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could denounce Wall Street and the interests, but it looked old–
fashioned, and more, it divided the liberal intellectuals from those
who, on the issues that still counted, were natural allies. For 'Vall
Street was closer to the liberal intellectuals on the two domestic issues
that were still alive-civil rights and civil liberties- and on the whole
range of issues related to foreign policy than were the former allies
of the liberal intellectuals, the farmers and the lower classes of the
city, both in their old form as factory workers and in their new form
as white-collar workers.
Indeed, what has happened is that the old issues died, and on
the new issues former friends or allies have become enemies, and
former enemies have become friends. Thus, the liberal intellectuals
have had to switch their attitudes toward Wall Street- as symbolizing
both the great financiers and the giant corporations they organize–
and toward "small business." By 1940, one could no longer speak of
Wall Street as "the enemy." Demographic shifts and the Depression,
along with the increasing ability of industry to finance expansion from
reserves, had already weakened the hegemony of Eastern capital. The
New Deal, by rhetoric and by such legislation as the SEC and the
Holding Company Act, weakened it further, in comparison with the
growing power of mid-continent businessmen (not to speak of tax–
privileged oil and gas men). And the war had the same effect, for
the small businessmen and tougher big businessmen of the Midwest
paid less taxes and less attention to OPA and WPB. Wall Street
lawyers Stimson and McCloy (perhaps Wendell WilIkie might be
added), Wall Street bankers Forrestal, Lovett, and Harriman, all
have had a far greater cosmopolitanism and tolerance for intellec–
tuals than do, for example, the big and little car dealers of the Eisen–
hower Administration. In general, Wall Streeters, like the British
Tories, are a chastened lot-and an easy symbol of abuse for pastoral
and Populist simplifications. But, while Harry Hopkins and Tommy
Corcoran recruited such men for Roosevelt, many New Dealers and
their journalist and intellectual supporters resented their entrance.
They also resented the military, who were frequently similarly
chastened men. The liberal political imagination in America, with its
tendency to consider generals and admirals hopeless conservatives,
and war an outmoded barbarity that serious thinkers should not
concern themselves with, was incapable of seeing that military men,
