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

Steve Fraser has undertaken the daunting task of a cultural history of Wall Street. The result is a book that is at once intriguing and exasperating, insightful and overstated, comprehensive and flawed. The research is broad and imaginative but not deep in key areas and marred by small but silly errors. The writing is often lucid and sprightly but also strains too hard to be clever.

Fraser organizes his narrative around four broad eras. During the first one, the "Financial Frontier," speculators and con men thrust Wall Street into the public consciousness with their notoriety and outrageous antics. The rise of the bankers, especially J. P. Morgan, ushered in the "Imperial Age," when the public acknowledged the power of Wall Street while alternately admiring and resenting it. This era reached its apex during the 1920s when Wall Street moved steadily into the center of American culture, only to suffer a dramatic fall from grace after the crash of 1929. The third period, the "Age of Ignominy," saw Wall Street fade largely from the public mind as it spent nearly half a century trying to claw its way back to respectability. By the 1990s it had again captured the culture as it had not done since the 1920s. Fraser labels this most recent era, "The World Turned Upside Down."

Within this broad framework Fraser plays fast and loose with chronology, applying generalizations to an entire period that more properly belong to one part of it. Nowhere does he define who or what Wall Street is or submit its identity to analysis. Rather, he deals exclusively with the images and myths of Wall Street as recorded by scores of financiers, writers, journalists, historians, and other observers. The range of literature he covers is impressive, although he seldom goes behind the views to assess their worth or accuracy.

Throughout, Fraser emphasizes speculative Wall Street while downplaying its other functions. He ignores the important business roles of men such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Henry Villard, and Samuel Insull, portraying them only as predatory speculators. His treatment of the late nineteenth century, the weakest section of the book, seldom rises above the level of robber baron clichés. Although he cites or mentions a number of important recent works, he writes as if the past half century of business historiography never happened or that it merely reinvigorated earlier hagiographies. Vanderbilt, Gould, Daniel Drew, and Jim Fisk are indiscriminately lumped together as "the Four Horsemen," Villard as an organizer of blind pools seeking only to profit from watered stock. "Community of interest" is mentioned once but never discussed or defined.

In this section the writing complements the oversimplified narrative with a hyperventilated style that seems bent on emptying the dictionary of words. Too often points, important or otherwise, get sacrificed to the quest for a memorable phrase, pun, or simile. Annoying errors crop up frequently. John C. Calhoun is quoted in the context of the 1857 panic even though he died seven years earlier. Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish's notorious party for dogs is attributed to Mrs. Hamilton Fish, who would have been appalled at the event. The myth that young Gould drove his partner to suicide is resurrected. The wrong name is given the hero in Jack London's The Iron Heel. James Truslow Adams is presented as a British historian. The list could be extended.

Once past this section, however, a curious transformation occurs. The baroque style tones down, the clichés dwindle, the handling of sources grows more secure, and the narrative becomes more plausible and persuasive. Fraser does an especially good job of portraying the transitions from Wall Street of the 1920s to the New Deal, and from World War II to what he aptly labels the "financialization" of the economy in the 1980s. "Wall Street, or its virtual equivalent in cyberspace," he observes, "became a kind of playground or nationwide casino, a twenty...