“money was associated with secret deals, sharp practice, invisible wealth acquired through trickery and guile rather than productive labor. The retail experience of ========== Rebirth of a Nation (Jackson Lears) - Highlight Loc. 1037-40 | Added on Thursday, January 01, 1970, 06:52 AM Yet as the authors of The Gilded Age knew, those promises often proved false, and the loans they spawned went bad. A great deal of waste, fraud, and corruption went into the making of the modern American economy, and much of it was concentrated on Wall Street. Railroad stocks, the ========== Rebirth of a Nation (Jackson Lears) - Highlight Loc. 1048-53 | Added on Thursday, January 01, 1970, 06:53 AM among the American populace. Wall Street was a madhouse, a witches’ cauldron, critics charged; predatory traders evoked Hobbesian visions of nihilism. Yet there was an undeniable if crude vitality about some of the more fabulous plungers: the tubby womanizer Jim Fisk, a king of the dudes whose “flash” drew a thousand mourners to his funeral; the ferocious Cornelius Vanderbilt, who preferred ruining rivals to suing them. Some, like Vanderbilt and Daniel Drew, a psalm-singing Methodist who made millions by selling watered stock, exuded a risk-taking virility that transformed them from confidence men (at least in the public eye) to Napoleons of finance. Others, ========== Rebirth of a Nation (Jackson Lears) - Highlight Loc. 1054-56 | Added on Thursday, January 01, 1970, 06:54 AM with money manipulators. Whatever their personal style, these capitalists financed a huge industrial explosion even as they systematically corrupted the polity, watering stock and bribing legislatures wholesale, preaching laissez-faire while they depended on government for loans, land, and subsidies. ========== Rebirth of a Nation (Jackson Lears) - Highlight Loc. 1069-73 | Added on Thursday, January 01, 1970, 06:55 AM self-transformation gave money a centrifugal force and a corrosive edge. It could dissolve settled communities and social bonds, send young men spinning off from their ancestral seats in search of fresh possibilities, clothe reprobates and rakes in raiments of respectability. A universal standard of value, money was also a universal solvent of other standards of value. Custom, tradition, morality—all dissolved, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said, “in the icy waters of egotistical calculation.” This was the heartless ========== Rebirth of a Nation (Jackson Lears) - Highlight Loc. 1080-83 | Added on Thursday, January 01, 1970, 06:56 AM carnival was in town all the time. American society began to approximate Melville’s vision—a milling mob of conniving confidence men and questing consumers, rendered credulous by their dream of magical self-transformation through purchase. Money was more than merely a means of keeping people afloat, more even than the key to new realms of pleasure; it was also a mechanism for reinventing the self. It financed fresh starts, new sets of surface appearances. ========== Rebirth of a Nation (Jackson Lears) - Highlight Loc. 1106-11 | Added on Thursday, January 01, 1970, 06:56 AM At about the same time, theology and morality merged in the Protestant ethic of disciplined achievement. The sincere self was also a hardworking self—so hardworking, in fact, that he produced his own success, his own social identity. He was, in short, a self-made man. For moralists, this paragon of autonomy provided a crucial centripetal force against the centrifugal energies of markets and monies. The ideals embodied in self-made manhood, it was hoped, would diffuse throughout society and stabilize the sorcery of the marketplace, contain its carnival spirit. Yet the sorcery kept resurfacing. After all, ascent to the lordship of capital required more than diligence—and less than sincerity. Success was a ========== Rebirth of a Nation (Jackson Lears) - Highlight Loc. 1112 | Added on Thursday, January 01, 1970, 06:57 AM the apotheosis of solidity and reliability, turned out at crucial moments to be confidence men. ========== Rebirth of a Nation (Jackson Lears) - Highlight Loc. 1215-20 | Added on Thursday, January 01, 1970, 06:58 AM Despite vast differences in personal style, Carnegie and Rockefeller had much in common. Eventually both men turned to systematic philanthropy, contributing to the common good even as they disregarded it in their business practices. Both shared a tendency to conflate their own interests with those of society and indeed humanity at large, as well as a talent for self-deception that dissolved moral ambivalence in a warm bath of ideological certitude. In this they were no different from other captains of commerce in their own time and ours. Both publicly disdained speculation; both privately profited from it. Both proclaimed their devotion to free-market principles while they depended on government support, ranging from tariffs and ========== Rebirth of a Nation (Jackson Lears)”
