finance the way Giotto painted St. Francis holding up

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the falling Church on his shoulder.” Dissenting views—that the

great banker might have personally profited, that indeed he
might have provoked the panic as a means to other mercenary
ends—were dismissed as calumnies. During a time when the au-
thority of public institutions remained severely restricted, espe-
cially when it came to policing the economy, when government
bureaucracies were limited in reach, staffed by amateurs, and
kept on short rations, Wall Street’s elite banking fraternity, Mor-
gan first of all, offered to substitute themselves as responsible
guardians of the public trust.14
So it was that during the age of Morgan, which ran roughly
from the depression of 1893 to the Great Crash of 1929, the Wall
Street hero took on a new set of traits. Wisdom, expertise, re-
straint, and disinterested supervision on the public’s behalf were
grafted onto earlier qualities of command and fearlessness. The
Street’s performance during World War I, when it became not
only banker for America’s mobilization but financier of the whole
Allied war effort, further burnished its reputation for financial
patriotism.
After all, the world war reversed the historic relationship be-
tween Europe and America, one in which the latter had always
played the role of the dependent partner. This dependency was
resented by millions of Americans. Not only was it painfully felt
by American bankers; it had seeped down into the lower depths
of the Populist Party and its outcry against the “English devil-
fish.” Every new war loan to the Allies was a nail in the coffin of

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that “enslavement.” In four years the United States went from

being a leading debtor nation to the world’s chief creditor.
Overnight the country liquidated its age-old debt to Europe.
Meanwhile, rivers of capital from all over the world flowed into
New York, the only place it could safely pool without fear of de-
preciation. In this atmosphere any opposition to Wall Street’s
role in the conduct of the war did not so much vanish as drown in
a tidal wave of martial enthusiasm.15
Above all, the bravery of the “Silk Stocking Regiment”
confirmed the Street’s new reputation for financial knight er-
rantry. The 107th Infantry regiment, made up mainly of Society
boys from Manhattan (along with a sprinkling of upstate “apple
knockers”), took on the impregnable Hindenburg Line (known
in Germany as the Siegfried Line), a formidable zigzagging series
of stony fortresses interlaced with underground tunnels, like
something out of The Lord of the Rings—just as lethal, just as
invincible—in the fall of 1918. The regiment was badly mauled.
It suffered the highest single-day casualty rate for a regiment in
U.S. history. In the process it earned itself a sacred place in the
nation’s conscience. What a turnabout. Once maligned as a
coddled and cowardly collection of class snobs whose only previ-
ous distinction was its deployment putting down risings of the
lower orders, the regiment found redemption when it punctured
the Hindenburg Line. Six months after the armistice, an im-
mense crowd gathered along 5th Avenue—drawn from as far away
as Connecticut and Pennsylvania—to welcome these heroes home:

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“Welcome home Seventh,” they cheered the bloodied and be-

medalled Silk Stocking Regiment, Wall Street’s knights.16

Mythmaking about Wall Street’s heroic presence began in the

Gilded Age and has been with us ever since. It has always rested
first of all on a belief that an elect subspecies of men are endowed
with a certain genius for triumphing over risk. This has been
emphatically the case more recently. One need only recall the
Reagan era and the years since then. Think of names like “Chain-
saw” Al Dunlap, the asset stripper from Sunbeam, “Neutron”
Jack Welch of General Electric, and the corps of samurai-like
practitioners of the art of “lean and mean” management, cru-
saders on behalf of “shareholder value.” For a decade and more
their ferociousness and implacability were applauded on maga-
zine covers, in best-selling biographies and autobiographies, in
gossip columns, and on a slew of new cable television shows
catering to the popular fascination with Wall Street as a combat
zone. Or recall books like The Predators’ Ball (1989), which re-
counts the high-risk financial acrobatics of Michael Milken and
his coterie of junk bond speculators. In fact, the very sobriquet
“Predators’ Ball” was not, as one might assume, the brainstorm
of some publisher’s marketing department. It was conceived by
Milken and his colleagues to capture the brazen spirit of the an-
nual Beverly Hills orgy celebrating their ruthless makeover and

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dismantling of the country’s most formidable corporations. And

of course who can forget Gordon Gekko, the cinematic apothe-
osis of people like Milken and Ivan Boesky? Gekko’s infamous
but charismatic pronouncement in the film Wall Street that
“greed is good” both scandalized and seduced. How reminiscent
of the way Vanderbilt, Drew, and Fisk had flouted Victorian
pieties a century earlier, earning themselves censure but also the
awe reserved only for the most daring.
Beginning with the merger and acquisition mania of the mid-
1980s, the media were overrun with depictions of Wall Street
“gunslingers,” “white knights” and “black knights,” “killer bees,”
“hired guns,” “shotgun” corporate matings, and “ barbarians at
the gates,” warrior appellations borrowed helter-skelter from
antiquity, the Middle Ages, and America’s mythologized West.
New magazines like Manhattan Inc., Venture, and Success, as well
as established venues like the New Yorker, became awestruck docu-
mentarians of the era’s power-suited corsairs, with their manly
horseplay and their O.K. Corral financial staredowns and shoot-
’em-ups. Portraits of the biggest deal makers on the Street such
as the lawyers at the leading merger and acquisition firm (Skad-
den, Arps, Slate, Meaghen, and Flam) marveled at their all-
around fitness and their regimen of physical workouts, which
prepared them for “all-nighters.” These were financial athletes
at the peak of their game, in it not for the money but for the je ne
sais quoi that always seems present at the heart of all true sports-

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men, men like the “Liquidator,” Asher Edelman, who confided

to an interviewer his “Nietzschean desire for control.” Bond
traders made out like professional hit men and boasted of “rip-
ping the faces off” their clients, while the more cerebral samurai
of the financial wars carried around copies of The Art of War by
Sun Tzu, the Chinese Clausewitz. One young trader caught up
in the throes of a superheated deal was overheard exclaiming: “I
love it. It’s just like combat. It’s the real thing.” A magazine
anointed Michael Milken “Michael the Magnificent.”17
Remarkably, for the first time in nearly a century scholars
began revising the shadier history of the founding generation of
Robber Barons. New studies of Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, and Ed-
ward Harriman reconceived them as master builders. This his-
torical revisionism did more than simply revive the Gilded Age
hagiographies and the fawning magazine literature of the turn of
the century. In these revisionist biographies the well-publicized
faults of the old tycoonery were duly noted; in fact, they were
reconceived as the natural, necessary, inevitable, and even heroic
traits of a bumptious country feeling its oats, preparing to burst
onto the world stage as a new colossus.18
Soon enough, all these goings-on became commonly referred
to as America’s second Gilded Age. It was a characterization that
would last well beyond the Reagan era, into the dot.com mania
of the next decade. Echoes of the present in the past—and con-
versely the past making itself heard in the present—suggest

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deep-running similarities between the two Gilded Ages. Like

Drew, Fisk, and Gould, many of the Wall Street heroes of the
1980s, including Carl Icahn, Bruce Wasserstein, Saul Steinberg,
Ivan Boesky, and Michael Milken, hailed from unimposing social
backgrounds, middle- and lower-middle-class outer boroughs
and suburbs, and state colleges or no colleges rather than the Ivy
League. Their rise out of social obscurity struck a chord, making
them living confirmations of that primal national faith that for
those with the gumption anything was possible in America. Awe,
mixed with envy for those who have ascended from nowhere into
the empyrean heights, is an indigenous American cultural in-
stinct. First noted by Alexis de Tocqueville in his portrait of
antebellum America, it has remained potent ever since. This
emotional chemistry provides the combustible raw material of
endless melodramas depicting the rise and equally delicious fall
of great Wall Street tycoons and their empires: thus Reagan-era
best-sellers included Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the
House of Lehman, Barbarians at the Gate, and The Serpent on the Rock.
Like their forebears of the first Gilded Age, the Street’s newest
breed of financial bad-asses burst on the scene as rebels against
the ancien régime, only more so. Michael Milken’s “social revo-
lution” aimed at overturning the Street’s historic hierarchy. The
firm he worked for, Drexel Burnham Lambert, had been dis-
tinctly minor league; now it, and a handful of other new arrivals
like Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Company, were cock of the

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walk. “Relationship banking,” that genteel world enclosed within

mahogany walls hung with Old Masters where “relationships”
were premised as much on family and social ties as on mere mon-
eymaking, gave way to, was run over by, “transactional banking.”
Here every new deal was open to negotiation, each a new test for
some Wall Street financial house to prove its commercial bona
fides all over again. Milken believed in and milked his reputation
as a warrior against the “corporacracy.” Nasty microclass struggles
for control took place between languorous Ivy League patricians
turned out in rimless glasses and the omnipresent breast-pocket
hanky and shirt-sleeved, uncouth cigar-chomping geeks from
the trading floor staring out at the world through thick-framed
black glasses. This too gave a sense of freedom, of fresh blood
being pumped through the aerated arteries of an aging financial
organism. The rebels’ bloody assaults on the corporate and fi-
nancial bastions of the old order earned them points for fearless-
ness. And their nerdy outfits gave them extra credit for their so-
cial irreverence, a kind of bourgeois version of épater le
bourgeois, like the tobacco juice drooling out of Unc’l Dan’l
Drew’s mouth.
Michael Milken’s Aladdin-like junk bond buy-outs, mega-
mergers, and acquisitions formed the vanguard of this upheaval,
making him the Lenin of the social revolution. Reared in Cali-
fornia, supremely arrogant, and notably modest in what he
drove, wore, and lived in, he was perhaps oddly suited to the role
of the iconoclastic gate-crasher. He exerted a mesmerizing influ-

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ence, a charisma that had limousines lining up on Rodeo Drive at

four in the morning to do deals, their owners convinced, as one
of his admirers gushed, that “Michael is the most important indi-
vidual who has lived in this century.” Why not? In just a half
dozen years, 215 industrial and financial companies issued $20
billion in junk bond debt (roughly 13 percent of the total corpo-
rate bond market). Household names of the American economy—
TWA, Gulf Oil, Walt Disney—were suddenly in play. Three
thousand mergers worth $200 billion took place in 1985 alone.19
It was an odd anti-elitist revolution, organized from on high
and exuding a messianic aura. As a “social revolution” it was de-
signed to save America from itself, from its fat-cat complacency.
Stripped of poorly performing assets, malingering workers and
their feather-bedding unions, doddering and absentee managers,
and intrusive government bureaucrats, American business would
rise again. Only men who had themselves risen from social ob-
scurity could appreciate and meet the challenge. Companies lan-
guishing in commercial oblivion, financially distressed but with
untapped potential, could be resurrected, but it would take the
audaciousness of a new financial knighthood.
In these same ways, however, Wall Street heroes of the second
Gilded Age were quite unlike the model epitomized by J. P. Mor-
gan. When the captains of industry and finance lorded it over the
country at the turn of the twentieth century, no one would have
dreamed of calling them rebels against either an overweening
government bureaucracy or an entrenched set of interests. There

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was no government bureaucracy to speak of to rebel against, and

these men were themselves “the interests,” Wall Street chief
among them. People like Morgan, Andrew Mellon, and Henry
Clay Frick worried about being overthrown, not about over-
throwing someone else. A Gilded Age peopled by irreverent, leo-
nine youngsters out to shake up the old order has a distinctly dif-
ferent feel from one run by lugubrious, bearded patriarchs whose
very physical heft cried out their sense of entitlement and rever-
ence for good order.
Just as Morgan’s emergence as a new kind of Wall Street hero
signaled a profound shift in the underlying structure of the
political economy at the turn of the century, so too did the rise of
Wall Street’s rebels during the Reagan years highlight another
fateful turning point. However, it was a more dubious one. Wall
Street “heroism” during the closing decades of the nineteenth
century, no matter how much it transgressed law and morality,
was bound up in the vast transcontinental industrial explosion of
the country. Wall Street heroes had their hand in all the nation’s
great undertakings— coast-to-coast railroads, gigantic steel, oil,
and raw materials industries, pioneering technologies in electricity
and chemicals, the dazzling cornucopia of new material delights.
Moreover, these stupendous feats of production and innovation
drove the economy.
A hundred years later, however, Wall Street stood at the center
of a decaying productive apparatus. The billions of dollars trad-
ing hands during the Reagan (or Milken) era measured what one

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commentator aptly called the “financialization” of the economy.

It concealed an underlying stagnation: the 1980s were marked by
a relative lack of investment in new plants and machinery, bare-
bones budgets for research and development, and the contrac-
tion or folding up of precisely those core industries that were the
hallmarks of the first Gilded Age. Instead the economy relied on
the heady vapors given off by the financial services sector. Wall
Street became a revolving door for the exchange and re-exchange
of nominal assets; corporations buying other corporations; pub-
lic companies taking on freight loads of debt to go private; pri-
vately held firms auditioning for their debuts on the public equi-
ties market; a kind of “paper entrepreneurialism.” Between 1979
and 1990 the proportion of total private investment in plant and
equipment that went into the financial, insurance, and real estate
sector (FIRE) doubled. And between 1984 and 1990, one-quarter
of all private investment ended up there.20
Our most recent cult of the titan, the maestro of risk, emerged
amid a mood and even the reality of national decline. It followed
the defeat in Vietnam, the scuttling of the postwar financial system
inscribed at Bretton Woods, the rise of OPEC, “stagflation,” the
wholesale deindustrialization of the country’s midsection, an in-
feriority complex regarding the Japanese economy, the humilia-
tion of the Iran hostage crisis, and more. How unlike the envi-
ronment of late-nineteenth-century America, when the country
was clearly on the rise, an awakening giant flexing its muscles.
Does the heroic stature of Wall Street diminish under such

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circumstances? Does it matter that once the lions of the Street

were identified with great material accomplishments but that
more recently, especially during the fabled 1980s, their names
have been linked to the economy’s dematerialization? Perhaps
this can account for what might be characterized as the declen-
sion of the masculine mystique long identified with the titan of
finance, indeed, even its faintly comic or comic-book inversion.
During the Reagan era the country was introduced to the “big
swinging dick” phenomenon made famous by Liar’s Poker. This
was the easily satirized world of Gordon Gekko or Larry “the
Liquidator” (from the play and film Other People’s Money), an ado-
lescent male fantasy world of “rip their eyes out” raw bravado
and violence. The Wall Street “hero” of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of
the Vanities is a “master of the universe” not because he is one—
on the contrary, he is a quivering mass of insecurities, duplicities,
and fears—but because he has borrowed the name of one of his
six-year-old daughter’s favorite over-muscled superhero toys. All
this preening and chest-thumping might have struck their titanic
forebears as unnecessary or even demeaning. One senses here an
instinct for revenge and overcompensation gestating during the
years of national frustration and decline.
Early on the Wall Street hero was given life by his association
with the country’s mighty material explosiveness; later, by living
off its financial fall-out. In either case, however, the Street has al-
ways seemed to thrive thanks to somebody else’s efforts. From

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the time of Jefferson through to the present, Wall Street has ap-
peared to many people under the guise of the parasite. And for
our ancestors especially the parasite was more than a species of
economic deadwood. First and foremost the Wall Street parasite
was a sinner.

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 four

The Immoralist

Henry Ford was an American folk hero. He was singularly iden-

tified with the country’s favorite new technology, the automo-
bile. But it was his character, even more than his inventive or
organizational genius, that most endeared him to his fellow
countrymen. Ford seemed a living embodiment of virtues con-
sidered quintessentially American and responsible for the na-
tion’s extraordinary good fortune. He hailed from small-town,
rural America, where hard work, frugality, modesty in dress and
deportment, a practical-minded affinity for the mechanical arts,
piety, and self-reliance were first nourished and still commanded
respect. Ford never strayed far from those roots; indeed, as his
legend grew, publicists deliberately exaggerated his rural origins,
burnishing his reputation as a twentieth-century version of the
Jeffersonian yeoman. He neither drank nor smoked, and long

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after he became an industrial tycoon, he was still showing up for

work at dawn. By the 1920s, Ford was so widely esteemed he was
semi-seriously considered presidential timber, running well ahead
of President Warren G. Harding in the polls.
So it was not a complete shock that when he published a dys-
peptic tirade against an alleged conspiracy of international Jew-
ish financiers it became a best seller. Appearing first in 1920– 21
as a series of articles in a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent,
that Ford controlled, the pieces were subsequently gathered to-
gether as a book under the inflammatory title The International
Jew. There had always been a tincture of the conspiratorial in the
country’s anxiety about the intimidating power of finance, Wall
Street in particular. And anti-Semitism had always been an in-
gredient in that phobic fantasy. This went at least as far back as
the days when Wall Street banker August Belmont, representa-
tive of the Rothschilds in the United States since the panic of
1837, became the object of vicious Jew-baiting during the Civil
War. The New York Times, for example, had this to say about Bel-
mont, then chairman of the Democratic Party: “The notorious
undenied leader of the Democratic Party at Chicago was the agent
of the Rothschilds. Yes, the Democratic Party has fallen so low it
has to seek a leader in the agent of foreign Jewish bankers.”1
Ford, however, raised the stakes considerably in his journalistic
scapegoating of a Jewish Wall Street, lending an extraordinary ec-
umenical reach to an ancient prejudice. For the automaker, a se-
cret cabal of international financiers was responsible not only for

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the subordination and parasitical leeching away of life-giving in-

dustry and agriculture, not only for the bloodbath of World War I,
not only—wondrously zany as it might seem—for the Bolshevik
Revolution but also for the rank impiety that he saw sweeping like
a contagion across postwar America. What Ford was most exercised
about was the perilous state of precisely that world of small-town,
Protestant, abstemious, proudly independent, and hard-working
America: he saw a way of life that once ruled the land and for
which he had become a cherished emblem in danger of vanishing.
The International Jew explained how this state of affairs had
come to pass. It discovered the hidden hand of Jewish financiers
behind virtually every form of urban, cosmopolitan popular
culture—the pornography, oversexed novels, and titillating maga-
zine illustrations of the publishing industry; a movie business
given over to glamorizing promiscuity and the high life; big-
time gambling, including the “Black Sox” World Series scandal
of 1919; bootleg liquor; “Jewish” jazz; Broadway degeneracy;
and a half-dozen other symptoms of moral decline that Ford
associated with the city and its infatuation with consumer cul-
ture. Wall Street, in Ford’s view, was the incubator of a mod-
ernist debauch, feeding the nation a steady diet of cheap thrills
and sexual innuendo.2
Henry Ford’s historical reputation comes down to us largely
airbrushed clean of this crackpot nastiness. And it is true that
after the public outcry against The International Jew became so
clamorous and widespread that his own car dealers were up in

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arms (once business began to suffer), Ford was compelled to

apologize. Nonetheless, the fact that the book did so well sug-
gests a strong undercurrent of sympathy not only for Ford’s anti-
Semitism but also for his apprehension of Wall Street as the
fount of a pervasive hedonism which threatened the moral in-
tegrity of American society.
Wackiest of all was the auto tycoon’s bizarre notion that
bankers and Bolsheviks were in league to undermine capitalism
and the bedrock middle-class morality upon which it rested. Yet
this weird formulation was also the most telling. For people who
believed as Ford did—and there were millions of Americans who
did—capitalism was as much a moral order as it was an economic
system for producing goods and services. The capital accumulator
was a virtuous person not because he was rich; he was rich because
he was virtuous. His distinctive virtues were familiar to every
American schoolboy: he depended only on himself, worked hard
and saved for the future, resisted the temptation to indulge in friv-
olous pleasures of the moment, and honored honest labor and its
material accomplishments, all to achieve a self-mastery that would
keep him safe from the snares and delusions of a sinful world.
Bolsheviks believed in none of this. To begin with, of course,
they proclaimed their intention to abolish private property, the
ground on which the character armor of the capital accumulator
was forged. The Bolshevik threat was more global, however, more
than a mere challenge to the prevailing system of political econ-
omy. It promised to do away with a whole set of vital institutions,

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 The Immoralist

beliefs, and customary ways of behaving: the church, the patriar-

chal family, monogamy, individualism, and patriotism. Together
they made up the moral edifice of capitalist civilization; without
them that civilization was inconceivable, and one was left staring
into the abyss of moral chaos. At least, that was the grim and pan-
icky premonition that darkened the national mood in the years
immediately following the Russian Revolution and World War I.
But what did Bolshevism have to do with Wall Street, interna-
tional finance, and the Jews? Wall Street, after all, was the
quintessential capitalist institution. Or was it? Insofar as it lubri-
cated the mechanisms of trade and investment, yes it was. But as
a cultivator of the moral virtues Ford and many others prized it
inspired grave doubts.
Money made on the Street, many were convinced, was not the
product of hard work, nor, more often than not, was it made
honestly. What it “produced” was intangible, ephemeral as paper,
and socially useless. Indeed, like a parasite it leeched away real
wealth that originated elsewhere. Parasitism, in this view, was as
much a moral indictment as it was an economic category. Wall
Street bred attitudes and behaviors that seemed demonically de-
signed to undermine the very capitalist superstructure it was
supposed to support. The Street encouraged an addictive fond-
ness for gambling and the desire for easy money. Like a casino
it preyed on human frailties, in particular the yen for a life of
pleasure-seeking idleness. It rewarded trickery and deceit rather
than the straightforward, transparent dealings the marketplace

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 The Immoralist

was presumably based on. Prices for what it traded shifted from
day to day, sometimes from minute to minute, without any ap-
parent rhyme or reason, subverting values fixed for generations,
placing a premium on cynicism, even toward the hallowed in-
stitutions of hearth and homeland. The Street’s single-minded
pursuit of money without regard for its source or purpose nour-
ished an all-consuming selfishness.
So too, Mammon worship, whose altar was the Stock Exchange,
was a stateless religion. Like Bolshevism it recognized no loyal-
ties to God or nation. Jewish bankers leagued with Jewish Bol-
sheviks were inherently subversive. Ford even concocted stories
about circles of Jewish financiers secretly plotting with the In-
dustrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party to make
war on the world of gentile capitalism. Because international fin-
anciers dealt in monetary abstractions, unmoored from their local
origins in particular workplaces, families, regions, and countries,
their allegiances could not be trusted. Ford’s anti-Semitism was
rooted in that lack of trust. For centuries Jews had been ostra-
cized in just this way: as a stateless tribe of parasitical and mer-
ciless Shylocks. Despised by every nation, they felt loyalty to
none. Once confined to the margins of the capitalist market-
place, now, according to this updated version of anti-Semitism,
they occupied its inner sanctums. Capitalism had been Judaized;
once a haven of Christian rectitude, now it was a playground for
the anti-Christ.
In the eyes of Ford and other critics, Wall Street poisoned the

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 The Immoralist

moral atmosphere. How could the fear of God, or bedrock be-

liefs in frugality or self-restraint, or respect for diligence and
perseverance, or devoted service to family and nation survive in
it? Moreover, Wall Street’s insidious penetration of the new ave-
nues of popular entertainment and communications worked to
spread the decadence. Consumer culture thrived on the same
narcissism, self-absorption, insatiable desire for immediate grati-
fication, and flight from the discipline of work and its libidinal
inhibitions that once seemed peculiar to Wall Street and less le-
gitimate forms of moneymaking. Consumerism transgressed
every boundary—religious conviction, ethnic solidarity, patriar-
chal authority, social hierarchy—that might get in the way of the
desiring, self-seeking individual. It propagated a rootless cos-
mopolitanism that undermined all established channels of moral
legitimacy. Primordial capitalism, the kind Ford stood up for,
had been evangelized by the new capitalism, the capitalism of
mass consumption, the devil’s capitalism, the Jewish capitalism
that had always been Wall Street’s secret desire.
Ford was caught in an irony of his own making. No product
was more closely identified with consumer capitalism than the
automobile, and no man was more responsible for its universality
than Henry Ford. The marketplace obeyed its own logic, how-
ever, and made the car a vessel of its maker’s cultural undoing.
Ford had always hated Wall Street, resented its power, and resis-
ted turning to the investment houses for credit and capital. His
animus against the Street was shared by a sizable segment of the

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 The Immoralist

business community, especially in middle American midsize cities

and towns, where the family-owned manufacturing enterprise
was a point d’honneur as much as the source of patrilineal conti-
nuity. For a long century Wall Street had been confined to a
moral gulag that worked to conceal the spiritual intercourse be-
tween industry and finance. But now the Street had escaped the
gulag, and people like Henry Ford were frightened.

Wall Street’s reputation as a sinkhole of immorality goes back to

the earliest days of the republic. Jefferson once described New
York as “a cloacina of all the depravities of human nature.” He
was thinking first of all about Wall Street.3
Jeffersonians were preoccupied with the dangers of aristoc-
racy. What they feared was both political reaction and moral de-
cline; or, rather, they were convinced that the political well-
being of the new republic depended on its moral good health; if
one were endangered so must be the other. Aristocracy fused po-
litical subversion to moral corruption. Aristocrats were counter-
revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow the new republic and
might succeed in their aim because their way of life promised to
eat away at the moral fiber of the new nation. Aristocrats, in the
Jeffersonian view, were immoralists by their very nature. Their
attachment to a life of luxury, their exemption from hard labor,
and their gratuitous sense of entitlement were profoundly cor-
rupting. They bred habits of sloth and contempt for all those

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 The Immoralist

Spartan virtues—simplicity, modesty, frugality, independence,

honest labor, and meritocracy—without which the whole demo-
cratic experiment was a lost cause. Jefferson’s profile of the aris-
tocrat expunged all the more admirable features of the aristocratic
personality—a sense of honor, courage, disinterested public ser-
vice, social generosity, and noblesse oblige—which champions
of more elitist social and political arrangements like Hamilton
naturally emphasized.
In the New World the roots of aristocracy were shallow; that
was America’s great good fortune and promise for the future.
Compared to the Old World, the new country was largely free of
titled wealth and hereditary privilege. But a vigilant republic still
had to stand guard. Especially in those new sectors of the econ-
omy subject to the power of money, great fortunes, accumulated
without apparent effort, invited all the moral pitfalls tradition-
ally associated with aristocratic decadence.
“Moneycrats” were singled out as agents of moral disarma-
ment. Their sins were numerous, but three especially seemed
most dangerous: those who spent their days trading and speculat-
ing in the mystifying value of paper wealth were gamblers, para-
sites, and hedonists.
Gambling, a habit long associated with the aristocracy (as well
as the demoralized lower orders), was considered a religious of-
fense of the first order. In colonial days the Puritan divine Cot-
ton Mather scathingly observed that “gains of money or estate by
games, be the games what they will, are a sinful violation of

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 The Immoralist

the laws of honesty and industry which God has given us.”
Gambling was considered a form of divination, a devilish prac-
tice that presumed on God’s prerogative to see into the future.
Speculative trading in the prospective value of land, goods, or
money (or, as in William Duer’s case, government bonds) was
merely a modern form of gambling and incited the same hubris
as its older counterparts. Moreover, the gambler shared some
fatal moral disabilities with the parasite and the hedonist.4
By the time of the American Revolution there was already a
robust plebian resentment of the aristocrat as parasite, a privi-
leged nonproducer living off the hard labor of those he lorded
over. While once labor carried with it the curse of Cain, in the
new age of the democratic revolution this common fate, to live
by the sweat of one’s brow, had found its redemption—indeed,
was sanctified. And suddenly, those, like the aristocrat, the
gambler, and the speculator, who lived off the honest earnings of
others were offensive in the eyes of God. So, too, it was plain to
see that a life free of toil was an incitement to hedonistic revel-
ing. “Stock-jobbing” and “speculations” were part of a whole
Olympics of economic games playing that encouraged libidinal
excess, a dangerous release of animal passions pandering to men’s
baser desires. The same plebian tradition that condemned the
aristocrat as a parasite depicted him as congenitally debauched.
How could he be otherwise, lacking the self-restraint that a regi-
men of hard work imposed? No less than the landed aristocrat of
old, whose limitless appetites for carnal pleasures of the most de-

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praved sort were legendary, the moneycrat of the new order was
seen as a champion of self-indulgence, chasing after the same
evanescent excitements, making a mockery of the moral order.
During the 1790s, when the passions dividing the followers of
Hamilton and Jefferson were most inflamed, political broadsides,
editorial admonitions, church homiletics, and didactic novels
and poems tirelessly condemned these moral failings of the new
moneyed aristocracy. One patriotic but gloomy poet worried:

We thought when once our liberty was gain’d,

And Peace had spread its influence thro’ the land,
That Learning soon would raise its cheerful head,
And arts on arts would joyfully succeed;
Till all Columbia’s genius ’gain to blaze,
And in true science more than rival’s Greece;
But Speculation, like a baleful pest,
Has pour’d his dire contagion in the breast;
That monster that would ev’rything devour.”

In the popular novel Dorval; or, The Speculator the villainous specu-
lator is a moral as well as an economic seducer, a man with a liquid
identity, so depraved he even turns his romantic adventures into
clever financial ruses. Anti-Federalist ministers sermonized that
“barefaced” speculation would undermine “common honesty.”
Jefferson warned George Washington that moneyed aristocrats
were corroding the moral behavior of the new nation, luring
people away from industrious labor “to occupy themselves and

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their capitals in a species of gambling destructive of morality . . .

which introduced its poison into government itself.”5
This Jeffersonian persuasion remained alive and well through-
out the nineteenth century. In antebellum America exposing
Wall Street’s’ aristocratic depravity excited the popular imagina-
tion, especially during the “age of the common man,” when An-
drew Jackson became a folk hero. Young women were warned
away from romantic attachments to Wall Street brokers, whose
trade made them experts at dissimulation and betrayal. John Pin-
tard, a Knickerbocker grandee, cautioned his daughter about such
bon vivants, who were bound to end their days in ruin or even
suicide. It was telling that some of the city’s earliest gambling
parlors sprang up in and around the Street and depended on the
patronage of speculators whose day jobs were scarcely different
from what went on behind closed doors at night. Indeed, an infa-
mous murder case suggested far worse. In 1836 a prostitute,
Helen Jewett, was brutally murdered by Richard P. Robinson, a
young clerk from the mercantile district. The world he and his
pals worked in supported a male subculture whose attitudes
about sex, work, and leisure defied the middle-class sense of pro-
priety, including sexual propriety. Cheered on by his fellow
clerks, Robinson was acquitted, an instance of upper-class immu-
nity to the law which infuriated less-privileged members of the
population, already convinced that Lower Manhattan was a sink-
hole of iniquity.6

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Potboiler novels and journalistic exposés circulated lurid de-

pictions of the Street as a site of lost innocence. Like the ancient
sirens of mythology, the financial district enticed callow young
men from the countryside to abandon their devotion to work and
family and addicted them to a life of compulsive gambling and
pleasure-seeking at the cost of everything they once held dear.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, one of the first to cater to the
tastes of the new urban middle class, ran a cartoon depicting the
whole fraternity of Wall Street brokers and bankers as a band of
inebriates reeling down the Street, empty liquor bottles labeled
“bull” and “bear” left in their wake. “Story papers” like the New
York Ledger that circulated widely among the working classes ed-
itorialized in favor of combined moral and economic regulation,
calling for enforcement of laws against gambling, defamation of
character, and conspiracy to defraud. Over and over again maga-
zine and newspaper illustrations sketched the consequences of
addictive speculation: a man, still young but dissipated, lies on a
bed, either dying or dead, an empty liquor bottle on the floor be-
side him, his distraught wife weeping forlornly in the foreground
(perhaps a sad small child in the background), with a caption
drawing the all-too-obvious moral of the story. The Adventures of
Harry Franco: A Tale of the Great Panic, was America’s first depres-
sion melodrama, published soon after the panic of 1837. Harry,
its ingenuous hero from the countryside, is mulcted not once but
multiple times by unscrupulous commercial hucksters, just in

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case anyone might miss the point about the moral perils await-
ing those foolish enough to venture into this secretive world of
treacherous double-dealings.7
George Foster, the widely read antebellum pamphleteer and
journalist who combined moralizing with a knack for vivid ob-
servation of everyday life in the new and mysterious big city, best
captured this sense of Wall Street as a moral snake pit. In his New
York by Gaslight, a series of newspaper sketches of his wanderings,
he described Wall Street as a dehumanizing place: “Wall Street!
Who shall fathom the depth and rottenness of thy mysteries?
Has Gorgon passed them through thy winding labyrinths, turning
with his smile everything to stone—hearts as well as houses?”8
This shadowy world, Foster and others suggested, was also
prone to wanton sexuality and sexual perversion. The hedonism
encouraged by a life of fast money and idle hours was bound to
break down inhibitions in all realms, including the sexual. Foster
frightened—and titillated—his readers with images of “milk-
white virgin bosoms given to the polluting touch of lust.” Aristo-
cratic presumptions that had grown up in conjunction with moun-
tains of unearned paper wealth encouraged their owners to believe
they could possess whatever they fancied. The Quaker City; or,
The Monks of Monk Hall (1844), the best-selling novel of the
nineteenth century until the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
was set in Philadelphia’s financial center—Chestnut Street was
then more imposing than Wall Street—and vividly expressed this
melodramatic dread of illicit intercourse between aristocratic fi-

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nancial power and sexual transgression. Its author, George Lip-

pard, was a widely read journalist, freethinker, and social re-
former. His story was erotic throughout and designed to reveal
the moral underside of capitalism and the social derangement it
fostered. Lippard undressed every “pillar of society,” bankers
and merchants especially, who spent their days and nights carry-
ing on at Monk Hall, committing repulsive sins—rape and incest
among others—in a labyrinthine hideaway well stocked with
opium, choice liqueurs, and ruined young women.9
Moral anxieties agitated the political realm. President Jack-
son’s enormous popularity had something to do with the way
he channeled his constituents’ queasiness about the ethics of their
commercial zeal. He enhanced his reputation as a hero of the
common man by making war against “the Monster Bank,” the
Second Bank of the United States. The bank was headquartered
in Philadelphia and presided over by Nicholas Biddle, a blue-
blooded Philadelphia gentleman of surpassing arrogance and
thus a perfect foil for Old Hickory’s denunciation of the bank as
an incubator of aristocratic privilege. Presidential jeremiads di-
rected at Biddle and the bank emphasized the institution’s eco-
nomic immorality. Thundering that he wished “stock-jobbers,
brokers, and gamblers . . . were all swept from the land,” Jackson
warned that “the people of this country shall yet be punished for
their idolatry.” This indictment was particularly wounding dur-
ing a time when Americans were taking special pride in their in-
dustrious settling and building up of a country that not long pre-

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viously had been a forested wilderness. It was maddening to

watch merchant bankers and speculators heap up unimagined
wealth without producing anything tangibly useful. On the con-
trary, their splendid carriages, Italianate mansions, and liveried
help seemed too much like the products of legalized thievery.
Moreover, their parasitism and immodest love of luxury were de-
moralizing, subverting the new nation’s commitment to frugal
self-reliance. The opulence of financiers served as a moral stigma.
But in a country in which pursuit of the main chance was practi-
cally universal, it was an ironic one.10
Great wealth posed a dilemma. Americans were, after all, in
love with moneymaking. Yet they also were deeply troubled by
how it was made and what it might bring in its wake. During the
antebellum years the issue simmered in the background while the
country was preoccupied with the overriding question of slavery.
After the Civil War, however, the conundrum of wealth and
poverty in the rapidly industrializing economy commanded every-
one’s attention. And in a debate that ranged from the pulpit to
the Broadway theater, Wall Street came to occupy a distinctive
niche within the American psyche.

America’s Gilded Age got its name, in part, thanks to spectacu-

larly ostentatious displays of wealth by a nouveau-riche class of
financiers and industrialists. Their extravagance was especially
noisome because it coincided with a time of urban and rural

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squalor, poverty, and desperation so immense that no one in the

New World had seen anything like it before. Could it be that the
two phenomena were related? Was it possible that the stupendous
wealth, which presumably embodied scientific, technical, and or-
ganizational progress, was also responsible for poverty, with its
calamitous social chaos and moral decline? Did those select few
who managed to accumulate such extraordinary riches do so by
playing fast and loose with the ethical norms that presumably
governed respectable society? If so were they endangering the
spiritual well-being of the country? Should they be held to
account? Could it be that the amassing of wealth automatically
placed the ambitious individual and even the whole of society
in moral jeopardy? In the Gilded Age, these questions became
unavoidable.
Jay Gould’s career captured perfectly the era’s moral forebod-
ings. Gould was immensely powerful and controlled some of the
country’s strategic means of transportation and communication,
including the Missouri Pacific Railroad, Western Union, and im-
portant metropolitan newspapers. He was a consummate Wall
Street speculator, renowned for his cold-blooded ruthlessness.
And during his lifetime he was the most hated man in America. In-
deed, in the century since his death, and despite history’s notori-
ous fickleness, Jay Gould’s reputation has remained irredeemably
dark. A recent biography of “the Mephistopheles of Wall Street”
(the first I know of to attempt his rehabilitation) takes a perverse
pleasure in reviewing this unblemished record of moral censure.

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Alexander Dana Noyes, the dean of turn-of-the-century finan-

cial journalism, judged him a “destroyer.” Gustavus Myers, whose
History of the Great American Fortunes was a seminal work of pre–
World War I Progressive-era muckraking literature, called him a
“pitiless human carnivore, glutting on the blood of his numberless
victims . . . an incarnate fiend.” Matthew Josephson’s celebrated
exposé, The Robber Barons, written during the Great Depression,
depicted Gould as eerily nonhuman: “No human instinct of
justice or patriotism or pity caused him to deceive himself or
waver . . . from the steadfast pursuit of strategic power and liquid
assets.” A biographer writing in the 1960s declared Gould’s life
“the ultimate perversion of the Alger legend,” and an eminent
historian of the same period judged that Gould’s career “encom-
passed almost every known variety of chicanery.”11
Even when he died in 1892 no one could think of a kind word
to say. For the editors of the New York World he was the “incarna-
tion of cupidity and sordidness.” Lamenting the demoralized
state of the country’s spiritual life, its prostration before “the
golden calf,” the paper blamed Gould particularly. His success
encouraged this idolatry. It “dazzled and deluded multitudes of
young men. Jails, insane asylums, and almshouses all over the
land are peopled with those who aspired to wealth by similar
methods.” Moreover, these incarcerated few could scarcely take
the measure of this moral plague that had infected many, many
more, still “at large, mingling with the community in all walks of

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life, excusing, practicing, and disseminating the vices of which

he was the most conspicuous model in modern times.”12
Silent and secretive, Gould nonetheless lived his life inside a
luridly lit bubble of public infamy, a purgatory of shame. Joseph
Pulitzer pronounced him “one of the most sinister figures that
have ever flitted, bat-like, across the vision of the American
people.” The New York Times was scandalized and despaired for
the cause of civic virtue so long as “the insidious poison of an
influence like that of Jay Gould can be detected . . . and when
people claiming to be respectable are not ashamed of being as-
sociated with such a man as he.” Even his sometime partner in
financial skullduggery, James R. Keene, whose own slyness
earned him the sobriquet of Wall Street’s “Silver Fox,” judged
Gould “the worst man on earth since the beginning of the Chris-
tian era.”13
Jay Gould was the original Wall Street immoralist. Condem-
nations this extreme suggest that he had become something more
than a human being: he had achieved the status of a metaphor, a
vivid piece of iconography in the folklore of a genteel culture
wrestling with the paradoxes of raw industrial capitalism. Gould
stood as a living insult to all the Victorian pieties and sentimen-
tal illusions that polite society found so necessary to veil its own
mercenary ardor. The Mephistopheles of Wall Street fascinated
not because he was unique but rather because he seemed to distill
in his person and career a set of character traits and behaviors

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commonly associated with Wall Street that the world of bour-

geois, middle-class propriety found deeply detestable.
Wealth, even the accumulation of great fortunes, did not by
itself offend the cannons of respectability. Tooth-and-claw, give-
no-quarter combat in the competitive marketplace was also ac-
ceptable, even a point of manly pride . . . so long as it was con-
ducted according to the implicit ground rules of Protestant
morality. But Wall Street, and not just in the person of Jay
Gould, seemed always to be testing, and often transgressing,
those ground rules. The nub of the problem was that despite the
growing cross-fertilization of the Street and the new industrial
order (especially the railroads), the two had not yet mated or
produced offspring. Manufacturing, distributing, and selling the
products of American industry and agriculture were carried on,
in the main, by small- and medium-size family firms and partner-
ships. Under normal circumstances, these had no intercourse
with Wall Street. But Wall Street banks, brokerages, and free-
lance speculators lived off the abnormal cyclical crises endemic
to this nineteenth-century family capitalism. Victims of these
crises suddenly discovered that their fate was more closely bound
up with the Street than they wished or had realized. Naturally
they treated Wall Street as a special kind of incubus.
When it came to pondering the relationship between wealth
and work, genteel culture knew certain truths to be self-evident.
Work was good, wealth incidental. Work encouraged self-
discipline, probity, and good order. Wealth was the tangible out-

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come of this earnestness. Its accumulation was a perpetual tutorial

in self-mastery. Property arising out of work provided the mate-
rial haven sheltering the patriarchal family. Inside that fortress of
land, home, and heritable assets, sentimental affections and the
moral education of the young would flourish. In this worldview,
property was more than a mass of congealed labor; it was a living,
breathing alter ego, a vehicle of self-expression, a passway to cre-
ative energies, a proving ground of middle-class manhood, and a
moral legacy. Nonetheless, for property to fulfill these functions,
for wealth to be legitimate, it had to be accumulated through
transparent fair dealing, however tough-minded.
In this way respectable society surrounded its preoccupation
with work and wealth with a halo of religiosity, worthy intentions,
and rules of correct behavior. Everyone recognized that wealth,
however beneficent, was also dangerous. It could be flaunted, but
that was a sign of hubris. Wealth could feed an insatiable inner
greediness, turning self-creation into self-indulgence. Wealth
might lure one down the paths of dishonesty, even if the trans-
gressions were not punishable by law. Wealth might be acquired
in what Christian civilization had for centuries censured as the
“Jewish way,” that is, undeservedly, by leeching away the fruits of
the honest labor of others. Wealth might emerge out of dark
conspiracies rather than through open transactions. Wealth, like
a loaded firearm discharged thoughtlessly or with malice, could
wound or annihilate the innocent. During the Gilded Age, when
middle-class folk as well as the genteel upper classes turned their

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gaze to Wall Street they were apt to see overweening pride, os-
tentation, lack of discipline, wanton idleness, selfishness, dis-
honesty, parasitism, stealth, callousness—a veritable thesaurus
of moral depravity.
Many sorts of people, often with nothing else in common,
shared these feelings about the Street. Upper-crust socialites in
Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other colonial-era seaboard
cities felt their social and political preeminence threatened by
the rise of the nouveaux riches. They were not so much disturbed
by the Street’s violation of the work ethic—after all, work did
not count for much in their own calculus of ethical worthiness—
but rather resented the way pure money was storming the barri-
cades of their cherished social exclusivity, based as it supposedly
was on nonmonetary values: breeding, education, and cultural
savoir faire.
Work-a-day middle-class folk harbored different concerns.
They were committed to the moral rigors of work and hostile,
not just politically but in their souls, to distinctions of social
class. If High Society was offended aesthetically and found
chasing after money unseemly, the upright middle classes of
town and country considered Wall Street an impiety. The “gen-
teel tradition” which encoded middle-class values as a set of
Protestant strictures about work and self-discipline viewed fast
money, lavish display of money, money cut loose from its ethical
moorings—the sort of money tidal-waving its way through Wall
Street—as far worse than unseemly. What went on in Wall Street

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was an inversion of the moral calisthenics of the work ethic, an

indolent lusting after money for its own sake.
Moreover, the Street’s imposing power over the two most vital
organs of the nation’s economic life—credit and the railroads—
incited feelings of frustrating dependency among farmers, busi-
nessmen, and others that were easily translated into expressions
of moral high dudgeon. Such power seemed undeserved, deriv-
ing as much from shady dealings, usurious finance, and merciless
exploitation of the labor of others as it did from the laying of
track, the building of drawbridges, or the choreography of freight
trains. A sizable quotient of this high-mindedness no doubt
amounted to so much pious cant and unctuous hypocrisy; these
same commercially minded middle-class folk might themselves
be caught dabbling in the market or engaged in their own cut-
throat business practices. But this world of savage incivility,
quintessentially represented by Wall Street, genuinely offended
their most precious conceits.
Remnants of the country’s preindustrial ruling elite, people
like the Adams cousins, Henry and Charles Francis, or the British
émigré E. L. Godkin (founder and editor of The Nation), were
lavish in their contempt for the barbarism of the nouveaux
riches, especially those whose fortunes came out of Wall Street.
The heroine of Henry Adams’s novel Democracy (1880), Mrs.
Lightfoot Lee, the widow of a wealthy financier, expresses her
disdain for Gilded Age millionaires who couldn’t think of any-
thing better to do with their money than pile it up and flaunt it:

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“To let it accumulate was to own one’s failure; Mrs. Lee’s great
grievance was that it did accumulate, without changing or im-
proving the quality of its owners.”14
Chapters of Erie, the stunning exposé of Wall Street shena-
nigans in the late 1860s, co-written by Charles Francis and
Henry Adams, mainly unmasked the era’s rampant political cor-
ruption and crony capitalism. But it was impossible to separate
the Adamses’ political indictment of the Street from their ethical
revulsion. The spectacle of financial chicanery they presented
damned a whole culture, one that could no longer tell the differ-
ence between piracy and legitimate business, that bestowed honors
and titles and welcomed into fashionable resorts men “without
character” like Gould, Fisk, Vanderbilt, and Drew. Dishonorable
men like Drew struck at the foundations of society and were “the
common enemy of every man, woman, and child.” The Crédit
Mobilier debacle, in particular, in which railroad operators con-
nived with government officials to loot the public treasury, per-
suaded Henry Adams that “the moral law has expired—like the
Constitution.” Writing about “black Friday”—the newspapers’
name for the gold panic of 1869—Adams excoriated Fisk for his
“singular depravity.”15
As the century drew to a close Adams’s moral revulsion soured
into anti-Semitism. He was tormented by an overwhelming
foreboding of the advent of a “Jewish Age,” which he gloomily
concluded was bound to put an end to everything he cherished
(foreshadowings of Henry Ford). Henry and his brother Brooks

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mourned the imminent demise of those sanctuaries of civiliza-

tion that were undergoing terminal ecological damage in places
like Washington Square, Beacon Hill, and Rittenhouse Square.
In the immediate aftermath of the 1893 depression Henry bit-
terly confided to his brother that he was looking forward to
the smash-up of his whole world with a kind of ghoulish glee: “I
shall be glad to see the whole thing utterly destroyed and wiped
away. . . . In a society of Jews and brokers, a world made-up of
maniacs wild for gold, I have no place.” The brothers’ Judeopho-
bia led them to blame Wall Street for all the social decay, ram-
pant vice, and mean-spirited avarice that was exterminating what-
ever remained of the self-conscious modesty, refinement, and
moral high-mindedness of the world in which they and people
like them had grown up. Henry was fatalistic: “We’re in the hands
of the Jews. They can do what they please with our values. . . .
Westward the course of Jewry takes its way.”16
Brooks was a crankier and more eccentric version of his
brother. He not only agreed with Henry, he transmuted Henry’s
drear premonitions into a general theory of historical decline in
his magnum opus, The Law of Civilization and Decay (1896). The
money power, Wall Street, Jewry—they were synonymous in his
eyes—had eaten away at the chivalrous imagination and heroism
of the Middle Ages. All residues of an honorable patrician no-
blesse were corrupted beyond saving. He summed up his bilious
conclusion for Henry: “I tell you Rome was a blessed garden of
paradise beside the rotten, unsexed, swindling, lying Jews, repre-

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sented by J. P. Morgan and the gang who have been manipulating

our country for the last four years.”17
E. L. Godkin, who shared the Adamses’ distress over parvenu
money lust (if not their sulfuric anti-Semitism), used his maga-
zine to excoriate people like Fisk, Vanderbilt, and Gould. God-
kin felt at home in Society and was more than a bit of a snob who
frowned on the vulgarity of the new plutocracy. At the unveiling
of the Vanderbilt Memorial Bronze he let loose a torrent of in-
vective that implicitly condemned the moral bankruptcy of a
culture that admired rather than stigmatized Vanderbilt. “Kings
of the Street” like Vanderbilt displayed “unmitigated selfish-
ness”; it was appalling, as were their “audacity, push, unscrupu-
lousness, and brazen disregard of others’ rights.” When Fisk died
sensationally (murdered by his former mistress’s new lover),
Godkin’s only regret was that he should have died “in old clothes
and in penury and neglect” rather than decked out in “velvet and
diamonds” surrounded by fawning reporters. Godkin was deeply
suspicious of the rough-and-tumble of democratic politics. Al-
though active in elite circles of government reform, he remained
dour about the prospects of raising the general level of public
morality. It might be the only remedy for the baleful influence of
people like Fisk and Vanderbilt, but he was not counting on it.
“People are eager for money and as unscrupulous about the means
for getting it.”18
Acidic denunciations like these of the country’s commercial
zealotry rang with Götterdämmerung finality. Social elitists de-

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spaired for the country’s cultural and moral well-being, believed

its decadence was possibly irreversible and part of the general de-
cline of Western civilization. They came to this gloomy conclu-
sion out of a historical world-weariness, secular in spirit, rather
than from the standpoint of a wounded Christian conscience.
Others, however, from less prepossessing social backgrounds
burned with the wrath of God.
Religious leaders and their communicants were of two minds.
Plenty of ministers from mainstream Protestant denominations
felt entirely comfortable providing divine sanction for the accu-
mulation of wealth, blessing a practice their middle-class con-
gregants pursued with ardor. Russell Conwell’s sermon “Acres of
Diamonds” was the best-known of such justifications. Conwell
was a farm boy from Massachusetts turned Baptist minister, and
the founder of Temple University, which he envisioned as an in-
stitution of educational and moral uplift for the children of the
working classes. His homily, first delivered in 1889 and repeated
six thousand times over the next quarter century, made the case
that not only was the opportunity to make a fortune open to all
but that striving to do so encouraged, like regular exercise, the
muscular development of strong character. Moreover, some of
Wall Street’s titans, including J. P. Morgan, were conspicuously
pious and contributed heavily to church philanthropies (after all,
even the wily and notoriously unscrupulous Daniel Drew founded
a theological seminary in his own name).19
Still, what went on in Wall Street was disquieting even to the

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most orthodox clerics. Henry Ward Beecher was by any measure

the most widely listened to preacher in mid-nineteenth-century
America. He presided over a substantial upper-middle-class con-
gregation in Brooklyn, and his words of moral instruction did
not often venture far beyond the horizon of conventional bour-
geois belief. But even he rose to rhetorical heights of Old Testa-
ment fire and brimstone when it came to issuing judgments
about the moral turpitude of Wall Street’s bad boys and the plu-
tocracy of which they were a part. Thus Fisk’s raffish disregard
for propriety infuriated Beecher, who denounced him as “that
supreme mountebank of fortune . . . absolutely devoid of moral
sense as the desert of Sahara is of grass.” When the “Admiral”
died, Beecher sent him on his way with an unforgiving eulogy,
dismissing him as a “shameless, vicious criminal, abominable in
his lusts.” Foretelling Gould’s demise as well, he described the
financier as “a great epitomized, circulating hell on earth”; “when
he dies hell will groan—one more woe.” Beecher’s parishioners,
however complacent, nonetheless did harbor doubts about the
cupidity and corner-cutting behavior they saw around them.
Luxury, conspicuous waste, preoccupation with fashion left them
vaguely anxious. Beecher mirrored their misgivings about those
who were too eager to pile up possessions, who abandoned their
responsibilities as stewards of wealth. They were, in Beecher’s
view, guilty souls and carriers of moral anarchy. Wealth accumu-
lated unjustly was “a canker, a rust, a fire, a curse.”20
Other voices were bolder, readier to raise the possibility that

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the Street itself, not just its most notorious mountebanks, was by
its very nature always verging on or falling into sin. The Social
Gospel movement offered a general indictment of free-market
capitalism as unchristian in its callous disregard for human wel-
fare. In the year of the Haymarket bombing (1886) one of the
movement’s principal founders, Washington Gladdens, issued a
widely read homiletic entitled “The Three Dangers: Moral As-
pects of Social Questions,” which took on Wall Street directly.
Gambling, according to Gladdens, was the worst of the three
dangers (the other two were drinking and family disintegration).
By gambling he mainly meant speculation, not cards or dice
playing. “Speculating in margins” was “immeasurably worse” than
ordinary gambling because it was more dishonest. The big-time
speculator, the minister observed, “may be a pillar in the church;
he may hob-knob with college presidents, and sit on commence-
ment platforms . . . but he is a plunderer.” Frustrated by the re-
markable deference, even admiration, shown for such people, he
for one would challenge the inertia and passivity of the pulpit
and work to extirpate the “evil genius of our civilization.”21
Theological censure and pronouncements from the pulpit
were formal expressions of a much more widely diffused and re-
ligiously inflected culture. The attacks might be likened to a sys-
tem of spiritual respiration that naturally expelled a certain kind
of economic behavior as a noxious threat to moral health. Gilded
Age editorial writers and political stump speakers tirelessly con-
demned the Street’s immorality. Great cartoonists like Thomas

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 The Immoralist

Nast, whose relentless, mocking depictions of the New York’s

notorious Boss Tweed and his gang of corruptionists led to their
overthrow, often drew Wall Street villains resembling reptilian
or prehensile devils. Nast sketched gothic nightmares of Wall
Street’s bottomless depravity. In one, “This Street Is Closed for
Repairs,” Boss Tweed is caught in prison garb with a ball and
chain around his neck walking down Wall Street past a storefront
labeled “Cuthem-Cheatem, & Co Bankers,” musing as he strolls,
“Why a fellow feels quite Honest in this neighborhood.” Even
popular board games of the period carried the stamp of moral
disapproval. One, “The Checkered Game of Life,” inscribed its
squares with landmarks of moral backsliding and dishonor, in-
cluding “Gambling to Ruin,” “Idleness to Disgrace,” and “Influ-
ence to Fat Office.”22
So, too, the literary landscape was littered with didactic nov-
els, plays, and short stories (often serialized in popular magazines
aimed at the genteel middle classes in town and country) that
worked to affirm Victorian ethics by playing up their violation at
the hands of those infected with the Wall Street contagion.
Much of this was second-rate melodrama, and to modern ears it
sounds intolerably preachy. Honest John Vane, for example, a suc-
cessful moral pot-boiler of the 1870s first serialized in The At-
lantic, described New York as the epitome of materialistic decay
and treated its nouveaux riches as “half Carthaginians and half
Sybarites.” The story was an allegory, a Pilgrim’s Progress in re-

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 The Immoralist

verse. Its hero, “Honest John Vane,” once a maker of iceboxes,

falls from a state of decency and diligent effort to moral destruc-
tion, driven by the temptations of easy money. A smash hit on
Broadway, The Henrietta (1887), applied the strictest Victorian
ethical code to Wall Street and found it in flagrant violation. The
playwright, Bronson Howard, frankly voiced his contempt: “I
tell you Wall Street represents the fiercest kind of gambling
in the world . . . a thousand times deadlier than Monte Carlo.”
And this is what the play harped on: the way the Street’s poison-
ous atmosphere sickens and kills even the most intimate human
affections between father and son.23
Some literature achieved more penetrating and convincing
levels of moral scrutiny. William Dean Howells’s Hazard of New
Fortunes (1890) captured the anxiety felt by many in the middle
classes about Wall Street’s insidious undermining of right think-
ing and right behavior. For all the characters in Howells’s novel
the consequences of the Wall Street contagion are disastrous, but
most of all for Jacob Dryfoos, the patriarch whose tragic undoing
originates in his seduction by the phantasms of Wall Street. Dry-
foos starts out as an exemplar of bourgeois rectitude, narrow-
minded and provincial to be sure, but a true believer in and prac-
titioner of sober-minded, methodical labor and thrifty provision
for the future, a forbidding but devoted father and husband, a
man possessed of solid moral convictions, “crude but genuine.”
But then fate, or rather Fortuna, changes everything. Once a

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 The Immoralist

farmer, he is drawn away, not without earnest resistance, by the

lure of rich neighborhood land and oil prospects. He changes,
becomes a kind of vampire, sucking the poetry out of life. Here is
Howells’s autopsy of the moral cancer metastasizing out of Wall
Street into the heart of Jacob Dryfoos as he is forced to confront
the true “hazard of new fortunes”: Jacob “came where he could
watch his money breed more money and bring greater increase
of its kind in an hour of luck than the toil of hundreds of men
could earn in a year. He called it speculation, stock, the Street.”
Here Jacob suffered “an atrophy of the generous instincts,” here
“where he broke down and cried for the hard-working wholesome
life he had lost. He was near the end of this season of despair, but
he was also near the end of whatever was best in himself.”24
Howells’s high moral seriousness reflected a deep-running
cultural queasiness about capitalism run amok. An embedded re-
ligious consciousness formed a moral boundary that the Gilded
Age sensibility might cross again and again but never entirely ef-
face. Wall Street functioned as Protestantism’s moral gulag, an
underzone of spiritual undesirables. In this way the Street’s rise
inspired a kind of counterculture that aspired not to overthrow
the inhibitions of an older moral order but to restore them. So
pervasive was this Protestant counterreformation that it supplied
much of the psychic energy driving the great oppositional polit-
ical movements of the Gilded Age, including Populism, the anti-
trust movement, and the Knights of Labor. The platforms and
programs of these movements were in no way backward-looking;

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 The Immoralist

on the contrary they anticipated the fundamental reforms of the

twentieth century with respect to government regulation of the
economy, the rights of labor, and social welfare. But they were
grounded in a vision as old as the Revolution, one that yoked
labor and virtue like body and soul. By severing the link between
wealth and productive labor the Street threatened a devastating
spiritual amputation. Legions of angry farmers and laborers and
midsize businessmen warned that Americans needed to be vigi-
lant. And their cry for moral vigilance echoed in the anathemas
they hurled at the Street.
Wall Street spread an antique nightscape before the populist
imagination. It was inhabited by the oversexed and the emascu-
lated, by urban tricksters and sybarites, by moral prostitutes and
apocalyptic demons. It was a despoiled landscape, robbed of its
natural vigor and hard-earned virtue. Folk poets often rhymed
about effete Anglophiles and demoralized fops. Trusts were in-
variably depicted as tentacled creatures, beasts of vaguely bibli-
cal provenance. Vulpine shylocks perched amid “Envy and Pride
and Lust and Greed,” sequestered themselves in “marble grot-
tos” or “great mausoleums of greed.”25
The Street’s corrupting influence on sexual mores and family
integrity was especially alarming. The Sioux Falls Daily Argus, for
example, singled out for censure Morgan’s contribution to “the
blighting of womanhood,” and “the premature aging of chil-
dren.” Irate farmers raised the specter of “Debased Manhood.”
Moreover, the fear of emasculation was coupled with an intu-

167
 The Immoralist

ition that the extraordinary power wielded by financial overlords

bred insatiable and conscienceless lust. The “Oligarchy” ravaged
every outpost of female virtue. For populists and many other po-
litical insurgents the Money Power was also an impiety and a
pollutant that threatened above all the purity of the land, the
family, the nation, and the race. A generation before Henry
Ford’s anti-Semitic tirade, the car manufacturer’s darkest pho-
bias about the moral subversiveness of finance capitalism circu-
lated widely through the country’s hinterland.26

How quaint this all seems now. Our own “second Gilded Age,”
beginning during the Reagan era, coincided with the efflores-
cence of fundamentalist and other forms of religious rebirth. Yet
modern-day evangelicals pay precious little attention to prob-
lems of wealth and poverty or to the peculiar role of the Street in
that relationship. If today there is such a thing as basic middle-
class morality, it no longer finds moral discomfort in the pres-
ence of moneymaking for its own sake. Certainly the old taboos
against gambling are gone. However censorious the religious
right waxes, it rarely finds a link between the moral looseness it
excoriates and the culture of devil may care so flagrantly prac-
ticed on Wall Street during the junk bond mania of Michael
Milken’s 1980s or the dot.com hysteria of the next decade. So,
too, this revamping of the nation’s religious subconscious has left

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 The Immoralist

its impact on the literary imagination. It has blunted the sting

and eased the moral anxiety once aroused by such Gilded Age
classics as A Hazard of New Fortunes and Edith Wharton’s House
of Mirth (1905). Indeed, the blunt, unironic moral seriousness of
Howells, for example, would strike a discordant note today.
That countercultural literary, religious, and political imagina-
tion of the nineteenth century which pronounced Wall Street an
excommunicant depended on the capacity to be profoundly
shocked, on a sense of violation. But that capacity has shrunk in
our own day, supplanted by an air of comic bemusement and
ironic detachment.
At first glance that may seem wrong. The financial high jinks
of the past quarter century have seemingly breathed new life into
the image of Wall Street as the great immoralist. Scan the titles
of some of some of the best-selling books about the Street during
the recent past: Liar’s Poker, Predators’ Ball, Den of Thieves, Dot.Con,
Barbarians at the Gate, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bombardiers. And this
is not to mention movie “heroes” like Gordon Gekko or psy-
chotic and criminal variations on Gekko’s triumphalist and chill-
ing amorality in movies and plays like American Psycho, Boiler
Room, and Other People’s Money. This suggests that the iconogra-
phy of evil discoloring our ancestors’ perception of Wall Street
lives on . . . but it does so more as an afterlife.
An atmosphere of comic irony or knowing fatalism, or some-
times both, suffuses most of these books and movies. The “liars”

169
 The Immoralist

morph into a bunch of wild and crazy Salomon fraternity broth-

ers. The confidence men in Bombardiers are hilariously funny.
But their schemes to securitize whole countries, to auction them
off as IPOs, don’t emit the infernal aroma the reader smells in
Melville’s equally amusing portrait of the Wall Street “bear” on
the riverboat Fidele. Michael Milken’s Predators living it up at the
Beverly Hilton indulge voracious appetites as gargantuan as those
of the old Robber Barons. But except in extremis, their chroni-
cler grants them a pass for carrying out a necessary angioplasty
on the clogged arteries of economic circulation. Those “Barbar-
ians” storming the gates of RJR Nabisco are not a threat to West-
ern civilization as once the Adamses and Godkin perceived Van-
derbilt and Gould and Russell Sage to be. Rather they menace
only Wall Street’s old guard, engaging in a battle between titans
whose moral significance is something less than titanic. And the
“Vanities” Tom Wolfe skewers belong to “masters of the uni-
verse” so fragile and unprepossessing as to call into question their
mastery of anything. It is difficult to see them as a serious moral
threat to anyone but themselves, even harder to imagine them
with Morgan’s scary preternatural eyes looming up from some
nonhuman abyss.
To perceive eyes in that way, the observer needs to feel him- or
herself in the presence of the uncanny, to live with the fear of
God and the Devil, even if those deities have been stripped of
their supernatural attributes. When earlier generations of scan-

170
 The Immoralist

dalized writers, hellfire preachers, and outraged tribunes of popu-

lar wrath peered into Wall Street and saw a whole bestiary of
moral depravity, their eyesight underwent a kind of cultural mag-
nification. These hedonists, idlers, parasites, and thieves appeared
not only fascinating in their own right but players in a more
global moral melodrama.
Beginning long ago and continuing through the New Deal,
various forms of political opposition—Jeffersonian and then
Jacksonian democracy, populism, Progressive-era reform, social-
ism, the antitrust movement, labor uprisings, the New Deal
itself—lent a gravitas to this cultural persuasion and its moral
confrontation with the Street. The withering away of these po-
litical insurgencies in the more recent past helps account for the
weightlessness of the liars and thieves and masters of the uni-
verse of our own era. They survive as remnants, if that.
After FDR the moral animus directed at Wall Street subsided.
For several decades the Street receded and then virtually van-
ished as a target of ethical anxiety. In one sense the disappearance
of the Street for a long generation marked the collective triumph
of those earlier cultural indictments and political insurgencies.
Arguably they died nobly and of natural causes, having managed
to curtail and inhibit Wall Street’s worst breaches of public and
private morality (not to mention the Street’s political and eco-
nomic wrongdoings). But the wheel continued to turn. When
Kevin Phillips published The Politics of Rich and Poor in 1990 it

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 The Immoralist

caused a stir. Here a Republican apostate, famous for his strate-

gic discovery of Nixon’s “silent majority,” denounced the Reagan
revolution as the “triumph of upper class America.” His cata-
logue of its sins would have been familiar to any late-nineteenth-
century populist. Indeed, Phillips thought he sensed a rising
movement against “the oligarchy” that would echo the thunder-
ous anathemas of Bryan and other jeremiahs who proceeded and
followed him. Phillips was convinced the 1990s would go down
as a “watershed decade.”27
It was not to be. The “new era” of the dot.com worshiped at
the shrine of “shareholder value.” Wall Street, once everybody’s
favorite immoralist, emerged instead as the paragon of economic
virtue—a miraculous transformation if ever there was one. Even
after the free-fall of the stock market and the cascade of financial
scandals beginning with Enron, the temperature of public indig-
nation remained low, hardly registering in the congressional
elections of 2002. On the one hand, it is probably true that the
Bush administration’s failed attempt to privatize Social Security
did indeed suffer as a result. A residual distrust of the Street and
its moral imperfections remains and probably always will. None-
theless, Wall Street the immoralist does not haunt the public
imagination as for generations it once did.
Some way of dealing with Wall Street in our midst, an encom-
passing moral temperament once deeply ingrained in American
culture has grown frail and sickly. Why? Not because an interna-

172
 The Immoralist

tional conspiracy ate away at the country’s moral innards. Henry

Ford had it wrong, malignantly wrong. But the ethos of play and
consumerism he found so repugnant in the 1920s no doubt has
exercised in the decades since a sedative effect on the spiritual
vigilance that once stigmatized the Street. For the moment at
least, Wall Street has escaped the gulag.

173
Image not available
 Epilogue

Wall Street has been around for two centuries. (The street itself
goes back to the founding days of Dutch colonial New York in
the early 1600s, when it included a wooden wall to ward off the
British, but the financial center began in the era of the American
Revolution.) For most of those two hundred years there has been
a great distance separating the Street from the American people.
That gulf was political, social, and cultural all at once. The ap-
paritions that attached themselves to Wall Street vividly cap-
tured this sense that the Street was the habitat of the abnormal.
Certainly the aristocrat, the confidence man, and the immoralist
were considered foreign matter, not native to the healthy Ameri-
can organism and dangerous to its survival. Even the hero, how-
ever much he was admired and endowed with a familial likeness

175
 Epilogue

to the pathfinder, frontiersman, and cowboy, was still a rare fig-

ure, towering over the mass of men like a Napoleon.
During the past half century, and especially during the age of
Ronald Reagan, that sense of estrangement has diminished. We
can today talk about the democratization of Wall Street both as a
reality and as a set of shared expectations in ways our ancestors
would have found dubious. Can we add the image of Everyman
to the gallery of Wall Street icons without seeming ludicrous?
For some people, ordinary citizens, the answer to that ques-
tion has always been an unproblematic yes. According to this
view, risk taking is an indigenous national character trait. And
Americans have been especially blessed, a people of plenty whose
daring exploits on behalf of material wealth have been richly re-
warded. Wall Street, however much its reputation has rested on
images of masses of wealth and alpine barriers of social exclusiv-
ity, has at the same time presented itself as a casino, open to any-
one bold or reckless enough to want to play. Money, after all, can
function as a leveler as much as an upholder of hierarchies of
power. Ancestry, breeding, education, religion, honorific titles
all count for little or nothing when it comes to paying Wall
Street’s price of admission. That has been its plebian appeal to
dreamers and schemers as far back as the early decades of the
nineteenth century.
Except for a relative handful of people—a few of whom, like
Jim Fisk or Daniel Drew, gained fame—this peculiar Wall Street
version of the American dream remained a dream. Briefly, during

176
 Epilogue

the 1920s, it seemed about to become more tangible. Wall Street

came to be associated in the popular mind with the flapper, boot-
leg gin, and jazz because its promise of fast money was an inte-
gral part of the era’s new culture of play that captivated many
middle-class Americans. On a less fanciful level, the number of
people participating in the market grew considerably; they were
not the mesmerized multitudes of historical legend but they still
counted several million more than had previously ventured any-
where near the Street. But soon the great crash turned the dream
into a nightmare.
Psychic recovery took longer than economic rebirth. A na-
tional preoccupation with security and an aversion to risk lasted
for a long generation. But in one of the more fascinating ironies
of recent American history, it was precisely this quest for security
which helped make many ordinary people feel more at home on
the Street. Unions, which until recently represented a consider-
able share of the workforce, were in the post–World War II era
effective means for achieving economic security. Union pension
funds, won through collective bargaining or accumulated as sepa-
rate fraternal benefit accounts, soon ended up in the stock mar-
ket as institutional investors joined the Street’s principal players
during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the
varieties of investment retirement vehicles proliferated for the
middle class, not only for working-class trade unionists. By
the end of the century roughly half of all American families had
some stake in the market, mainly through their holdings in mu-

177
 Epilogue

tual funds and other forms of relatively risk-averse financial

instruments.
By the 1990s many people, whose Depression-era mothers and
fathers might cringe at the very thought of wagering anything on
the stock market, had come to see it as an entirely reasonable
place not only to make provision for their retirement but to fi-
nance college educations, a wedding, vacation homes, and ordi-
nary big-ticket consumer items. Most of these people were pas-
sive participants. They entrusted their surplus capital to an array
of investment advisers and institutions. Their ambitions were
relatively modest, their instincts still conservative. They hardly
resembled the daredevil speculators of Wall Street lore. None-
theless, their very presence in such vast numbers made Wall
Street seem middle-American in a way previously unimaginable.
And then there was the dot.com bubble. This did indeed in-
vite the participation of those whose instincts were anything but
prudent. Day traders, for example, imagined themselves as finan-
cial mavericks, riding the free range of the World Wide Web in
hot pursuit of exotic treasures invisible to nearsighted, overly
timid institutional investors, brokers, and investment house ana-
lysts. For the shirt-sleeved day trader, hooked up to a personal
computer, often moonlighting from a day job as a truck driver or
housewife, the appeal was psychic and immaterial as much as it
was about the money: the thrill of the hunt, the gambler’s high,
thumbing one’s nose at all those presumptuous “experts.”
All of this and much more seemed peculiarly possible and ra-

178
 Epilogue

tional thanks to the information superhighway. The outsized

confidence of day traders (but not only day traders) was kept aloft
by a new technology that promised to make information trans-
parent and available to all, even the most esoteric information,
even that encoded, arcane knowledge which for generations had
been sequestered deep within the labyrinthine byways of the
Street. No more insider trading because now everybody could be
an insider, or so it seemed. Moreover, visions of the new tech-
nology, at least as advertised by its entrepreneurs and promoters
in the media, were grandiose, approaching the metaphysical.
Whether stock market exuberance was considered irrational by
some and rational by others (or, as in the case of Alan Greenspan,
both in succession), the conventional wisdom had it that an
information-based economy would inaugurate a new era, one
resting on a plateau of permanent prosperity, free of cyclic
spasms—those booms followed by busts, with all their heart-
breaking collateral damage. Hence all those absurd prices paid
for newly minted stock at IPOs for Internet companies, espe-
cially, many of them more virtual than real, companies without
profits, revenue, or even products.
It is hard to exaggerate how far the Street’s aura reached dur-
ing the glory years of the dot.com boom. Newspaper and maga-
zine articles reported on ordinary people who dreamed of the
market at night: an investor who said, “It’s given me a feeling of
control over my life I’ve never had before”; a woman who re-
marked that her newest romantic interest had “tremendous up-

179
 Epilogue

side potential”; a dentist who confessed that he tracked his stocks

between patient visits, sometimes even between X-rays and fill-
ings. First came class consciousness, then the royal road to the
unconscious; now there was “Dow consciousness.” Once there
was a Depression generation, then a Sixties generation; now
there was a Dow generation. For some years it became virtually
impossible to turn on the TV or radio, plug into the Internet, or
even attend a baseball game without joining an all-day, every-day
open house hosted at Broad and Wall Streets.1
But the dot.cometh and it also goeth away, as it did at warp
speed with the crash of 2000. It turned out that the expectations
and exuberance were indeed irrational. Market panics were by no
means a thing of the past. And the Enron scandal and the cascade
of disasters that followed for years afterward, affecting many of
the leading financial and corporate institutions of the country,
made it woefully clear that insider trading was also alive and all
too well. It is hard to predict whether this will have a lasting im-
pact on Wall Street’s most recent iconic incarnation as Every-
man. Certainly, everybody is now forewarned that the Street’s
less savory presences remain at large. Whether Americans will
continue nonetheless to find in Wall Street a welcoming place to
indulge their romance with risk and dreams of universal abun-
dance remains to be seen.

180
 Notes

one
The Aristocrat
1. Eric Homberger, Mrs. Astor’s New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded
Age (New York, 2002), 49 – 50.
2. Cathy Mason, “Public Vices, Private Benefits: William Duer and His
Circle, 1776–1792,” in William Pencok and Conrad Edick Wright, eds.,
New York and the Rise of American Capitalism: Economic Development and the
Social and Political History of an American State, 1780–1870 (New York,
1989); see also Stanley Elkins and Eric McKittrick, The Age of Federalism:
The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (New York, 1993).
3. Mason, “Public Vices.”
4. Alexander Hamilton, “The First Report on the Public Credit,” January
14, 1790, and “The Second Report on the Public Credit,” January 16,
1795, in Samuel McKee, Jr., Alexander Hamilton Papers: Paper on Public
Credit, Commerce, and Finance (New York, 1934); Herbert E. Sloan, Prin-
ciple and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York,
1995), 110.
5. Mason, “Public Vices”; Homberger, Mrs. Astor’s New York, 46 – 50.
6. Alexander Hamilton, “Observations on Certain Documents Contained
in nos. 5 & 6 of ‘The History of the United States for the Year 1796’ in

181
 Notes to Pages 17–29

Which Charges of Speculation Against Alexander Hamilton, Late Sec-

retary of the Treasury, Is Fully Refuted by Himself” (Philadelphia, 1797).
7. Thomas Jefferson to the President of the United States (George Wash-
ington), May 23, 1792, in Merrill Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writ-
ings (New York, 1984), 986.
8. Washington, quoted in Mason, “Public Vices.”
9. Philip Freneau, quoted in Karen Weyler, “A Speculating Spirit: Trade,
Speculation, and Gambling in Early American Fiction,” American Litera-
ture 31, no. 3 (1996); Thomas Jefferson, “The Anas, 1791–1806,” in Peter-
son, Jefferson: Writings; Madison, quoted in Elkins and McKittrick, Age of
Federalism, 243; Adams, quoted in Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Cur-
rents in American Thought: An Interpretation of Literature from the Begin-
nings to 1920, 3 vols. (New York, 1927– 30), 1:314.
10. A Philadelphia citizen, quoted in Elkins and McKittrick, Age of Federalism,
460; Madison, quoted in Elkins and McKittrick, Age of Federalism, 243.
11. Hamilton, quoted in Gary J. Kornblith and John Murrin, “The Dilem-
mas of Ruling Elites in Revolutionary America,” in Steve Fraser and Gary
Gerstle, eds., Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy
(Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Hamilton, quoted in Sloan, Principle and In-
terest, 138; Dixon Wecter, The Saga of American Society: A Record of Social
Aspirations, 1607–1937 (New York, 1937), 8.
12. Homberger, Mrs. Astor’s New York, 46–50; Marvin Gelfand, “The Street,”
American Heritage 38, no. 7 (1987); Wecter, Saga of American Society, 8;
Jay, quoted in Carl Becker, The United States: An Experiment in Democracy
(New Brunswick, N.J.), 86.
13. Tom Watson, “Wall Street Conspiracies Against the American Nation,”
New York World Sunday Magazine, October 10, 1896.
14. James K. Medberry, Men and Mysteries of Wall Street (1870; rpt., New
York, 1968), 10 –11, 194 –95, 196–97, 247; observer, quoted in Maury
Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (Baltimore, 1986), 70.
15. “Wall Street in War Time, “ Harper’s New Monthly, December 1864 –
May 1865.
16. “One of the Upper Ten Thousand,” illustration in Carl Bode, ed., Docu-
ments in American Civilization: American Life in the 1840s (New York,
1967); William Worthington Fowler, Ten Years in Wall Street; or, Revela-
tions of Inside Life and Experience on ’Change (1870; rpt., New York, 1971),
42. See also Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York, 1934).

182
 Notes to Pages 33–44

17. Lloyd, quoted in Chester McArthur Destler, American Radicalism, 1865–

1901: Essays and Documents (Menasha, Wis., 1946), 219.
18. Charles Francis Adams and Henry Adams, Chapters of Erie (1886; rpt.,
Ithaca, N.Y., 1956), 3, 8, 10, 33, 95, 98.
19. William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe Each Other (1883; rpt.,
London, 1961).
20. Sven Beckert, “The Making of New York City’s Bourgeoisie, 1850–1886”
(Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1995), 354; Thomas Kessner, Capital
City: New York City and the Men Behind America’s Rise to Economic Domi-
nance, 1860–1900 (New York, 2003), 247– 48; Mary Elizabeth Lease,
quoted in Edward Herbert Mazur, Minyans for a Prairie City: The Politics
of Chicago Jewry, 1850 –1940 (New York, 1990).
21. Ignatius Donnelley, Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1960), 246.
22. Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire,
the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago, 1995), 61.
23. George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern
America, 1900–1912 (New York, 1962); Teddy Roosevelt to Henry Cabot
Lodge, November 14, 1906, in Letters of Theodore Roosevelt: Selections from
the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884 –1918
(New York, 1925); William H. Horbaugh, ed., The Writings of Theodore
Roosevelt (New York, 1967), 86, 423– 32.
24. Robert H. Wiebe, “The House of Morgan and the Executive, 1905–13,”
American Historical Review 65 (October 1959); Jean Strouse, Morgan: Ameri-
can Financier (New York, 1999), 440– 41; Morgan, quoted in Stephen
Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York (New
York, 1967), 203.
25. Roosevelt, quoted in Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 98; Roosevelt,
quoted in Wecter, Saga of American Society, 109.
26. Morgan, quoted by Frederick Lewis Allen, Lords of Creation (New York,
1935), 160.
27. Louis D. Brandeis, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It, ed.
Melvin I. Urofsky (New York, 1995), 27, 33, 68 – 69, 70 –71.
28. Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (New York, 1913), 177; Wilson,
quoted by Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and
Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 208; Wilson, acceptance speech,
Democratic Party convention, August 7, 1912, in Arthur M. Schlesinger,

183
 Notes to Pages 44–58

Jr., and Roger Bruns, eds., Congress Investigates: A Documented History,

1792–1974 (New York, 1975), vol. 3.
29. George Reynolds, quoted in Current Opinion, February 1913.
30. Schlesinger and Bruns, Congress Investigates, 2264 –65, 2267– 68, 2295–
98, 2343.
31. Wecter, Saga of American Society, 124; New York Times, April 10, 11, 12,
1913; the Reverend William Wilkinson, quoted in Sigmund Diamond, The
Reputation of the American Businessman (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), chap. 4.
32. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, in Roosevelt, Looking
Forward (New York, 1933), 263, 265; Russell De Buhite and David Levy,
eds., FDR’s Fireside Chats (Norman, Okla., 1992), fireside chats of March
12, 1933, October 22, 1933, September 30, 1934.
33. Letter from FDR quoted in Jordan A. Schwarz, Liberal: Adolph Berle and
the Vision of an American Era (New York, 1987), 108.
34. Schlesinger and Bruns, Congress Investigates, “The Pecora Wall Street Ex-
posé,”2563, 2566, 2570, 2572; “Big Bankers Gambling Mania,” Literary
Digest, March 11, 1935; N. R. Danielion, “The Stock Market and the
Public,” Atlantic Monthly, October 1933; Father Coughlin and Huey Long,
quoted in Alan Brinkley, “Dissidents and Demagogues,” in Colin Gordon,
ed., Major Problems in American History, 1920– 45 (Boston, 1999), 385, 387.
35. Edmund Wilson, “Sunshine Charlie,” in Wilson, The American Earth-
quake: A Documentary of the Twenties and Thirties (New York, 1958).
36. Jack Morgan, quoted in Wecter, Saga of American Society, 141.
37. John Brooks, Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920–38
(New York, 1969), 180– 82.
38. New York Times Magazine, quoted in Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through
History: America in the Reagan Years (New York, 1992), 196.

two
The Confidence Man
1. Mark Twain, quoted in Walter Fuller Taylor, The Economic Novel in Amer-
ica (New York, 1964), 126.
2. A. J. Liebling, “High Finance in the Gilded Age: The Great Diamond
Hoax,” in Richard A. Bartlett, ed., The Gilded Age: America, 1865–1900:
Interpretive Articles and Documentary Sources (Boston, 1969), originally
published in the New Yorker, November 16, 1940, as “The American
Golconda.”

184
 Notes to Pages 62–78

3. Washington Irving, quoted in Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in

America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, 1957), 438; Ver-
non Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Literature: From the Be-
ginnings to 1920 (New York, 1927– 30), 2: 204, 208–10; Ralph Waldo
Emerson, “The Conduct of Life,” quoted in Patricia O’Toole, Money and
Morals (New York, 1998), 93.
4. Jeremiah Church, quoted in Marvin Myers, The Jacksonian Persuasion:
Politics and Belief (Stanford, 1957), 138.
5. Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy (London, 1987);
Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (New York, 1965), 376–77, 383.
6. George Foster, New York by Gaslight and Other Urban Sketches (1850; rpt.,
Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 131, 220– 21, 226– 27.
7. Johannes Bergmann, “The Original Confidence Man,” American Quar-
terly 31, no. 3 (fall 1960).
8. Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (New York, 1967),
67–71.
9. See Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in
Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), 188, 191, 195; Cedric B.
Cowing, Populists, Plungers, and Progressives: A Social History of Commodity
Speculation, 1890–1930 (Princeton, 1965), 28 –30; Edwin Lefevre,
“Gambling in Bucket Shops,” Harper’s Weekly, May 11, 1901.
10. Edward G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York
City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 1042– 43.
11. See Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke: Financier of the Civil War (Phila-
delphia, 1907), 2:224 – 25, 233– 34, 238, 240, 243, 295, 301, 309;
John Steele Gordon, The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a
World Power, 1653– 2000 (New York, 1999), 143; Edward Chancellor,
Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation (New York,
1999), 184.
12. The best account of the Erie wars is John Steele Gordon, The Scarlet
Woman of Wall Street: Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Erie
Railway Wars, and the Birth of Wall Street (New York, 1988); see also W. A.
Swanberg, Jim Fisk: The Career of an Improbable Rascal (New York, 1959).
The best account of the Gold Ring is Kenneth D. Ackerman, The Gold
Ring: Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, and Black Friday, 1869 (New York, 1988).
13. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today
(1873; New York, 1994); see also Chancellor, Devil Take the Hind-
most,170; Taylor, Economic Novel, 130– 31.

185
 Notes to Pages 79–89

14. Robert Sobel, The Great Bull Market: Wall Street in the 1920s (New York,
1968), 17–20.
15. This and the following profiles from John Brooks, Once in Golconda: A
True Drama of Wall Street, 1920 – 38 (New York, 1969), 78, 122; Mark
Smith, Towards Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock
Market (New York, 2001), 79, 136; Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-
Witt, The Day the Bubble Burst: A Social History of the Wall Street Crash of
1929 (New York, 1979), 20; Tom Schactman, The Day America Crashed
(New York, 1979), 52; Sobel, Great Bull Market, 85 – 87.
16. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929 (Boston, 1997), 20 – 21,
53 – 54, 60 – 66; Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History
of the 1920s (New York, 1931), 271–72, 322; observer of stock market as
sport, quoted in Brooks, Once in Golconda, 72.
17. Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost, 202; Schactman, Day America Crashed,
43; Thomas and Morgan-Witt, Day the Bubble Burst, 282; Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr., and Roger Bruns, eds., Congress Investigates: A Docu-
mented History, 1792–1974 (New York, 1975), 3:2576, 2721; Cowling,
Populists, Plungers, and Progressives, 233, 242.
18. Brooks, Once in Golconda, 61, 129, 273, 287; Galbraith, Great Crash, 102,
161–65; Thomas K. McCraw, Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis
Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn (Cambridge,
Mass., 1984), 196.
19. Schactman, Day America Crashed, 18; Thomas Lamont, quoted in Thomas
and Morgan-Witts, Day the Bubble Burst, 345, and see also 70, 78, 134.
20. Kathleen Odean, High Steppers, Fallen Angels, and Lollipops: Wall Street
Slang (New York, 1988), 131.
21. Scientist interviewed by Forbes quoted in Robert Teitelman, Gene
Dreams: Wall Street, Academia, and the Rise of Biotechnology (New York,
1989), 27; Wall Street Journal, quoted in David Colbert, Eyewitness to Wall
Street: Four Hundred Years of Dreams, Schemes, Busts, and Booms (New
York, 2001), 327; Abby Joseph Cohen, quoted in Robert Shiller, Irra-
tional Exuberance (New York, 2000), 74, and see also 28, 30; Smith, To-
ward Rational Exuberance, 255; John Cassidy, “Pricking the Bubble,” New
Yorker, August 17, 1998; John Cassidy, “The Fountainhead,” in David
Remnick, ed., The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of
Affluence (New York, 2000).
22. New York Times, November 2, 1999, and August 23, 1999; Colbert, Eye-
witness,330.

186
 Notes to Pages 91–111

23. Po Bronson, Bombardiers (New York, 1995), 153, 223. See also Colbert,
Eyewitness, 235; Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History: America
in the Reagan Years (New York, 1991), 431– 33; Michael Lewis, Liar’s
Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street (New York, 1989).
24. William D. Nordhaus, “The Story of the Bubble,” New York Review of
Books, January 15, 2004.
25. Louis Lapham, quoted in Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Politi-
cal History of the American Rich (New York, 2002), 405.

three
The Hero
1. British observer, quoted in Dixon Wecter, The Saga of American Society: A
Record of Social Aspiration, 1607–1937 (New York, 1937), 142; New York
Herald, quoted in H. W. Brands, Masters of Enterprise (New York, 1999), 25.
2. “The Vanderbilts,” in Henry Nash Smith, ed., Documents in American
Civilization: Popular Culture and Industrialization, 1865–1900 (New York,
1967), 88. The material about Vanderbilt in the following paragraphs is
from this source.
3. Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the
Rise of Modern Finance (New York, 1990), 7; James K. Medberry, Men and
Mysteries of Wall Street (1870; rpt., New York, 1968), 157; John Steele
Gordon, The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street: Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Cornelius
Vanderbilt, the Erie Railway Wars, and the Birth of Wall Street (New York,
1988), 91, 206, 309, 318, 332, 337, 374 –75; Harper’s Weekly, September
25, 1869; Sigmund Diamond, The Reputation of the American Businessman
(Cambridge, Mass., 1955), 55, 61– 62, 69, 72.
4. On Fisk, see William Worthington Fowler, Ten Years in Wall Street; or,
Revelations of Inside Life and Experience on ’Change (1870; rpt., New York,
1971), 482; Jean Curtis Webber, “The Capital of Capitalism,” American
Heritage 24, no. 1 (1972); Stuart H. Holbrook, The Age of Moguls (New
York, 1953), 22 –23, 34, 41, 43, 46; W. A. Swanberg, Jim Fisk: The Career
of an Improbable Rascal (New York, 1959), 7– 8, 26, 169, 171.
5. David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York, 2006).
6. James D. McCabe, Great Fortunes and How They Were Made (New York,
1870), and quoted in Wecter, Saga of American Society, 197–98; Diamond,
Reputation of the American Businessman, 55, 61– 62, 69, 72. These charac-
terizations can be found in numerous books, including Kenneth D. Ack-

187
 Notes to Pages 112–26

erman, The Gold Ring: Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, and Black Friday, 1869 (New
York, 1988), Holbrook, Age of Moguls, and Thomas Kessner, Capital City:
New York City and the Men Behind America’s Rise to Economic Dominance,
1860–1900 (New York, 2001).
7. Theodore P. Greene, American Heroes: The Changing Models of Success in
American Magazines (New York, 1970), 110, 112; David Black, The King
of Fifth Avenue: The Fortunes of August Belmont (New York, 1981).
8. William Graham Sumner, quoted in Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwin-
ism in American Thought (Boston, 1992), 58.
9. Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (New York, 1967), 8– 9; Dreiser, The
Titan (New York, 1965), 397–98; Dreiser, The Stoic (New York, 1947).
10. Obituaries from New York World, New York Tribune, Harper’s Weekly, all
quoted in Diamond, Reputation of American Businessman, chap. 4; New
York Times, April 10, 11, 12, 1913.
11. Nasaw, Carnegie, 474.
12. Chernow, House of Morgan, 38, 67– 69; Jean Strouse, Morgan: American
Financier (New York, 1999), 6, 261, 320.
13. James Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and
Corporate Capitalism, 1890–1913 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), 51, 56, 58; Thomas
H. Nevins and Marion V. Sears, “The Rise of the Market for Industrial
Securities, 1887–1902,” Business History Review 29 (1955); “Final Report
of the United States Industrial Commission” (Washington, D.C., 1902),
19:616 –19; Thomas Cochran and Warren Miller, The Age of Enterprise: A
Social History of Industrial America (New York, 1942), 192– 93; Vincent P.
Carosso, Investment Banking in America: A History (Cambridge, Mass.,
1970), 47– 50, 140– 44; Strouse, Morgan, 320, 395.
14. John Steele Gordon, “The Magnitude of J. P. Morgan,” American Heri-
tage, July–August 1989; Jean Strouse, “The Brilliant Bail-Out,” New
Yorker, November 23, 1998; Bernard Berenson, quoted in Strouse, Mor-
gan, 589, and see also 582.
15. Carosso, Investment Banking, 222– 23; John Steele Gordon, The Great
Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653– 2000 (New
York, 1999), 202, 208; Cochran and Miller, Age of Enterprise, 298–300;
Alexander Dana Noyes, The War Period of American Finance, 1908–1925
(New York, 1926), 7, 88, 106.
16. Stephen L. Harris, Duty, Honor, Privilege: New York’s Silk Stocking Regiment
and the Breaking of the Hindenburg Line (Washington, D.C., 2001), 295, 338.
17. See Manhattan Inc., September 1984, July 1985, September 1987, among

188
 Notes to Pages 126–37

many other issues; Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost: A History
of Financial Speculation (New York, 1999), 254, 264; Connie Bruck, The
Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk
Bond Raiders (New York, 1989), 245, 270; Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking
Through History: America in the Reagan Years (New York, 1991), 195, 215,
225– 26; Ken Auletta, Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House
of Lehman (New York, 1986); Manhattan Inc., June 1987; Michael Lewis,
Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street (New York, 1989).
18. Revisionist biographies of the era include Maury Klein, The Life and Legend
of Jay Gould (Baltimore, 1986), Lloyd J. Mercer, E. H. Harriman: Master
Railroader (Boston, 1985), and Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An
American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Big Business (New York, 1990).
The trend would continue through the 1990s with new biographies of
Morgan by Jean Strouse, of John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow, and of
Harriman by Maury Klein and histories of Wall Street and big business
by John Steele Gordon, Thomas Kessner, and Charles Geisst, among
others.
19. Milken admirer, quoted in Bruck, Predators’ Ball, 84, and see also 19, 84 –
85, 93, 95, 270; Auletta, Greed and Glory; Kevin Phillips, Wealth and
Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York, 2002), 366.
20. Kevin Phillips variously calls this the “financialization of the economy”
and the “collectivization of risk” (not entirely the same thing) in Wealth
and Democracy, 93, 95 – 98; Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic
Development (New York, 1961), 126; Robert Brenner, The Boom and the
Bubble: The United States in the World Economy (New York, 2000), 81, 86,
88; Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American
Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath (New York, 1990), 70, 171–72, 174.

four
The Immoralist
1. New York Times, quoted in Irving Katz, August Belmont: A Political Biogra-
phy (New York, 1968), 143– 45; David Black, The King of Fifth Avenue:
The Fortunes of August Belmont (New York, 1981), 257.
2. Henry Ford, The International Jew (Dearborn, Mich., 1922), originally a
series of articles published in the Dearborn Independent between 1920 and
1922 under the title “The Jewish Question”; Albert Lee, Henry Ford and
the Jews (New York, 1980); Leo P. Ribuffo, “Henry Ford and the ‘Inter-

189
 Notes to Pages 142–58

national Jew,’” American Jewish History 60 ( June 1980); David L. Lewis,

“Henry Ford’s Anti-Semitism and Its Repercussions,” Michigan Journal
of History 24 ( January 1984).
3. Thomas Jefferson, quoted in John Steele Gordon, The Great Game: The
Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653–2000 (New York, 1999), 21.
4. Cotton Mather, quoted in Wayne Westbrook, Wall Street in the American
Novel (New York, 1980), 8.
5. Poem excerpt quoted in Karen Weyler, “A Speculating Spirit: Trade,
Speculation, and Gambling in Early American Fiction,” Early American
Literature 31, no. 3 (1996), and see this article for references to Dorval; or,
The Speculator; Thomas Jefferson, “The Anas, 1791–1806,” in Merrill
Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York, 1984).
6. Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in
Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), 6–7, 44, 61; Patricia Cline
Cohen, “Unregulated Youth: Masculinity and Murder in the 1830s City,”
Radical History Review (winter 1992).
7. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 12, 14, 19, and October 3,
10, 17, 24, 1857; New York Ledger, July 27, 1850, May 22 and October 17,
24, 1857; Charles Frederick Briggs, The Adventures of Harry Franco: A
Tale of the Great Panic (1839; rpt., New York, 1969).
8. George Foster, New York by Gaslight and Other Urban Sketches (1850; rpt.,
Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 131, 220– 21, 226–27.
9. Foster, New York by Gaslight; George Lippard, The Quaker City; or, The
Monks of Monk Hall (Amherst, Mass., 1970).
10. President Jackson, quoted in Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in Amer-
ica: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, 1957), 430– 31; Presi-
dent Jackson’s Farewell Address, March 4, 1837, in Francis Newton
Thorpe, The Statesmanship of Andrew Jackson (New York, 1904).
11. All quotations cited in Maury Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould
(Baltimore, 1986).
12. New York World, quoted in Klein, Life and Legend, 484.
13. Joseph Pulitzer, in New York World, and New York Times, quoted in Klein,
Life and Legend, 484, 3, and see also 217, 477; James R. Keene, quoted by
Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Specu-
lation (New York, 1999), 178.
14. Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel (New York, 2003), 1, 6, 8–9.
15. Charles Francis Adams and Henry Adams, Chapters of Erie (1886; rpt.,
Ithaca, N.Y., 1956), 3, 8, 10, 33, 95, 98.

190
 Notes to Pages 159–80

16. Henry Adams, quoted in Michael N. Dobkowski, The Tarnished Dream:

The Basis of American Anti-Semitism (Westport, Conn., 1979), 122, 125.
17. Brooks Adams, quoted in Dobkowski, Tarnished Dream, 126.
18. E. L. Godkin in The Nation, November 18, 1869, January 11, 1872, Sep-
tember 15, 25, 1873, October 2, 9, 1873, November 6, 1873.
19. Irwin G. Wylie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches
(Glencoe, Ill., 1954), 56, 65.
20. Henry Ward Beecher, quoted in Wayne Westbrook, Wall Street in the
American Novel (New York, 1980), 39; Beecher, quoted by W. A. Swan-
berg, Jim Fisk: The Career of an Improbable Rascal (New York, 1959), 113;
Beecher, quoted in Wylie, Self-Made Man, 70; Henry Ward Beecher,
“The Deceitfulness of Riches,” quoted in David Mark Wheeler, “Per-
ceptions of Money and Wealth on Gilded Age Stages: A Study of Four
Long Run Productions” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1986), 62.
21. Washington Gladdens, “The Three Dangers: Moral Aspects of Social
Questions,” in Applied Christianity and Moral Aspects of Social Questions
(1886; rpt., New York, 1976), 203– 5.
22. Morton Keller, The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast (New York, 1968);
Thomas Nast: Cartoons and Illustrations with Text by Thomas Nast St. Hill
(New York, 1974), plate 85; “This Street Is Closed for Repairs,” cartoon
cited in C. Vann Woodward, “The Lowest Ebb,” American Heritage 8
(1957); New-York Historical Society exhibition, “Games,” 2001.
23. Jan W. Dietrichson, The Image of Money in the American Novel of the Gilded
Age (New York, 1969), 336; J. W. DeForest, Honest John Vane (1875; rpt.,
State College, Pa., 1960), 84, 124, 159; Howard, quoted in Wheeler,
“Perceptions of Money and Wealth on Gilded Age Stages.”
24. William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York, 1965),
225– 27.
25. Robert H. Walker, “The Poet and the Robber Baron,” American Quar-
terly 13, no. 4 (1961).
26. Sioux Falls Daily Argus, quoted in Sigmund Diamond, The Reputation of
the American Businessman (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), 89.
27. Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Elec-
torate in the Reagan Aftermath (New York, 1990), xvii, xviii, xxiii.

Epilogue
1. Matthew Klam, “Riding the Mo in the Lime Green Glow,” New York
Times Sunday Magazine, November 21, 1999; Chris Smith, “How the

191
 Notes to Page 180

Stock Market Swallowed New York,” New York Magazine, October 3,

1998; “Stunning Stock Action Pervades New York Culture,” USA Today,
March 30, 1999; “Some Abandon Water Cooler for Internet Stock Trad-
ing,” New York Times, May 29, 1999; “People of the Bull,” Business Week,
April 12, 1999.

192
 Acknowledgments

It has been a great pleasure to prepare this book for the Icons of
America series of Yale University Press. For that opportunity I
want to first thank my good friend Rochelle Gurstein. Rochelle
knew my previous work on Wall Street and also knew about the
series, and she suggested that we would make a good fit. Mark
Crispin Miller was excited about adding a book on Wall Street to
the series and got me excited about all the other fascinating sub-
jects lined up to appear there. John Donatich and Jonathan Brent
welcomed me to the Press with great enthusiasm. Jonathan has
been a responsive and thoughtful editor throughout, and I have
come to rely on his advice. I also want to thank his assistant
Annelise Finnegan, who has been invariably helpful with many
important details. Susan Laity did a superb job as my line editor,
catching many an instance of overwriting and other literary sins.

193
 Acknowledgments

She is a true master of her craft. Evan Daniel, a graduate student

who knows his way around picture archives, tracked down the
graphics that appear in the text. Finally, I want to thank my friend
and longtime colleague Gary Gerstle for taking time to read the
manuscript when it was nearly done and suggesting some good
ways that it might be made better.

194
 Index

Adams, Brooks, 158– 59 Arnold, Philip, 55 – 58

Adams, Charles Francis, 33, 157, 158 Art of War (Sun Tzu), 126
Adams, Evangeline, 86 Arthur Andersen, 91–92
Adams, Henry, 33, 57, 157, 158 Astor, John Jacob, 61
Adams, John, 19
Adelphia, 91– 92 banks, 31– 32, 119, 149–50
Alexander, William, 13 Beecher, Henry Ward, 162
American Revolution, 13, 144 Bellamy, Edward, 37
anti-Semitism, 155; of Henry Belmont, August, 27, 56, 57, 111–12,
Adams, 158– 59; of Henry Ford, 136
136–38, 140; and Wall Street, Belmont-Rothschild interests, 31,
136, 140– 42 119, 136
antitrust legislation, 40, 42 Bennett, James Gordon, 67– 68
aristocracy, 4 –5, 51– 53, 175; Amer- Berenson, Bernard, 121– 22
icans’ fears regarding, 17–19, Berle, Adolph, 47
21–22, 33 –34, 52, 142– 43, Biddle, Nicholas, 149
145– 46; and capitalists, 23; Boesky, Ivan, 51–52, 90, 104, 127
ostentatious manifestations of, Boiler Room (film), 88–89
26 – 29; power embedded in, Bolsheviks, as threat to Wall Street,
30 – 34 137, 138–39

195
 Index

Bombardiers (Bronson), 89 –91, 170 day traders, 178

bond traders, 126 Depression. See Great Depression
Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe), 132 Dickens, Charles, 63 –64
Brady, “Diamond Jim,” 104 Dillon Read, 31
Brandeis, Louis, 42 – 43, 49 Donnelley, Ignatius, 37
Bronson, Po, 89 – 91 dot.com bubble. See Internet stock
Brown Brothers, 31 bubble
Bryan, William Jennings, 24, 117 Dreiser, Theodore, 112–15
bucket shops, 70 –71 Drew, Daniel, 30, 74 –76, 100, 111,
Bush, George W., 93 – 94 161
Butler, Benjamin, 56 Drexel Burnham Lambert, 90,
127– 28
Caesar’s Column (Donnelley), 37– 38 Duer, Lady Kitty, 13, 15
capitalism: and American aristoc- Duer, William, 11–13, 15, 16,
racy, 23; Bolsheviks as threat to, 19 – 21, 22, 53, 144
138– 39; as promoted by Wall Dunlap, Al, 124
Street, 1, 141 Durant, William Crapo, 81
Carnegie, Andrew, 36 – 37, 105,
109 Edelman, Asher, 126
Chrysler, Walter, 81 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 61– 62, 69
Church, Jeremiah, 62 Enron, 9, 91
Cleveland, Grover, 25, 33 Europe, relation with United
Cohen, Abby Joseph, 88 States, 122– 23
Confidence Man (Melville), 68 –70, Fish, Mrs. Hamilton, 27
170 Fisher, Irving, 85
confidence men, 4 – 6, 170, 175; in Fisk, “Jubilee Jim,” 6, 30, 74 –76,
fiction, 63 – 64, 68 –70, 76 –78; 100, 101– 3, 105, 111, 115, 158
during the Jazz Age, 78 – 87; in Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 86
market society, 58– 61; during Ford, Henry, 109, 135–36, 173;
the 1990s, 87– 91; and paper anti-Semitism of, 136 – 38, 140
economy, 60; and railroad specu- Foster, George, 65, 148
lation, 71–76 Fowler, William, 29
consumerism, 141 Freneau, Philip, 18
Conwell, Russell, 161 Frick, Henry Clay, 130
Cooke, Jay, 72 –73, 105
Coughlin, Father Charles, 48 gambling: as sin, 143 – 44, 168; Wall
Crash of 1929, 4, 46, 78, 177 Street associated with, 139– 40,
Crédit Mobilier scandal, 77, 158 146, 163, 176

196
 Index

Gilded Age, 23, 129– 30, 150– 51, Stocking Regiment, 123– 24;
155– 56, 169–70; second (in the Vanderbilt as, 97–100
1980s), 52, 126–31 Hill, James, 105
Gilded Age (Twain and Warner), 26, Homestead Strike of 1892, 36 – 37
55, 77–78 Hoover, Herbert, 85
Gladdens, Washington, 163 House of Mirth (Wharton), 169
Glass-Steagall Act, 49, 93 House of Morgan, 31, 50 – 51
Godkin, E. L., 111, 157, 160 Howells, William Dean, 165 – 66,
Gould, Jay, 6, 30, 36, 74, 75 –76, 169
100, 105, 106, 126, 151–54, 162
Graff, Lya, 50 – 51 Icahn, Carl, 9, 51–52, 127
Grant, Ulysses “Buck,” Jr., 71 immoralists, 7–8, 133, 139– 43,
Grant, Ulysses S, 5, 32, 71 175; and aristocracy, 145 – 46; as
Great Depression, 9, 46, 78 depicted by authors and journal-
Great Diamond Hoax of 1872, ists, 145– 49, 151–52; and gam-
55 –58 bling, 143– 44; as perceived by
Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), 86 the middle classes, 154 –57; polit-
Greeley, Horace, 62 ical response to, 166–68
Greenspan, Alan, 88, 179 insider trading, 90, 179, 180
International Jew (Ford), 136– 38
Hamilton, Alexander, 13 –16, Internet stock bubble, 59, 87– 89,
19 – 21, 145 94, 178, 179– 80
Harding, Warren G., 136 investment banks: power held by,
Harriman, Edward, 105, 126 31– 32. See also Wall Street
Harriman Brothers, 31 investment pools, 81– 82
Haymarket bombing of 1886, 36 Irving, Washington, 61
Hazard of New Fortunes (Howells),
165– 66, 169 Jackson, Andrew, 146, 149– 50
Hearst, William Randolph, 67 Jay, John, 22
hero, 6–7, 104 –15, 130–33, Jazz Age, 59
175–76; in fiction, 112 –15, 132; Jefferson, Thomas, 4, 15 –16, 142,
Fisk as, 101–3; in the late twen- 145– 46
tieth century, 129 – 32; media Jerome, Leonard, 27
adulation of, 110 –12, 125; Jewett, Helen, 146
Milken as, 124 –25, 128– 29; Jews. See anti-Semitism
Morgan as, 115–22, 130– 31; Josephson, Matthew, 152
Napoleon as, 100 –101; scholarly junk bonds, 124, 128, 129. See also
studies of, 126; and the Silk Milken, Michael

197
 Index

Keene, James R., 44, 153 Mitchell, “Sunshine Charlie,”

Kennedy, Joseph, 79, 80, 104 49 – 50, 53, 82
Kidder Peabody, 119 Money Trust, 42 – 46, 49
King, Clarence, 57 Morgan, J. P., 4, 6, 9, 38, 110,
Knights of the Dagger, 21 129– 30, 161, 167; adulation of,
Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & 115– 22, 126; as aristocrat, 39,
Company, 127– 28 40 – 42, 44 – 45; death of, 45 – 46.
Kreuger, Ivar, 79 See also House of Morgan
Kuhn, Loeb, 31, 40, 45 Morgan, Jack, 50 –51, 80
Myers, Gustavus, 152
Lamont, Thomas, 85 – 86
Lapham, Lewis, 93 Napoleon, mystique surrounding,
Lee, Higginson, 119 100–101, 104
Lewis, Michael, 90 Nast, Thomas, 163 –64
Liar’s Poker (Lewis), 90, 132 National City Bank, 49
Lincoln, Abraham, 5, 56 national debt: and fears of aristoc-
Lippard, George, 148– 49 racy, 17–19; Hamilton’s plan for,
Livermore, Jesse, 80 14 –16, 20
Livingston, Philip, 13 Netscape Communications Corpo-
Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 32 ration, 87– 88
Long, Huey, 48 – 49 New York by Gaslight (Foster), 65,
148
Madison, James, 15 –16, 18 –19 New York Stock Exchange, 64, 83
Mather, Cotton, 143 – 44 Northern Pacific Railroad, 72 –73
McCabe, James D., 111 Northern Securities Company, 40,
McClellan, George B., 56, 57 41
McKinley, William H., 24, 25, 39 Noyes, Alexander Dana, 152
Meehan, Michael, 79 – 80
Mellon, Andrew, 130 Other People’s Money (play and film),
Melville, Herman, 68, 76, 170 132
merger movement: in the 1980s,
129; at the turn of the century, pension funds, 177
39, 119–20 Phillips, Kevin, 171–72
Merrill, Charles, 8 Pintard, John, 21– 22, 146
Merrill Lynch, 8 Politics of Rich and Poor (Phillips),
Milken, Michael, 6, 9, 51– 52, 90, 171–72
104, 124 – 25, 126, 127, 128–29, Ponzi, Charles, 5, 78 –79
170 Populist Party, 117

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 Index

Public Utility Holding Company Seligman, Henry, 56

Act, 49 Seligman Brothers, 119
Pujo, Arsène, 42, 44 Sherman Anti-trust Act, 40
Pulitzer, Joseph, 25 Silk Stocking Regiment, 123– 24
Pullman, George, 37 Slack, Silent John, 55 –58
Pullman Strike of 1894, 37 Smith, Ben, 79
Social Darwinism, 35, 112–13
Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Social Security, privatization of,
Hall (Lippard), 148– 49 93 – 94, 172
Qwest Communications, 91–92 social upheaval, during the late
nineteenth century, 36 –38
railroads: Morgan’s innovations to, speculation: as gambling, 144;
117–18; speculation involving, growth of, 61–63; investment
71–76, 118 pools, 81– 82; involving railroads,
Raskob, John Jakob, 81, 85 71–76, 118. See also confidence
RCA, 81 men
Reagan era, 52 speculators, 107– 9. See also confi-
religious fundamentalism, 168 – 69 dence men; Duer, William; Fisk,
Reynolds, George M., 44 “Jubilee Jim”; Gould, Jay;
Robinson, Richard P., 146 Kennedy, Joseph; Kreuger, Ivar;
Rockefeller, John D., 42 Livermore, Jesse; Meehan,
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 4, Michael; Mitchell, “Sunshine
46 – 48, 80, 83 –84 Charlie”
Roosevelt, Theodore, 39 – 41, 47 Spencer, Herbert, 113
Rothschild, Baron, 57 Standard Oil, 42
Rothschild family, 136 Steichen, Edward, 110
Steinberg, Saul, 127
Sage, Russell, 30, 100, 115 stock market crash. See Crash of
Sarbanes-Oxley Bill, 92 –93 1929
Schiff, Jacob, 45 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 37
Schuyler, Elizabeth, 14 –15 Sumner, William Graham, 35, 113
Schuyler, Philip, 14 –15 Sun Tzu, 126
Schwab, Charles, 81
Second Bank of the United States, Temple University, 161
149 Thompson, William, 66 –68
Securities and Exchange Commis- Tiffany, Charles, 57
sion, 49 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 127
securities laws, 49, 92 –93 Tumulty, Joseph, 81

199
 Index

Twain, Mark, 26, 55, 60, 76 –78 92 – 95, 156– 57, 169–73, 175– 80;
Tweed, Boss, 164 symbolic associations with, 1– 3,
Tyco, 91– 92 177; uncertainty inherent in,
106– 8; as viewed by religious
Union Pacific Railroad, 77 leaders, 161– 63. See also aris-
United States of America, relation tocracy; confidence men; hero;
with Europe, 122 – 23 immoralists
Untermeyer, Samuel, 44 – 45 Wall Street (film), 8, 89, 125
Warner, Charles Dudley, 26, 55,
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 5 –6, 30, 105, 77
115; monument to, 99–100, 160; Washington, George, 14, 17–18,
mythologizing of, 97–100, 111, 145
112; and railroad speculation, Wasserstein, Bruce, 127
74 –76 Watson, Tom, 25–26
wealth, as moral issue, 154 –56, 162
Wall Street: ambivalence toward, Wealth Tax Act, 49
23; anti-Semitism directed at, Welch, Jack, 124
136, 140– 42; books about, 90, Wharton, Edith, 169
132, 169–70; criticisms of, 33; Whitney, George, 82 – 83
democratizing of, 8; fears regard- Whitney, Richard, 82 – 84
ing, 24; in fiction, 26, 55, 77–78, Wilkinson, William, 46
86, 89 –90, 112–15, 145, 147, Wilson, Edmund, 49
148– 49, 157–58, 164 –66; in Wilson, Woodrow, 43 – 44, 81
film, 8, 88 – 89, 125, 132; as Wolfe, Tom, 132, 170
gambling venue, 139 – 40, 146, Wood, Ferdinand, 71
163, 176; magazines devoted to, World War I, 123– 24
125; political challenges to, 34, WorldCom, 91– 92
166– 68, 171; press coverage of,
147– 49; public perceptions of, Yerkes, Charles, 104

200