In 1976, the populist scholar Lawrence Goodwyn wryly observed that “the subjects of money and banking do not seem to be in immediate danger of being overworked by American historians.” What held water as an assessment for more than two generations has diminishing purchase as a critique of scholarship today. Over the past decade, finance has come into view as an important and engaging part of the political-economic past. Its ascent as a subject of inquiry has been particularly notable in the literature on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, a period that witnessed the rise of the trusts, the growth of the modern insurance industry, and the dawn of the consumer credit economy. Peter Knight and George Robb's recent studies in many ways mark the culmination of this first wave of scholarship, analyzing the material and cultural dimensions of finance as the best of the literature has done. They also press toward large issues in social and historical theory, concerning the psychic experience of financial modernity and the relationship between capitalism and gender ideology, in ways that suggest an expanded agenda for further research in the field.
Knight's Reading the Market examines the various representational forms, from panic novels to ticker tape to business columns, to which Americans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned in order to understand the changing world of investment and speculation. The study's primary argument is that the conventional narrative of passage from a moral economy of intimate exchange to a corporate economy of abstract transactions belies the personalizing work of finance literature in this critical period. Conspiracy narratives like Frank Norris's The Pit (1903) and Wall Street gossip reportage in magazines like Town Topics offered readers a portrait of financial life in which association, affection, and enmity were potent economic forces. Fortunes were made and lost not because of chance or the will of the invisible hand but because individuals had labored to earn their share or to take someone else's. Even in the rarefied confines of the New York Stock Exchange, where securities prices could appear to dance to an otherworldly tune, commercial behavior was patterned by the feelings that traders had for one another and the choices that they themselves made. This was not an individualizing narrative so much as a personalizing one. Its effect was less to attribute success or failure to moral character than to provide a set of familiar categories for understanding an economy that appeared to be increasingly removed from the traditional realm of material production and face-to-face exchange.
For some, personalizing the market was a deliberately pro-financialist project. Investment manuals like Lewis C. Van Riper's The Ins and Outs of Wall Street (1898) and A. N. Ridgely's The Study and Science of Stock Speculation (1909), for example, sought to humanize financial commerce in order to render it more accessible to prospective investors (while earning their business as consumers of financial advice). For others, narratives of choice and consortium were meant to serve anti-financial ends, as in the case of the House of Representatives’ Pujo Committee (1912–1913), which adopted the language of calculated conspiracy in order to buoy a range of regulatory proposals. Knight suggests that despite being hitched to different political-economic aims, these literary devices ultimately converged at a deeper and more consequential cultural point. They helped to make the financial market intelligible to ordinary people and, in so doing, granted it a kind of coherence and moral legitimacy, even as its proper place in economic life would continue to engender debate throughout the twentieth century. They also tended to obscure the class dimensions of their central object, either by rendering finance so thoroughly personalized as to defy true class formation or by portraying it as so elaborately integrated as to deny any meaningful differentiation of interests. Knight's is thus a story of the “uneasy resistance against and accommodation to the abstractions of finance” that casts light on the making of the first Gilded Age as well as its contemporary sequel (23).
Where Reading the Market explores what might be termed the enabling culture of financialization, Robb's Ladies of the Ticker addresses a question of participation: To what extent were American women involved in the investment economy of the turn of the century era, and how did their involvement push or pull on the ideology of gendered separate spheres? This is a classic, even conventional, social-historical inquiry, yet it is one that, as many feminist scholars have observed, has not been asked by historians of finance, and in this way Ladies of the Ticker breaks new ground. Mining a diverse archive of prescriptive literature, business records, journalistic writing, and legal documents, Robb reconstructs the nineteenth-century notion of women's financial incapacity and then challenges it with evidence of their significant presence in financial affairs. Middle-class (and occasionally working-class) women were major investors in government bonds, real estate, and corporate securities throughout this period. In the 1880s, nearly a quarter of the clients of Morton, Bliss & Company, a New York merchant bank that Robb examines in detail, were women, and by the 1920s women were said to comprise 35 percent of the nation's shareholder class, owning nearly half the stock of such businesses as Pennsylvania Railroad, DuPont, and U.S. Steel. In less formal venues, such as bucket shops, their presence may have been even greater.
These women were not passive capitalists, content to live off of interest and dividends without questioning where they came from. Instead, as Robb learns from the client correspondences of firms like Morton, Bliss, they often took a keen interest in the management of their portfolios, asking their brokers to investigate prospective opportunities and urging them to pursue alternative courses of action. In the main, women appear to have been more cautious than their male counterparts, a theme attributable to the gendered counsel of their financial advisors and other social factors. Yet this difference was not enough to overwhelm the belief that women risked losing their femininity or being exploited by it when they entered the financial marketplace. In an expansive chapter on women and financial fraud and two focused considerations of the female investors Victoria Woodhull and Hetty Green, Robb traces a persistent inability on the part of the broader culture to place financial women in any category other than likely victim or unsexed Other. Many women themselves were ambivalent about their financial roles, classing them as engagements of circumstance or, in Woodhull's case, denouncing Wall Street even while profiting from it. One project often tied to these attitudes was the case for government regulation, which was routinely made in reference to pitiable widows beggared by villainous confidence men. More common was a culture of condescension and exclusion that continues to the present day. Yet this sexism “should not blind us to the new economic avenues opened to women since the Financial Revolution,” Robb concludes, in a notable contrast to the declensional tone that tends to pervade scholarship in the field.
Taken together, these studies demonstrate that much of the vitality of the new history of capitalism stems from its interdisciplinary methods and catholic source base. Knight and Robb ably blend close readings of literary texts with careful examinations of bank records, bond circulars, and other financial arcana, persuasively suggesting that the history of finance cannot be ceded to the conventional realms of economic, social, or cultural analysis. Further, they show that the financial turn does not need to evacuate historical narratives of people in favor of faceless flows of capital. On the contrary, Knight and Robb provide readers with an impressive galley of captivating characters, from public figures like the business journalist Edwin Lefèvre to the private investors Robb has retrieved from brokerage archives. These discoveries illuminate how the moral and intellectual problems of finance capitalism were negotiated in the lives of actual individuals and will help scholars both to imagine and to teach the history of an often-obscure dimension of the economic past.
Yet these volumes also suggest a coming of age for financial history, in their engagement with some of the larger theoretical questions that have traditionally organized scholarship on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Many recent studies of money and banking have taken as their point of departure the 2008 financial crisis, asking, in ways implicit and explicit, what in our social and cultural past can account for the speculative themes of our twenty-first-century present? This is a reasonable inquiry, but its preeminence has had the effect of isolating some of the important yields of this research from other areas of the discipline, where issues of contemporary capitalism do not loom quite so large. Knight and Robb write from within the shadow of 2008 as well and, at times, do appear to search for a moment of definitive financial transition. On the whole, however, their aims are at once narrower and more expansive, seeking less to offer a prehistory of finance today than to explain how two of the more powerful cultural constructs of nineteenth-century life, in the moral economy and the gendered ideology of separate spheres, fared as the market began to offer new opportunities for distant and abstract profit making. Their findings thus contribute not only to the field of financial history but also to conversations that have long engaged rural and urban historians; scholars of work, labor organizing, and the corporation; and women's and gender historians.
Further integrating finance into the collective portrait of social change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will require scholars to build on the interpretive achievements of these studies, but it will also involve addressing some of their omissions and shortcomings. Reading the Market concludes with the investigations of the Pujo Committee, for example, but provides no consideration of the key regulatory device advanced by those proceedings in the Federal Reserve, an institution that was readily incorporated into narratives of conspiracy and deceit as freighted as those that once surrounded the robber barons. To what extent does the cultural history of finance require a complementary cultural history of the administrative state, and how might those twinned projects inform our understanding of the psychic accommodations made to bureaucratic modernity in the long Progressive Era? Ladies of the Ticker likewise recuperates a rich history of female participation in financial life but says little about how changes in the legal status of women—both in terms of access to property and exposure to risk and uncertainty—might have impelled their search for an independent competency through finance. Robb considers the Financial Revolution as a positive event in the emancipation of women, but in what ways could the gradual dismantling of coverture be seen as a positive event in the history of finance?
These two volumes model the interdisciplinarity that has made the new history of capitalism such a vibrant field, and their lively analysis of an esoteric archive will be of value to students, specialists, and generalists alike. In placing finance within a sophisticated set of conversations concerning American encounters with the modern, they gesture toward new and rich destinations for the next generation of financial historians.
