America's 60 Families

Ferdinand Lundberg's 1937 polemic was one of the first serious attempts to map how a handful of dynastic American families — Rockefellers, Morgans, Du Ponts, Mellons — interlocked to control wealth and political institutions. Drawing on tax records and corporate filings, it gave Depression-era readers data to go with their anger, and a Kirkus reviewer at the time called it 'dynamite.' Its energy is still readable. The honest caveat is that the Du Pont family successfully pursued a 1938 libel suit over factual inaccuracies, and professional economists largely rejected its conspiratorial framing. It should be read as a historical document of 1930s populist thought, not a reliable academic analysis. For readers interested in where modern inequality discourse began, it is a genuinely significant, if flawed, artifact.