RSS

Contact us

Friday 5 December 2008

Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace

Aristocrats, tricksters, heroes and sinners

Christopher Silvester looks at the archetypes that have dominated Wall Street throughout the ages

The first Wall Street crash was caused by a scoundrel named Philip Duer, who was the son of a wealthy West Indian planter, a former British army officer and an Old Etonian to boot. Duer had supported the American Revolution, but in 1792, as assistant secretary to the Treasury, he and his accomplices used insider information to speculate on the national debt. He was caught and sent to jail. Duer represented the ugly aspect of a powerful strain in American culture, namely the capitalist as would-be aristocrat – a prototype of today’s Russian oligarchs.

While one of the Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton, approved financial speculation as an instrument to boost economic growth and void the country’s war debt, another, Thomas Jefferson, saw it as leading to an aristocracy of money that would corrupt the body politic of the fledgling republic. In this negative vision, says Steve Fraser, ‘Wall Street speculators made up a rentier class on steroids, one that lived not only off the fruit of the land (like feudal lords of old) but off the entire material output and inventive genius of the nation’. From the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century until the ignominy of 1929, the aristocracy of money prevailed. Yet Wall Street has always possessed a chameleon-like quality. ‘In a culture preoccupied with questions of sin and salvation,’ Fraser argues, Wall Street has served as a ‘protean metaphor’, standing in for numerous cultural phenomena, both good and bad.

With fewer than 180 pages for its main text, this book about Wall Street as metaphor (part of a series called Icons of America that so far includes studies of the skyscraper and the hamburger) is a nimbly argued and concentrated version of Fraser’s earlier book on the same subject, Wall Street: A Cultural History. He examines four Wall Street archetypes: the aristocrat, the confidence man, the hero and the immoralist or sinner – actually five, since he considers Everyman in his epilogue. Each of them ‘shares features with his mythic brethren: the aristocrat is a sinner, the sinner a confidence man, the hero is a man of the people but also an elitist’.

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comment   |  Apollo Art Books

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved