The Lords of Creation: The History of America's 1 Percent (Forbidden Bookshelf)
by Frederick Lewis Allen
View on GoodreadsFrederick Lewis Allen's 1935 history of American finance from roughly 1900 through the 1929 crash — a contemporaneous account by a Harper's editor, reissued in the Forbidden Bookshelf series as still-relevant material on plutocracy.
Core ideas
- The early 20th century concentration of corporate, banking, and political power — Morgan, Rockefeller, the trust era — is treated as a coherent project, not a series of accidents.
- Allen connects the 1920s speculative boom to the structural concentration that preceded it; the crash wasn't an anomaly but the predictable endpoint.
- Reading it post-2008 and post-Trump, the recurring patterns (financial deregulation cycles, political capture, public anger that doesn't translate into reform) are the source of its republication.
Published1935
Pages511
ISBN9781497622661
ReadJun 2023
