The Lords of Creation
by
[Harpers, $3.00]
FREDERICK LEWIS ALLEN, the author of Only Yesterday, has spent years in the research for and the writing of this new book, with its catchy title. His purpose has been to comb the last thirty-odd years of corporate financial history in search of an explanation for the social upheaval through which we are now passing. The period covered begins with Roosevelt the First, hellbent on breaking up combinations in business, and closes with Roosevelt the Second, hellbent on bringing them under regulation. The history illuminates the men, the notable economic events, and the important reform measures from the formation of the United States Steel Corporation to the dissolution of the NRA.
Like Mark Sullivan, Mr. Allen is a social historian, and in this book it is his design to give history the leading rôle and let biography add color and completeness to the background. In discussing a financial episode in relation to other contemporary events, and in tracing its social consequences, Mr. Allen must identify those personalities who had a hand in it all. There were, for instance, some big men concerned with the formation of the United States Steel Corporation, yet as individuals they were of less importance than the fact that what they did put a new symbol ’X’ on the ticker tape — Steel Common. Why? Because Steel Common initiated a widespread interest in security trading which, augmented by the Liberty Bond drives, made possible the period of insane speculation during the fat years following the war, and so, logically, the explosion of 1929.
Again, the elder Morgan was the Hercules who shouldered the financial world during the panic of 1907. For his pains he got called before the Pujo Committee of Congress, where he pounded the table and bellowed so all the world could hear that he would not lend a dollar to a man in whom he had no confidence, though he should offer as collateral all the bonds in Christendom; that it is character alone that counts. This is spectacular and interesting, but of little moment compared with the stark fact that the 1907 panic was due to an outmoded banking system in a rapidly expanding business world. That panic gave us the Federal Reserve System.
The author gets us deeply interested in the financial careers of his lords, but he is always careful not to let his Morgans and Hills, Harrimans, Carnegies, and Schwabs, do more than furnish the human interest necessary to keep his real objective afloat. What men do and the consequences of their action are always kept well in front of the men themselves. Wholesale and widespread investment in Peruvian bonds is of greater social moment than Mitchell and his National City Company, the Alleghany Corporation than the Van Sweringens, and the Middle West Utilities than Samuel Insull.
Most of the pivotal financial events which Mr. Allen has brought together in sequence have been treated heretofore as isolated episodes. Published last year, Matthew Josephson’s Robber Barons vigorously lambasted the predecessors, the fathers of Mr. Allen’s ‘lords.’ And individually these twentieth-century moguls have been subjects of inspired biographies or critical prose portraits. Case histories have been written of some of the financial incidents. But Mr. Allen is the first to correlate them all, men and events, in so fair an interpretation of the social and financial upheaval.
He has allowed no source of information to go unmined, and has introduced almost to the surfeiting point the detailed facts which he has dug up. One’s attention is sustained, however, by the human interest which he has so tersely employed. The book marks Mr. Allen as a careful economist, a first-rate historian, and a biographer of skill.
HOWARD DOUGLAS DOZIER