[...]... fundamental about its history, about its place in the national saga They can also tell us something not only about the mind of Wall Street, but, more intriguing and rare, something about the Wall Streets of the American mind Examining how Wall Street has entered into the lives of generations long passed and those alive today is both a probe into the American character and an inquiry into the way the character... Yet William Duer was a patrician as well as a financial intriguer That alloy was a fusion of Wall Street s prerevolutionary past and emblematic of exactly what most alarmed Jefferson, Madison, and all their fellow republicans: namely, the lethal combination of aristocracy and money Jefferson’s flippant allusion to “nine pins” was, as a matter of fact, on the mark Duer was not alone in his plottings His... sexiness It enduringly implicated Wall Street in a crisis so grave it wouldn’t recover its credibility for forty years For a generation and more, since at least 1900, Wall Street had been a central gathering place for a genuine American ruling class At least Wall Street s inner circle came as close to constituting one as is ever likely in a society as fissiparous and liquefied as America’s (not counting... remain tempted by the dream For all its hustle and bustle, its creedal faith in the next big thing, the nation’s center of cultural gravity hovers in place Again and again the country has headed back to the future At no time has that seemed truer than now For the moment at least, Wall Street has won the war for hearts and minds What an extraordinary reversal of the balance of power However much Americans... itself, hardly an extraordinary occurrence, even when, as in this case, directed against a founding father What makes the “Reynolds Pamphlet” at the same moment so titillating and so somber is the unimaginably bizarre combination of circumstances that gave rise to its publication Those circumstances touched on the most intimate affairs and affairs of international gravity Charges of financial impropriety... daily life of the Street Only during the last quarter century have we become a “shareholder nation,” where roughly half of all American families have some stake in the market And even that exaggerates the degree of present-day real personal engagement Nonetheless, even when no more than a minuscule proportion of the population actually invested anything in the stock market, Wall Street radiated an indubitable... moral and economic certitudes of two cultures at war with each other.11 Two armies, commanded by Jefferson and Hamilton, carried on this war all through the 1790s Wall Street, literally and figuratively, was again and again the terrain on which they fought A great American historian, Charles Beard, once argued that a principal force responsible for scrapping the Articles of Confederation and replacing... that at all; or in the way our literary and cinematic fictions or even our daily newspaper fare assume a stance of fateful inevitability about the reign of the free market both at home and abroad Crony capitalism so blatant it might have made Daniel Drew blush hardly arouses comment, much less condemnation Delusional or not, for the moment at least Wall Street s promise of emancipation, of Every Man. .. Quakers, and Anabaptists, speaking eighteen different languages, made it by far the most heteroge- 10 Every Man a Speculator neous of all the American colonies Wall Street and the surrounding neighborhood emerged as the arterial core of the city’s social, residential, and political life Captain Kidd lived there He was, to begin with, a privateer protecting American slave traders from pirates “Red Seamen,”... rather mainly about the rest of us It tries to tell the two-hundred-year-old story of how Wall Street has inspired dreams and nightmares deep inside American culture, leaving its imprint on the lives of ordinary as well as some extraordinary people Those popular images and metaphors, those visions and anxieties and desires that have attached themselves to the Street, can reveal something fundamental . means of transportation and communication. Jacksonian America was awash in dreams of boundless opportunity for Every Man. Some saw W all Street as yet another arena in which those plebian fantasies. those alive today is both a probe into the American char- acter and an inquiry into the way the character of America has changed. xii Introduction But this is tricky terrain. The notion of a singular. book and participated in a fascinating, multidisciplinary sem- inar on “risk,” a phenomenon that makes up much of the mystique sur- rounding Wall Street. I owe a special thanks to Jackson Lears,