THE DYNAST

EMPIRE BUILDER

CECIL RHODES, empire builder and diamond monopolist, dreamer and money-maker, who made a million dollars while taking his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Oxford, is unique among the great fortune builders of history.

THE WARMAKER

IF THE Lord God Jehovah had not created Basil Zaharoff, some novelist sooner or later would certainly have got around to the job. Indeed, it is by no means certain that Zaharoff, as we have him, is not the joint product of God and the fiction writers.

HUGO STINNES

ONE CANNOT speak of Krupp before the Great War without thinking of Hugo Stinnes after the war. For one brief, dizzy moment Stinnes was, perhaps, and in a sense, the richest man in the world. In the hot cauldron of inflation the modern ideal of liquidity reached its craziest perfection—liquidity of ownership, the ownership of everything in Germany reduced to complete fluidity, running like a turbulent wild river through the markets.

MARK HANNA was born in the same year as J. Pierpont Morgan and two years before John D. Rockefeller. The shadows of these men, merged into one monstrous silhouette, brooded over the American scene for more than half a century. As Morgan dominated the financial life of the nation and Rockefeller gave direction to its industrial life, Hanna became the molder of those political forms proper to the age of Big Business.

THE APPEARANCE of John D. Rockefeller marks the beginning of that historic struggle between the government and organized business for the control of our economic life, which now moves to its final phase. One may doubt whether anything can be done to turn aside the stream of inevitable logical sequence. These powerful movements in society intrude themselves at first like a small trickle that, ignored too long, becomes the invincible force of a vast erosion.

THERE CAN BE no doubt that the two most considerable figures in the world of business in their time, if not in any time, were John D. Rockefeller and J. Pierpont Morgan. Rockefeller was pre-eminently the richest man of his day. Morgan would have to be left out of this volume if the size of his fortune alone were considered. There were many men during his life, as well as before and after, who were worth more than twice as much.

Aaron of Lincoln, 17

Abdul Hamid, 257

Abercorn, Duke of, 317

Abraham Lincoln: the War Years (Sandburg), 473

Accessory Transit Company, 187, 188, 194

Adamic, Louis, 258–9

Addis, Tom, 346

Addison, Joseph, 144

Aetna Fire Insurance Company, 460

Agassiz, Louis, 222

Agence Radio, 361

Aguesseau, Henri François d’, 78

JOHN T. FLYNN has written extensively on economics in newspapers, books, and magazines. His Country Squire in the White House was an outstanding best seller in 1940. God’s Gold, his life of Rockefeller, was widely read several years ago. He writes regularly on finance for the Scripps-Howard newspapers and he is a staff contributor to Collier’s. Men of Wealth is the result of more than five years’ work.