Everybody Ought to Be Rich: The Life and Times of John J. Raskob, Capitalist - Hardcover

Farber, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199734577 ISBN 13: 9780199734573

Publisher: OXFORD UNIV PR, 2013

Synopsis

John Raskob is not a name that looms large but his greatest building casts a shadow on us every day. Financier of the Empire State Building, Raskob was a self-made businessman who worked for DuPont and for GM and famously invented with the idea for consumer credit, which he first offered to individual car buyers (GMAC). A friend of New York Governor Al Smith, Raskob became active in New York politics and ran the Democratic National Committee and Smith's campaign for the presidency. He invested his own fortune heavily in the Empire State Building, built at the height of the Great Depression. 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. His most famous interview was entitled "Everybody Ought to Be Rich" in Ladies' Home Journal in August 1929-on the eve of the stock market crash―and his personal achievement of such extraordinary wealth and power highlight just how far he came traveled from a teenage candy seller on the railway between Lockport and Buffalo. His wide circle of business associates and personal acquaintances included Water Chrysler, the DuPonts, Alfred Sloane, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Kennedy, Western miners, and the Pope. He lived his own creed: "Go ahead and do things. The bigger the better, if your fundamentals are sound. Avoid procrastination."

About this title

Review:

"Mr. Farber chronicles in well-researched detail the surprisingly colorful life of John J. Raskob, who is relatively unknown compared to many other business leaders of his era. Farber effectively brings to light Raskob's important roles in the growth and development of two corporate giants, DuPont and General Motors, at critical junctures in their histories, as well as his significant engagement in other important business, political, religious, and social activities of the era."
--Rick Wagoner, former Chairman and CEO, General Motors

"The 'organizing genius of this country' and an exemplar of the American Dream-this is how contemporaries styled John Raskob. David Farber evocatively reveals Raskob's 'inner fire' and how it drove decades of innovation within American capitalism. Business, finance, politics, motoring in the West, and creating the Empire State Building were all adventures for Raskob, and Farber's splendid prose captures the zeal and legacies of Raskob's passions."
--Pamela Walker Laird, author of Pull: Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin

"Seventy-five years before the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management was founded, John J. Raskob unknowingly provided its mission statement. David Farber has brought to life an extraordinary figure in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States whose gifts to the Church were as much his prescience as his philanthropy."
-- Kerry A. Robinson, Executive Director, National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management

"No other book covers the same ground -- a curious lacuna, given Raskob's undeniable importance in economic history. A thoroughly researched book..."
--Kirkus Reviews

About the Author:

Professor of History, Temple University

About this edition

• Publisher: OXFORD UNIV PR
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0199734577
• ISBN 13: 9780199734573
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 376