Customer Reviews

Wall Street to Main Street: Charles Merrill and Middle-Class Investors

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I learned a lot about Wall Street history from this book. The relatively overnight successes of technology driven Wall Streeters should not obscure the more remarkable achievements of Charlie Merrill. The author skillfully describes the times in which Merrill operated and gave me a balanced view of Merrill's strengths and weaknesses. The story moves swiftly along and I gained a real appreciation of the future Merrill saw, the opportunities he capitalized on, and those he inspired along the way.

Charles Merrill is an authentic American genius and today's capital markets bear his distinctive stamp in many ways, as Edwin J. Perkins' book proves in fascinating detail. While the book works as a business history and as a professional portrait, it is less successful as a biography because Perkins deliberately chose to focus on Merrill's professional life. By keeping Merrill's personal life very much in the background, Perkins declines to bring Merrill's personality to life. We learn about his career, but we do not seem to get to know the man himself. Happily, Merrill's achievements and business innovations are well worth examining. His commitment to service, integrity and the good of the common customer - even when that angered the elite customer - made him richer than most of the aristocrats who fought against him. We [...] recommend this worthy portrayal of a riveting role model to entrepreneurs, finance professionals and any business history buff.

Charles Merrill is in a long line of American capitalists who took a product previously reserved for the wealthy and spread it to the middle class, democratizing stocks and bonds. A genius at marketing---along the lines of Jay Cooke---Merrill understood that wresting power from corporate America began with making average Americans owners.

Edwin Perkins is a well-established historian of banks, financial markets, and the economy, and his understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of Merrill is thorough. Highly recommended.

In his introduction, the author attempts vainly to put Merrill in the same category as Morgan and other great financiers. The problem is that he was not a financier, just a guy riding the trend of retailing in the 1920s. But his gratitude for his own personal pension fund appreciating in the 1990s and attributing it to people like Merrill is extremely embarrassing. This suggests that the author is trying to ingratiate himself to Merrill's company. A little balatant. More to the point, Mr. Perkins did not seem to understand his topic very well. He constantly refers to the backroom at Merrill as "backstage." The backroom and its problems was a big topic on Wall St from the 1950s through the 70s although Perkins seems unaware of the whole problem and constantly refers to it as backstage. Did anyone ever research a topic so poorly? Whether Merrill deserves a full fledged biography still remains unclear after reading this amateurish attempt.