America Returns to Our Proud History of Hating -- and Fighting -- Wall Street

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The fact is that the end of the world as we’ve known it has been taking place all around us for some time.  Until recently, however, thickets of political verbiage about cutting this and taxing that, about the glories of “job creators” and the need to preserve “the American dream,” have obscured what was hiding in plain sight -- that street of streets, known to generations of our ancestors as “the street of torments.”

After an absence of well over half a century, Wall Street is back, center stage, as the preferred American icon of revulsion, a status it held for a fair share of our history.  And we can thank a small bunch of campers in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park for hooking us up to a venerable tradition of resistance and rebellion.

The Street of Torments

Peering back at a largely forgotten terrain of struggle against “the Street,” so full of sound and fury signifying quite a lot, it’s astonishing -- to a historian of Wall Street, at least -- that the present movement didn’t happen sooner.  It’s already hard to remember that only weeks ago, three years into the near shutdown of the world financial system and the Great Recession, an eerie unprotesting silence still blanketed the country. 

Stories accumulated of Wall Street greed and arrogance, astonishing tales of incompetence and larceny.  The economy slowed and stalled.  People  lost their homes and jobs.  Poverty reached record levels .  The political system proved as bankrupt as the big banks.  Bipartisan consensus emerged -- but only around the effort to save “too big to fail” financial goliaths, not the legions of victims their financial wilding had left in its wake. 

The political class then prescribed what people already had plenty of: yet another dose of austerity plus a faith-based belief in a “recovery” that, for 99% of Americans, was never much more than an optical illusion.  In those years, the hopes of ordinary people for a chance at a decent future withered and bitterness set in.   

Strangely, however, popular resistance was hard to find.  In the light of American history, this passivity was surpassingly odd.  From decades before the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century through the Great Depression, again and again Wall Street found itself in the crosshairs of an outraged citizenry mobilized thanks to political parties, labor unions, or  leagues of the unemployed.  Such movements were filled with a polyglot mix of middle-class anti-trust reformers, bankrupted small businessmen, dispossessed farmers, tenants and sharecroppers, out-of-work laborers, and so many others. 

If Occupy Wall Street signals the end of our own, atypical period of acquiescence, could a return to a version of “class warfare” that would, once upon a time, have been familiar to so many Americans be on the horizon?  Finally!

What began as a relatively sparsely attended and impromptu affair has displayed a staying power and magnetic attractiveness that has taken the country, and above all the political class, by surprise.  A recent rally of thousands in lower Manhattan, where demonstrators marched from the city’s government center to Zuccotti Park, the location of the “occupiers” encampment, was an extraordinarily diverse gathering by any measure of age, race, or class.  Community organizations, housing advocates, environmentalists, and even official delegations of trade unionists not normally at ease hanging out with anarchists and hippies gave the whole affair a social muscularity and reach that was exhilarating to experience.