From a wall to an icon: the Street's evolution

Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life
By Steve Fraser
HarperCollins, 721 pp., $29.95

In the beginning was the Wall.

The Wall of Wall Street was humble, a string of wooden posts built by Dutch settlers to keep out Indians and later the British. The Street came later, when the Wall was taken down in the 1690s. No longer humble, it became an address of the elite, and by the 1790s, a group of brokers arranged to regulate the trading of securities (according to probably apocryphal lore, at a meeting under a buttonwood tree) in what is considered the unofficial founding of the New York Stock Exchange.

This is genesis. What rivets New York historian Steve Fraser is evolution: the braiding of Wall Street with American culture, one generating or losing wealth, the other viewing the Street alternately as the Yellow Brick Road to wealth or a highway to ruin.

In this engaging epic, the stock market's image, fueled by larger-than-life players, rivals its financial roller coaster for stomach-churning ups and downs. ''No president until Calvin Coolidge found it strategically wise to lavish praise on the Street in public; no president after him did so until Ronald Reagan; no president since Reagan has failed to do so," Fraser sums up.

Before Coolidge, we had the Gilded Age, in which robber barons captured the public's attention with their grandiose ambitions even as they repulsed it with their venality. Men like J.P. Morgan were the Federal Reserve before there was a Fed, using their own resources to stop financial panics by pouring money into the market.

Then came the Roaring '20s, when the market seemingly could do no wrong. The crash of 1929 and the Great Depression it created (in the public's mind, though not necessarily historians') upended the market's reputation, branding brokers and analysts as bumblers and outright crooks.

It wasn't until the most recent bull market, beginning under Reagan and hitting orbit during the dot-com Clinton years, that Wall Street again gripped the public's imagination with a positive image. We became a ''shareholder nation," with a record half of households owning some stock.

Fraser's prose is elegant, at times poetic. Here's how he describes the 1920s view of Wall Street expressed in ''The Great Gatsby": ''For Fitzgerald, the Market punctuates the era's tragic trajectory. It is the magnetic north of its spiritual inertia, its pervasive dissipation, compulsive gaiety, and looming air of loss." In takeover battles between Reagan-era corporate raiders and the Street's old guard, ''The have-not-enoughs were confronting the have-too-muches."

A book this long is bound to have flaws. Perhaps Fraser's personal views blind him to nuances in recent events. He says the tax code under Reagan became the least progressive among the industrial nations, failing to note that the loophole-plugging 1986 reform (since watered down) strengthened it. When he writes that today's crony capitalism ''hardly arouses comment, much less condemnation," charitable readers might want to pitch in to buy him a newspaper subscription.

These defects don't spoil the book in the end. ''Every Man a Speculator" is ''The Iliad" set on Wall Street, its literary gravity pulling you along with the sweep of its narrative and the stylishness of the telling.