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The Specter of Wall Street
Wall Street's Comeback as the Place Americans Love to Hate
By Steve Fraser

Wall Street sits at the eye of a political hurricane. Its enemies converge from every point on the compass. What a stunning turn of events.

For well more than half a century Wall Street has enjoyed a remarkable political immunity, but matters were not always like that. Now, with history marching forward in seven league boots, we are about to revisit a time when the Street functioned as the country's lightning rod, attracting its deepest animosities and most passionate desires for economic justice and democracy.

For the better part of a century, from the 1870s through the tumultuous years of the Great Depression and the New Deal, the specter of Wall Street haunted the popular political imagination. For Populists it was the "Great Satan," its stranglehold over the country's credit system being held responsible for driving the family farmer to the edge of extinction and beyond.

For legions mobilized in the anti-monopoly movement, Wall Street was the prime engine house of monopoly capitalism, leaving behind it a trail of victimized businesses, consumers, captive municipalities, and crushed workers. For Progressive reformers around the turn of the twentieth century, Wall Street's "money trust" was the mother of all trusts, its tentacles -- and the octopus was indeed a popular image of the time -- choking off economic opportunity for all but a favored few. Its political power in Congress, in presidential cabinets, in statehouses, in both major political parties was seen as so overwhelming as to threaten to suffocate democracy itself.

All the periodic panics and depressions -- 1873, 1884, 1893, 1907, and 1913 -- that, with numbing regularity, punctuated economic life until the Crash of '29 and the Great Depression brought the house down seemed to begin on the Street. And whether they actually began there or not, all the misery that followed in their wake -- the homelessness, the armies of tramps and hobos, the starvation, the bankruptcies, the broken families, the crushing sense of dispossession -- was regularly laid at the feet of the Street.

The rest.

—Jonathan Schwarz