The class quiz
More
So said Louis Brandeis (1856-1941), left-wing American crusader who ended up in the US Supreme Court, of the late 19th-century tycoons. In 1913, in his book Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It, he tried to mobilise progressive opinion to break the financial stranglehold of these immensely powerful oligarchs over American life. This was the era of what political commentator Matthew Josephson (1899-1978) called the ‘robber barons’ – capitalists such as John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) and William Vanderbilt (1856-1938) who had accumulated billions of dollars at the expense of ordinary people. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) called them ‘malefactors of great wealth’ and tried to curb their power through anti-monopoly laws. Sometimes these plutocrats would come to Britain and marry off their rich heiresses to impoverished aristocratic families, swapping a fortune earned from ‘trade’ for a title.
