Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on September 30, 2008
Enterprise and Society 2008 9(4):619-630; doi:10.1093/es/khn086
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When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy and the Emergence of the Retail Investor in the United States, 1890–1930
JULIA OTT is an assistant professor at Eugene Lang College and the New School for Social Research. This dissertation was completed at Yale University in 2007
Contact information: Committee on Historical Studies, Eugene Lang College or New School for Social Research, 80 Fifth Avenue, Room 511, New York, NY 10001 USA. E-mail: ottj{at}newschool.edu
"When Wall Street met Main Street" recovers the lost history of the American investor and locates the origins of conservative belief in the ability of laissez-faire financial markets to provide economic security and justice for all. Bond and stock marketing by the federal government, corporations, and the financial industry is analyzed alongside emerging investor-centered theories of political economy and the relevant debates over economic reform. As early twentieth century securities marketers and their ideological allies promoted investment, they wrestled with the meaning of citizenship and democracy under industrial corporate capitalism. The ideas and institutions examined in this study endured the Crash of 1929, shaping the parameters of New Deal securities market regulation and sustaining opposition to modern liberalism until the present day.
I thank my advisor, Professor Jean-Christophe Agnew, and my dissertation committee—Professors William Goetzmann, Jennifer Klein, and Beverly Gage—for all their useful suggestions, generous support, and guidance. I am also indebted to Professor Meg Jacobs, my faculty mentor at the Miller Center. I received support for writing and research from the following: Yale University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; Whitebox Advisers’ Doctoral Fellowship in Behavioral Finance from Yale School of Management's International Center for Finance; John E. Rovensky Dissertation Fellowship in American Economic and Business History; Miller Center Fellowship in Contemporary History, Politics, and Policy; and a Gilder Lehrman Institute Doctoral Fellowship. I extend my deepest gratitude to Richard Vermillion, to whom the dissertation is dedicated.