Merrill can't be dismissed as a moneybags who made a lucky guess on the Crash. He truly deserves to be remembered for what he did during that second career of his, the one that began when he was deep into middle age. In founding Merrill Lynch--his partner and sidekick, Edmund C. ("Eddie") Lynch, was a soda-fountain-equipment salesman--Merrill created an important and enduring institution. But more than that, he started the country down an important and enduring path.

Merrill, you see, was the first person to openly advocate that the stock market should not just be a plaything for Wall Street insiders but should also be an avenue for the broad mass of Americans. Decades before founding Merrill Lynch, he coined the phrase "Bringing Wall Street to Main Street." For the last 17 years of his life, that's what he tried to achieve with his new firm, which became a laboratory for his grand experiment. Today when we conjure up the names of the great American financiers, we tend to think of people like J.P. Morgan and Warren Buffett and even Michael Milken. But none of them had the effect on American life that Charlie Merrill had. In fact, they're not even close.

Can there be any doubt that the democratization of the markets is the single most profound financial trend of the past half-century? The statistics certainly bear this out: by some measures, half of America's households now invest, compared with only 16% in 1945, and mutual funds alone hold more of America's financial assets than banks do. Indeed, a strong argument can be made that the small investor, far more than the professional trader, is the true foundation upon which the modern bull market has been built.

Look at how fixated we've become with the daily ups and downs of the Dow--how our hearts race when the market is up and how we sag when the market does. Or look at how we've turned mutual-fund managers like Peter Lynch into celebrities. Most of all, look at the extraordinary extent to which we now rely on stocks to fund our retirement, send our kids to college and allow us to lead the kind of comfortable lives we view as middle class. We believe in the market today with something approaching religious faith.

Which, it turns out, is a pretty fair description of how Merrill always viewed the market. Its ability to create wealth broadly was to him an undeniable proposition. And while this is now a more or less universal truth, it was not always so. During the first part of this century, after all, the Street was largely a rigged game. Insiders manipulated the market from behind the curtains, behavior that, while unseemly, was legal then. Small investors were scorned--or fleeced. Yet Merrill was untouched by the cynicism that pervaded Wall Street. Like so many American visionaries, he was marked by naive and exaggerated optimism that was unshakable, even in the face of the darker reality he saw all around him.