When Wall Street met main street: The quest for an investors' democracy and the emergence of the retail investor in the United States, 1890--1930

From the outset of the great merger movement among industrial corporations in the 1890s to the Great Crash of 1929, governments and corporations seeking capital, the financial industry and its advertising and marketing agents, academic economists, and a new financial press all promoted stock and bond ownership. This dissertation analyzes these efforts to create a retail market for financial securities alongside new theories that placed the individual investor at the center of the American political economy. "When Wall Street Met Main Street" recovers the neglected, intertwined histories of the small investor and the ideal of investor democracy in early twentieth century America.;Stock and bond investments gained legitimacy in the context of a larger project that aimed to materialize an investors' democracy---that is, to integrate all Americans into the investor class, so that each might receive his rightful political-economic stake in industrial corporate capitalism. Investor democracy ideologists concurred that universal ownership of financial securities could secure individual economic autonomy and security, as well as national economic equity and prosperity. Yet they competed to associate the practice of investment with their varied political agendas. Ultimately, investor democrats refigured the financial securities markets---once popularly regarded as instruments of unaccountable elite power---as both analogous and instrumental to political democracy and economic justice.;As a rhetorical figure, the small investor first appeared in prewar economic policy debates. During the First World War, the federal government's mass bond drives encouraged new, positive ways of thinking about the relationship between investment and democracy. These War Loan campaigns urged Americans to incorporate financial securities ownership into their understandings of citizenship and nation. Many anticipated that widespread ownership of federal debt might transform postwar American society and government.;Over the course of the 1920s, the inchoate wartime vision of investor democracy solidified along more politically conservative lines. Immediately after the Great War, a range of thinkers promoted the 'New Proprietorship,' the notion that corporate stocks---not federal bonds---would best convey an economic-political stake in America. Mid-decade, first corporations and then financial firms and associations reoriented War Loan marketing and New Proprietorship ideals. As they celebrated the advent of a shareholder's democracy, they built the nation's first mass market in financial securities and established key tenets of modern free market political conservatism.