TAMING THE STREET

The dramatic story of this unprecedented fight to save the soul of American capitalism and the battle to regulate Wall Street - a story with profound lessons for today - is the heart of this book by New York Times bestselling award-winning financial journalist Diana B. Henriques.

Taming the Street tells the epic story of the Franklin Roosevelt's battle to regulate Wall Street for the very first time in the wake of the Crash of 1929 that ushered in the Great Depression. Deeply reported and vividly told, it provides a trip back to a time when the power of concentrated wealth in America arguably exceeded that of the federal government. Roosevelt's campaign to curb the excesses of the market, end reckless speculation, and mitigate the disastrous boom-and-bust cycle is one of the great untold dramas in American history, and as it unfolded, its outcome was far from clear.

In TAMING THE STREET, Henriques takes us back to a time when fraud was just the way business was done with pump and dump schemes which were standard operating procedure, most investors were made victims, prosperity was top-heavy and narrow as wealthy speculators got rich and everyone else - farmers, tradesmen, unskilled laborers slipped into poverty without a net.

In the world that Henriques vividly recreates the power of concentrated wealth in America arguably exceeded that of the federal government and we meet a titanic cast of characters, among them Joseph Kennedy, who left his career as a movie producer to become chairman of Roosevelt's newly-created Securities and Exchange Commission, William O. Douglas, the hotshot lawyer fresh out of Yale, who would take over for Kennedy and declare a pitiless war on the criminals of American capitalism. Richard Whitney, the patrician chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, who would go to prison for his crimes, and of course Roosevelt himself who early in his presidency decided that an unfettered Wall Street was the enemy not just of capitalism, but of democracy itself.

Henriques has written this book for two main reasons: First, because it's a vital history that needs to be preserved and properly told; and as importantly, because the battle lines that were drawn in that time are the very same battle lines that define our politics today. Taming the Street is a book rooted in the drama of the 1930s, but as inequality in America has again reached Jazz Age levels, one of Henriques' many ambitions for the book is to bring to life a time when the system worked in the public interest. An idealistic time when we knew what had to be done, and summoned the will to do it, against the power of an American oligarchy.

Taming the Street is a riveting, true-life thriller that raises an urgent and troubling question: What does capitalism owe to the common good?

Diana B. Henriques is the author of The White Sharks of Wall Street and Fidelity's World. She is a longtime business correspondent for The New York Times as well as a Polk Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist. She won several awards for her work on the Times's coverage of the Madoff scandal and was part of the team recognized as a Pulitzer finalist for its coverage of the financial crisis of 2008. She lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.