Financiers such as Gould and Cooke—the investment bankers, brokers, and speculators of the postwar economy—were the people whom Americans referred to as capitalists. They distrusted them because they were alien to the world of free labor. They did not work with their hands; they did not make things. Capitalists justified the rewards they reaped by the risks that they took rather than the work they did. Without their willingness to risk their fortunes, so the argument went, there would be no progress, no jobs for workingpeople, and no prosperity.
