GUSTAVUS MYERS COPYRIGHT RENEWED 1936 AND 1937, BY GUSTAVUS MYERS ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL, LONDON, ENG., Manufactured in the United States of America PUBLISHERS' NOTE For more than a quarter of a century, Gustavus Myers' History of the Great American Fortunes has stood unassailed as a document that has recorded and made national history. As a source book, it has provided materials and reputations for many writers of the first rank. When History of the Great American Fortunes was written in 1909, America was on the threshold of a flourishing iconoclastic era. The postCivil War industrialization of the country had produced financial titans who inspired a literature of glorification. With the turn of the century, popular revulsion to the saccharine praises of the newly emerged plutocracy brought into favor a new and opposite type of writer. The reaction against panegyrics in behalf of the multimillionaires took form in a clamor against "malefactors of great wealth." The books and articles of crusaders like Ray Stannard Baker, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Herbert Casson and Charles Edward Russell found immense public support. Their revelations were always sensational and vividly personalized. For the most part, they dealt with the private lives and individual vagaries of great magnates, and, in general, overlooked their social significance. At the same time, Gustavus Myers was gathering and sifting his huge accumulation of solid facts. The incontrovertibility of his findings, when they appeared in book form, created a different and deeper sensation than did the more transitory exposés of mere personalities. There was no denunciation, no loose editorializing. The facts were all recorded and documented with references and direct citations from authentic official records. The reader was left to draw his own conclusions. No one has yet challenged a single fact in Mr. Myers' work. Every statement is made with the authority of corroborated and proven evidence. At no time did he indulge in tirades against personal traits, dispositions or temperaments. He was not concerned with the good or bad qualities of the individual founders and perpetuators of great fortunes. His only interest was in the means whereby great fortunes were acquired and the purposes for which they were used. Where the vogue for the more lurid revelations of gigantic scandals has long since passed, the research and conclusions drawn in History of the Great American Fortunes have withstood every test of time. The book has the same vitality and accuracy it had in the first decade of the twentieth century. Moreover, the additions made to bring this work completely up to date make it a definitive history of the fortunes that have been amassed during and since the World War. In order to record the changes that have taken place during the last twenty-five years, Mr. |