The Crash punctured this fantasy. The Street's most august figures were exposed as cheats and felons--pillars of rectitude like New York Stock Exchange president Richard Whitney went off to Sing Sing wearing his bowler hat. Wall Street was reimagined as a bestiary of parasites, gamblers and noxious con men--a return of the repressed popular iconography of shame. Many, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, reconsidered the 1920s as one long drunk in which stocks had functioned like booze (as Fraser summarizes Babylon Revisited, Fitzgerald's post-mortem) "lubricating childish daydreams about an eternity of good times, anesthetizing any sense of responsibility, fostering a careless and criminal negligence." Meanwhile, theoreticians like John Maynard Keynes were deriding the purported "science" of stockbrokerage as a regime in which "enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation." Worst of all, Wall Street was widely ridiculed. "Laughter is a punishing historical sentence," Fraser observes, and the flood of lampooning cartoons, literary satires and iconoclastic biographies "whittled away the puissance of the old ruling class."

This latest round of cultural subversion fatally compromised Wall Street's ability to hold its own against New Deal reformers. FDR--who, like TR, inherited a patrician disdain for the nouveaux riches--declared that "we cannot allow our economic life to be controlled by that small group of men whose chief outlook upon the social welfare is tinctured by the fact that they can make huge profits from the lending of money and the marketing of securities." The financial world was "subjected to a real if flawed public supervision under the New Deal"; social democratic programs like Social Security were set in place; and state-capitalist investment mechanisms loosened Wall Street's chokehold on capital formation--even when it came to financing World War II, the Street remained a junior partner to government.

Fraser is very good on the New Deal era--not surprisingly, as he's given us a superb biography of Sidney Hillman and co-edited an essential collection about the period--but he's particularly smart about the 1940s-60s boom, the first in which Wall Street failed to instantly overcome Depression-era obloquy. The 1930s had been too searing to be soon forgotten: Postwar America remained security-conscious, and flamboyant speculators stayed in the doghouse. Once again a gray-flannel Wall Street presented itself as the prudential guardian of widows and orphans, and as a patriotic bulwark against un-Americanism (broker Charles Merrill argued that nothing "would provide a stronger defense against the threat of Communism, than the wide ownership of stocks in the country"). Unfortunately, the little investors remained gun-shy, and the new institutional purchasers like pension funds and insurance companies bought only the bluest of blue-chip stocks. Worse, the great corporations now financed expansion and innovation largely out of internal capital. The result, Fraser argues, was that Wall Street, having been for a century "an essential element of the country's cultural iconography," now "vanished from the front page and lived out its life in the business section of the daily newspaper." Financiers, to be sure, became commanding figures in the economic and defense establishment. But Wall Street itself, "once a main thoroughfare running through the American imagination, now seemed deserted." Some swagger resurfaced in the go-go 1960s, only to vanish in the crash of 1970, which ushered in a decadelong period of stagflation and decline that Keynesian remedies failed to reverse.

The convergence of economic crisis with military defeat in Vietnam, Fraser suggests, left the Wall Street establishment open to another onslaught, this time from the right. In the 1980s, a rising generation of speculators like Ivan Boesky and Carl Icahn, more plebeian and outer-borough than the white-shoe old guard, stormed the twin fortresses of the ancien régime wielding "a capitalist version of liberationist theology." Wall Street warriors and Reagan Republicans repudiated big government and launched a counterrevolution against the New Deal. They also lit into the "Corpocracy" of complacent industrial managers, claiming that corporate takeovers and makeovers would revive the economy and succor disenfranchised shareholders.

Supply-side zealots, mergers and acquisitions wizards, greenmailers and assorted asset strippers, Fraser points out, failed to accomplish their professed goals--hostile mergers impaired efficiency, 1980s investment in plants and equipment sank below 1970s levels and S&L bailouts wasted billions--but they did manage to reignite the speculative sector. A torrent of capital surged into paper entrepreneurism--an endless reshuffling of nominal assets--and Wall Street went from being the economy's spark plug to being its engine, a structural shift (from finance capitalism to financialized capitalism) akin to the revolution wrought during the Age of Morgan.

The 1980s also revived--and deepened--the country's infatuation with Wall Street. With Americans hungry for signs that the days of defeat and decline were over, strident macho posturing by bond traders in suspenders seemed a Viagraesque antidote for a "wilted national masculinity." Corporate raiders, greenmailers and "hot-to-trade portfolio managers with ice in their veins" made out like financial samurai, sporting copies of The Art of War by Sun Tzu in an atmosphere, Fraser notes, that "reeked of pure male fantasy." Scorning what guru "Adam Smith" (a k a George Goodman) had derided in The Money Game as, in Fraser's words, the "stultifying emphasis on safety and security that had settled over the markets since the war," they chased after the biggest and quickest payoffs. Shareholders were happy--and their numbers exploded--as junk-bond financing generated handsome returns for those in mutual funds, pension funds and investment clubs (there were 7,000 of the latter by the end of the 1980s). And Wall Street resurfaced, big-time, in popular culture. Magazines like Success, Millionaire and Vanity Fair published lavish accounts of the "New Tycoonery"; soap operas (Dynasty, Dallas) doted on the doings of the nouveaux riches; and a multitude of media retailed each Gilded Age excess from masquerade balls to kitsch Hamptons palaces.

The 1987 crash momentarily soured the national mood, as did revelations (Liar's Poker, Den of Thieves, The Predators' Ball, Barbarians at the Gate) of gross corruption on the part of radical outsiders turned privileged insiders. Mike Milken and Ivan Boesky were sent to the slammer, and there was a brief reckoning with the social costs of the latest Great Barbecue--zooming homelessness, industrial collapse, declining wages, growing inequality. In popular culture, the trader went from being a Master of the Universe to being a villain, best exemplified by Gordon Gekko, the pitiless parasite played by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone's film Wall Street ("I create nothing. I own," Gekko gloats). But much of the criticism, Fraser argues, was more ironic than indignant, as if any hope for serious reform had been abandoned. There was no stopping the free-market utopians' cultural momentum, in part because the crisis was quickly contained and the paper boom roared on.

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