How did the United States, historically committed to individualism and political democracy, emerge as one the premier capitalist and corporatist economies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? One way to examine that question is to figure out how the United States became an “investor’s democracy” as more Americans came to own stocks, bonds, and commodities over the twentieth century.
Building on the scholarship of historians such as David Hochfelder, Ann Fabian, Jonathan Levy, Julia Ott, and Jonathan Lurie, my own work looks to the history of bucket shops—businesses that allowed predominantly working-class patrons across the country to place wagers on the fluctuation of prices in stock and commodity markets without ever owning specific securities between the 1870s-1920s—to explain how individual gambling facilitated the creation of an “investor’s democracy.” Despite their questionable business practices, bucket shops served as an informal arena of practice that helped to normalize the language and mechanics of securities markets for Americans not named Gould or Vanderbilt.