The Price of Progress

The US was only able to remove the influence of oligarchs by expanding the government’s powers and supporting the middle class during the Great Depression

In his America's 60 Families, a 1937 expose on super-rich, Ferdinand Lundberg wrote that "The United States is owned and dominated today by a hierarchy of its sixty richest families, buttressed by no more than ninety families of lesser wealth... These families are the living center of the modern industrial oligarchy which dominates the United States, functioning discreetly under a de jure democratic form of government behind which a de facto government, absolutist and plutocratic in its lineaments, has gradually taken form since the Civil War." This was as if he was describing the current situation in Ukraine.

The United States developed rapidly over the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, gradually moving to world leadership, at the same time with a corrupt political system. Back in the 1930s, when Mr. Lundberg was working on his book, the era of plutocracy was running out in America. The New Deal of the legendary President Roosevelt significantly restricted the influence of big business on government. However, the American middle class began a progressive movement to struggle for honest government even earlier at the end of the 19th century.