This initial debate, argues Fraser, foreshadowed the terms and tone of nineteenth- century combat over the steadily expanding role of financiers in the growing American economy, with Wall Street's status rising and falling with the country's economic fortunes. During upswings, speculators gained kudos for mobilizing investment in canals, railroads and industrialization: Their willingness to place bets on the future made them emblems of America's buoyant optimism and entrepreneurial audacity. And while few Americans as yet actually participated in the financial marketplace, the fortunes won there by clashing cliques of bulls and bears stimulated avaricious fantasies among a far wider circle. The fact that men of plebeian background could get rich by speculative wheeling and dealing also gave the Street a democratic sheen in a democratic era.

Wall Street titans were also credited with warriorlike virtues, even sexual prowess. Fraser is particularly sharp in spotting the emerging association of financiers, from at least the days of August Belmont and Commodore Vanderbilt, with rebellion against the buttoned-down standards of bourgeois masculinity. Freebooting speculators like Daniel Drew and Jim Fisk had bravado and dash--"I was born to be bad," Fisk boasted--and their defiance of conventional proprieties gave them a raffish glamour. Ordinary folks relished reading dime-novel accounts of their swashbuckling exploits, drinking their health while belting out barroom favorites like "Jim Fisk, or He Never Went Back on the Poor" and poring over inspirational accounts like James D. McCabe's Great Fortunes and How They Were Made (1870).

But even in flush times, when Wall Street exerted a mass fascination, it also inspired mass revulsion. Pious Protestants considered speculation a form of gambling and thus a sin, not least in dangling delusions of effortless gain before the improvident. "Wall Street is a thousand times deadlier than Monte Carlo," hissed a character in the 1887 Broadway play The Henrietta. At best, its rewards were ill gotten, leeched off the enterprise of others, not earned the old-fashioned way, through pluck, perseverance and productive labor. At worst, it seemed to be a species of con game--a conviction bolstered by the steadily rising number of frauds, defalcations and market manipulations. The Street's "code of laws," the Louisville Courier editorialized in 1857, was that of "the sharper, the imposter, the cheat, and the swindler," a view echoed in Herman Melville's mordant Confidence-Man. From this perspective, speculators were not lovable rogues but menacing outlaws. Jay Gould--whose failed effort to corner the nation's gold market in 1869 precipitated a crisis that shuttered hundreds of businesses and cost thousands of workers their jobs--suffered universal execration. Gould, said Gustavus Myers in his History of the Great American Fortunes, was a "pitiless human carnivore, glutting on the blood of his numberless victims...an incarnate fiend"; Hamilton couldn't have wished for a greater degree of "public infamy," but it did nothing to rein in speculation.

Worst of all was the ever more evident link between Wall Street's investment mechanisms and cyclical derangements like the panics of 1837, 1857, 1873 and 1893, each of which ushered in depressions and increasingly violent capital-labor conflicts. Among those most alienated by a competitive capitalism run amok were key figures on Wall Street itself. Investment bankers like J.P. Morgan took a longer-term, more systemic view of the national economy. They loathed speculators (whom they considered sociopathic gamblers) and the wild "free market" whose gyrations they engendered. From the 1870s on, Morgan and his colleagues struggled to limit self-destructive competition, and by century's end they had engineered the massive consolidations that ushered in corporate capitalism, establishing a privately owned command economy run largely by financiers like themselves.

For Fraser the heyday of finance capitalism that followed--he calls it the Age of Morgan and dates it, reasonably enough, from 1890 to 1920--marks both a distinct phase in the development of US capitalism and a cultural breakthrough for Wall Street, the moment when it attained middle-class respectability. Many Americans, he finds, especially in the burgeoning ranks of well-paid professionals and managers, accepted Wall Street's hegemony for much the same reason they voted for McKinley Republicans: as a bulwark against the mob and economic crises. Bankers and entrepreneurial grandees were lionized as financial and industrial Napoleons in popular fiction and middle-class magazines. Speculators were rehabilitated as well--no longer mere gamblers, they were anointed as professionals in their own right, practitioners of the "science" of speculation, members of the "securities industry," which irrigated industrial growth and opened speculative opportunities for the upper middle class. Academic economists offered guilt-free defenses of stock and commodities exchanges (and derided critics as ignorant rustics), while pragmatist philosophers like William James and Charles Sanders Peirce re-evaluated (as Fraser astutely observes) the very notion of chance, making it seem, like market risk, "both inescapable and controllable."

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