GOVERNMENT: Thirteen Families

In 1937 a lumbering, leftish ex-newspaperman named Ferdinand Lundberg decided to give form to his favorite gripe: big, fat capitalists and their de facto control of our de jure Government. Under his microscope went 60 of the fattest with their families, their incomes, their politics, their philanthropies. He wrote an erudite bombshell of questionable accuracy titled America's 60 Families, watched his subjects squirm while Secretary Ickes and then Assistant Attorney General Jackson quoted it with gusto. Within less than a year the families were sprawled under more powerful microscopes as the Temporary National Economic Committee made a study of...

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