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  • Everybody Ought to be Rich: The Life and Times of John J. Raskob, Capitalist by David Farber
  • Charles R. Morris
Everybody Ought to be Rich: The Life and Times of John J. Raskob, Capitalist. By David Farber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 361 pp. $29.95.

John J. Raskob was an important, if second-tier, figure in the history of American business and finance. He was a numbers guy, a virtuoso of corporate balance sheets, who played a major role in the rise of both DuPont and General Motors in the 1920s. He chaired the Democratic National Committee during Al Smith's campaign, and built the Empire State building. One of the richest of all American Catholics, he gave generously, and was avidly courted by the Vatican and local prelates. "Everybody ought to be rich," was a much jeered-at, and probably apocryphal, comment attributed to Raskob, and David Farber's crisp, compact biography is a service to American business history. [End Page 63]

Raskob was the purest of financiers – while at DuPont and GM, he appears to have had literally no interest in their products or technology. (He liked to own and drive cars, but knew little about how they were made.) The peak of his national recognition and influence came just before the Depression, and although his projects were typically highly-leveraged, both he and his enterprises emerged from the crash, battered and bruised but still intact.

Raskob was born in 1879 in the modest Erie Canal town of Lockport. His parents were German and Irish, staunchly Catholic on both sides, and relatively prosperous – his father ran a family cigar-making business. John was highly social, athletic, hugely confident, and with a flair for math. Even as a young boy, John almost always had a paying job, and kept careful accounts. With both a high school degree and a year of business school, he was in the upper strata of educational attainment.

Very ambitious, and dissatisfied with his first jobs, John papered the region with his resume. By a chain of happenstance, at twenty-one he became a clerk to Pierre Du Pont, an MIT grad, just thirty himself, but the heir designated to resuscitate the family's struggling gunpowder business. Although shy and withdrawn, Du Pont was a fine chemist, and became a brilliant businessman.

Raskob started as Du Pont's clerk, with standard secretarial duties, but within a year or two began to act as his financial specialist, and in time almost as his alter ego. As Du Pont transformed the company into a broadly-gaged chemical business, Raskob raised the rivers of cash to support its aggressive program of expansion and acquisition. The two men developed a lifetime relationship of affection and trust, deep enough to survive the kind of reversals that often leave permanent enmities in their wake.

Raskob and Du Pont repeated their performance at General Motors. Raskob began to invest on his own, then drew in Pierre and the DuPont company as investors, and finally took over the management of GM's finances. At first GM followed much the same trajectory of success as DuPont had, but unusually, Raskob allowed himself to be seduced by the GM chief, "Billy" Durant, a consummate salesman and promoter, but a big spender and chaotic manager. John finally came to his senses, and allied with Pierre to force Durant out the company. Pierre became GM's president, but turned over plant management to Alfred P. Sloan, who turned out to be one of history's great manufacturing executives.

The successes at GM and DuPont vaulted Raskob into the ranks of the richest Americans, able to indulge his tastes for luxury homes, yachts, and a richly-appointed personal railway car. In 1906, John had [End Page 64] married Helena Springer Green, who although impecunious, was from an old Maryland family and well-educated, a handsome, confident, and musically gifted woman. The marriage was at first a contented one. Helena produced thirteen children in fifteen years, while keeping her figure, her magnetism, and her many interests. John was an emotionally involved father, and plunged into family life, if only on weekends. As John's wealth...

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