America's 60 Families
Cover of the 1946 printing of America's 60 Families
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| Author | Ferdinand Lundberg |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Vanguard Press |
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Publication date
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1937 |
| Pages | 495 (1937 printing) |
| OCLC | 256489013 |
| 339.20973 | |
| LC Class | HG181 |
| Followed by | The Rich and the Super-Rich |
America's 60 Families is a book by Ferdinand Lundberg published in 1937 by Vanguard Press. It is an argumentative analysis of wealth and class in the United States, and how they are leveraged for purposes of political and economic power, specifically by what the author contends is a "" composed of a tightly interlinked group of 60 families.
The controversial study has met with mixed reactions since its publication. Though praised by some contemporary and modern reviewers, and once cited in a speech by Harold L. Ickes, it has also been criticized by others and was the subject of a 1938 libel suit by DuPont over factual inaccuracies contained in the text. In 1968 Lundberg published The Rich and the Super-Rich, described by some sources as a sequel to America's 60 Families.
Ferdinand Lundberg was an iconoclastic journalist and writer who spent his career pillorying the American upper class over what he charged was its grip on the United States' economy. According to Lundberg, he quit his job as a reporter at the New York Herald Tribune to pen his first book, Imperial Hearst: A Social Biography, which was published in 1936. An unflattering look at the life and business of the publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst, it ascribed to Hearst what the New York Times would later describe as "fascist political ambitions ... abetted by an unholy alliance of big bankers". The book, whose foreword by Charles A. Beard said that Hearst would face "oblivion in death", caused an immediate stir and was described by Foreign Affairs as "an annihilating study of the newspaper magnate" worthy of "wide attention".
America's 60 Families was Lundberg's second book. Published in 1937 by Vanguard Press, it joined several previous works by American authors and commentators which purportedly identified a cartel of families or individuals that controlled most of the wealth in the United States, part of what has been described as "a generational moral reaction against the perceived depredations of the monied class".
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