Today Wall Street is the nation and Main Street is more Wall Street than Wall Street ever was—or probably ever will be. Wall Street is a state of mind; 20,000,000 men and women—investors and speculators—are its corporeal being; and the chattering tape that runs under the glass domes of 12, 000 tickers, up hill and down dale, are its hyper-sensitive nervous system.

Tchkt, tchkt, tchkt,.. . the tape spurts endlessly and inexhaustibly into the tall waste basket; and in Harlem, Bangor, Denver, San Diego and Atlanta, men hang breathlessly over the story it tells, and lustfully or bitterly decode its personal meaning.

Here, surely, is something that none of the old buccaneers, who regarded the public as a necessary — but avoidable—evil, ever dared predict. Indeed, one may count on the fingers of his hand the few authoritative men who predicted it ten years ago. And there are still men in Wall Street—brokers and bankers— who must from time to time pinch themselves to restore the conviction.

But the transition is here, and has been for five years. The public is in Wall Street, and Wall Street is in the public. And this merging of personalities has produced the most spectacular thing that this nation—or the world—has ever witnessed.

Source: The Outlook, 18 September 1929

HOW quickly indeed do we lose the feverish faiths and passions of our fathers. The memory of the average American is short, and shorter still the span of his conscience. In this it would seem he differs quite sensibly from the elephant. His capac-ity for sustained hatred is very largely modified by its immediate convenience.

We glance at Wall Street. It was only a few years ago— within the life times of middle-aged men—that Wall Street, a spicy blend of robust individuals, was a target for the nation’s most virulent oratorical sharp-shooters.

Were the Balkans to steam a bit, measles to break out in Kansas, a bank or two to close in North Carolina, a moderate scarcity of money to develop, and at once the stalwart and often self-appointed paladins of public conscience poised their lances and charged, dialectically, into the little winding street that runs off Broadway.

Wall Street! Festering place of our national ailments, breeding place of dastardly, but legal skullduggery. There dwelt the Morgans, the Goulds, the Carnegies, huge, bloated figures with dollar signs on their waistcoats and widows’ scalps on their belts.

By reason of the scorching, quasi-legendary prejudices accumulated by all respectable people north of Fulton Street and west to the Golden Gate, Wall Street stood for a good part of what was detestable upon the American financial scene; and the men who moved there were carnivores of the more loathsome sort.

But that was yesterday, as the horse car, the corset and the stocking bank were yesterday. Wall Street then was just Wall Street—a darksome alley at the foot of Trinity Church, in whose beneficent shadow millionaires scuttled railroads, the government, the public when they could, and occasionally other millionaires.

Source: The Outlook, 18 September 1929