How does Ron Chernow use imagery in The House of Morgan?

Imagery:

While Junius inhabited the white-glove world of the City, Pierpont had to deal with Wall Street squalor and found it alternately seductive and repellent. Confronted by corruption, he saw himself as a proxy for honorable European and American investors, a tool of transcendent purpose representing the sound men on Wall Street and in the City.

"The bankers' rescue on Black Thursday proved longer on symbolism than on substance. The men knew they couldn't prop up a collapsing stock market, so they tried to introduce liquidity and engineer an orderly decline."