History is, in a very compelling sense, biography. So opined one of my newsletter’s most interested and interesting subscribers some time ago, when he asked if I might recommend four biographies which he could read over the course of a year, and which would sum to an economic history of the United States through a few of its most important actors.

After due reflection, I told him I thought I could do it in five great books – not just biographies but literature of a very high order – beginning in 1794 and running continuously up to the present day.

On the wild chance that other readers might wish to spend an inexpressibly rich year on this same economic/historical vision quest, these five magisterial biographies are:

The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T. J. Stiles. At his death in 1877, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s fortune of some hundred million dollars was equal to one in every twenty dollars then in circulation, including demand deposits. He was not just America’s first centimillionaire; he was the richest man who ever lived in this country, scaled to money in circulation. He did it first in shipping and later in railroads, and his story is quite literally that of the continent itself.

 

Morgan: American Financier by Jean Strouse. Pierpont Morgan was born the year Andrew Jackson finally succeeded in killing the Second Bank of the United States, and died the year the Federal Reserve was founded. For much of the interim, he was not only America’s greatest steward and rationalist of capital; he functioned at critical moments as the central bank America didn’t have, and rescued the nation from insolvency not once but twice.

 

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow. Between 1870 and 1900, John Rockefeller drove the price of oil down 80 percent, democratizing first the most important illuminant and then the most important propellant since fire. In the process, he became the richest man in the world – supplanting Andrew Carnegie, who during the same period drove down the price of a steel rail by 70 percent. (American GDP per capita soared by two thirds in those 30 years as a direct result of both men’s efforts.) Chernow is our era’s finest biographer; in Titan he virtually throws in a perceptive study of Rockefeller junior, perhaps America’s greatest philanthropist.    

 

Mellon: An American Life by David Cannadine. By the time Andrew Mellon became Harding’s Treasury Secretary in 1921, he was the third largest taxpayer in the United States, behind only the senior Rockefeller and Henry Ford. He achieved this distinction by being the greatest venture capitalist of his era, having seeded (among other enterprises) Alcoa, Koppers, Carborundum and Gulf Oil. Mellon was Coolidge’s partner in the great wave of tax-rate cutting and budget balancing of the 1920s, and personally endowed the National Gallery of Art even as FDR’s myrmidons were trying to hound him into prison. This is a great book about an astonishing and all but forgotten life.

 

Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence by William L. Silber. Paul Volcker was the Fed chairman who – staunchly backed by Ronald Reagan in the face of  almost unimaginable political pressure – single-handedly broke the back of the cancerous inflation (and economic stagnation) which all but engulfed this country at the end of the Somber Seventies. That triumph set off the greatest bull market in both stocks and bonds of all time. The scope of Volcker’s lonely, heroic achievement – in the larger context of his life in full – is finally before us in this wise and admirable book.                                                               

                                      *****************
Permit me quietly to doubt that there’s a two-semester undergraduate economic history course anywhere in the republic whose content is richer – nor its effect more salutary – than these five volumes.

(c) 2013 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. Nick highlights new books, articles, research findings and academic papers in the “Resources” feature of his monthly newsletter, Nick Murray Interactive. To download a sample issue, visit www.nickmurray.com, and click on “Newsletter.”