Capital of Capital by Jaffe Steven H. Lautin Jessica Museum of the City of New York

Author:Jaffe, Steven H., Lautin, Jessica, Museum of the City of New York
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036080, History/United States/State & Local/Middle Atlantic (DC, DE, MD, NJ, NY, PA), BUS027000, Business & Economics/Finance
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-05-06T04:00:00+00:00

The Great War and After

While the Federal Reserve System was getting under way in 1914, the outbreak of World War I led to a new era of turbulence and agitation on Wall Street and throughout the nation. With Populists marginalized and progressives either silenced or converted to the war effort, leftists became the most visible critics of Wall Street and plutocracy. For socialists and anarchists, American loans to the warring European nations amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars—together with the profits pouring into the pockets of munitions makers, war contractors, shareholders, and bankers—proved that the war was primarily an opportunity for capitalists to cash in on misery and bloodshed. Socialist Morris Hillquit, who proclaimed the war “a cold-blooded butchery” serving “the ruling classes of the warring nations,” failed in his 1917 New York City mayoral bid, but he did garner 142,000 votes. Such dissent, however, increasingly invited suppression by federal agents and private vigilantes. The New York Times lambasted “half-baked disciples of socialism, internationalists, pro-Germanists” who didn’t buy or “believe in Liberty Bonds.” According to Woodrow Wilson’s postmaster general, Albert Burleson, anyone who dared to allege that “the Government is controlled by Wall Street or munitions manufacturers” could be arrested and prosecuted under the federal Sedition Act of 1918, enacted to curb wartime dissent.30

Calls for reform and regulation would be muffled in the postwar era. Following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, wartime campaigns against domestic radicals helped feed a “Red Scare” in 1919-20 targeting communists, anarchists, and labor unions, making any criticism of American business—or banking—potentially dangerous. True, some voices continued to assail Wall Street, including Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, who ran unsuccessfully as the Progressive Party candidate for the presidency in 1924. His ally in the House of Representatives, a young resident of working-class Italian East Harlem named Fiorello La Guardia, nominated La Follette by declaring, “I speak for Avenue A and 116th Street, instead of Broad and Wall.”31

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