| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Wall Street: America's Dream Palace. By Steve Fraser. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. 200 pp. $22.00, ISBN 978-0-300-11755-4.)

In this slim volume, Steve Fraser chronicles popular attitudes toward Wall Street. Drawing on newspaper and magazine accounts, sermons, political speeches, fiction, and the private papers of individuals such as Thomas Jefferson and Henry Adams, Fraser argues that the population at large has had four categories into which it places Wall Street figures: aristocrats, con men, heroes, and "immoralists." For the most part, this classification scheme is the extent of Fraser's original contribution. His book largely repeats complaints about and critiques of finance with which any serious student of American history is already familiar. The exception is the section on "heroes," in which Fraser argues that swashbuckling financiers such as Cornelius Vanderbilt appealed to the popular imagination because their risky operations demanded extraordinary nerve and self-control that most people envied but lacked. This subtlety is the exception, however.

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