Today, consumer credit, employee stock options, and citizen investment in the stock market are taken for granted - fundamental facts of American economic life. But few people realize that they were first widely promoted by John Jakob Raskob (1879-1950), the innovative financier and self-made
businessman who built the Empire State building, made millions for DuPont and General Motors, and helped shape the contours of modern capitalism.
David Farber's Everybody Ought to Be Rich is the first biography of Raskob, a man who shunned the limelight (he was the anti-Trump of his
time) but whose impact on free market enterprise can hardly be overstated. A colorful figure, Raskob's life evokes the roaring twenties, the Catholic elite, the boardrooms of America's biggest corporations, and the rags-to-riches tale that is central to the American dream. Farber follows Raskob's
remarkable trajectory from a teenage candy seller on the railway between Lockport and Buffalo to the pinnacles of wealth and power.
With no formal education but possessed of a boundless energy and an unshakeable faith in individual initiative (his motto was "Go ahead and do something!"),
Raskob partnered with great industrialists and financiers, buying up companies, leveraging investments, reorganizing corporations, funneling money into the political system, and creating new pools of credit for rich investors and middle class consumers alike - practices commonplace today but
revolutionary at the time. His most famous innovation was mass consumer credit, which he offered to individual car buyers, enabling working and middle-class Americans to purchase GM's more expensive cars. Raskob desperately wanted to bridge class divides and to share the wealth American corporations
were fast creating - so that everyone could be rich.
Chronicling Raskob's short-comings as well as his successes, Everybody Ought to Be Rich illuminates a crucial but little-known figure in American capitalism whose influence can still be felt today.
Introduction
1. Small Town Catholic Boy
2. Pierre and John
3. Rich Man
4. Raskob and Durant
5. Crisis Manager
6. Jazz Age Hero
7. Last Days of the Old Order
8. Distant Shore
Notes
Bibliography
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
David Farber is Professor of History at Temple University. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism; Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America's First Encounter with Radical Islam; and Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors.
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