Wall Street: America's Dream Palace (review)

Steve Fraser, the author of the Every Man A Speculator, the best long cultural history of Wall Street, has now written the best short history, Wall Street: America's Dream Palace.

Fraser has chosen to frame his short cultural history with four congruent but intertwining essays on four "ideal typical" Wall Street characters: The Aristocrat (e.g. William Duer and J.P. Morgan), The Confidence Man (e.g. Mark Twain's "Colonel Sellers" and the real-life Charles Ponzi), The Hero (e.g. Commodore Vanderbilt and Morgan, again), and The Immoralist (e.g. Jay Gould and Michael Milken). Each essay traverses a chronological sweep of a century or more; each introduces characters real-life and fictional; each draws comparisons and makes contracts between a then and a now; each segues artfully into the next.

This is not a traditional history. The ideal types we are presented with are amalgams, composite configurations. Writing in the tradition of Matthew Josephson—though without the ideological over-reach, Fraser moves effortlessly from real events and personages to their caricatured representations. He is not overly interested in cutting through the cultural baggage to get at the "real" J.P. Morgan, Daniel Drew, or Jay Gould, but with fastening our attention on the cultural resonance, reach, and signification of these truly larger-than-life characters. This is cultural history without apologies or regrets: its subject the iconic images of Wall Street, not its day-to-day operations. What we come away with is an understanding of how Wall Street—as a dream palace, alternately and often simultaneously celebrated and excoriated—has functioned to distract attention from the economic system it has sustained and defined for more than two centuries. It has always been more convenient—for politicians, the press, and the American public—to rail against the demons of Wall Street—aristocrats, confidence men, and immoralists alike—than to confront and condemn capitalism outright.

While there is much to appreciate in the telling of this tale, there were moments when I wished that Fraser had given us more history and less culture, moments when I got lost in his luxuriously overheated prose and wanted a realty check, an authorial voice to distinguish for me between the real-life tycoons and their fictional representations, between Michael Milken and Gordon Gecko. One was real, the other fictional, one did damage in the real world, the other did not. We gain a great deal by allowing one image to morph into the other, but do we not also lose something as well?

This is an ideal book for students in a wide variety of courses. It should be widely read and widely adopted. The author is, of course, to be commended, but so too Yale University Press, which has done a splendid job of publishing, and Mark Crispin Miller, the editor of the ICONS OF AMERICA series, who had the good sense to envision Wall Street as an American "icon" and commission Fraser to write about it.