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THE RICH AND THE SUPER-RICH. Copyright 1968 by Ferdinand Lundberg. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from Lyle Stuart except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review. Queries regarding rights and permissions should be addressed to Lyle Stuart at 239 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10003.

   Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we bad to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD 

   I wish to acknowledge with gratitude the permissions granted by the following publishers to make somewhat extended quotations from the books here listed:

   To The Free Press of Glencoe for permission to quote from Robert E. Lane, Political Life, 1965

   To Harper and Row, New York, for permission to quote from Joseph S. Clark, Congress: The Sapless Branch, 1964, and W. Lloyd Warner and James C. Abegglen, Big Business Leadership in America, 1955

   To Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, for permission to quote from Alan Harrington, Life in the Crystal Palace, 1959

   To Oxford University Press, New York, for permission to quote from C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956

   To The Ronald Press Company, New York, for permission to quote from Louis Eisenstein, The Ideologies of Taxation, 1961, Copyright

   Beyond this I am obviously indebted and feel appropriately grateful to writers and publishers for all shorter quotations from other works, and to leading newspapers such as the New York Times, the late New York Herald Tribune and the Wall Street Journal for the many excerpts taken from their pages.

   Obviously nobody could have developed so large a canvas as that of the present book without summoning many scholarly witnesses. To mention all such here would be superogatory, as they are all prominently mentioned in the running text as well as in the appended notes. Needless to say, my debt to such is great and without them much would have been obscure which is now precise. However, much more work remains to be done in many areas that are yet obscure.

   Special thanks are due to the staff of the New York Public Library, Central Branch, which was unfailingly helpful over a long period in locating for me much not readily accessible or very well-known data.

F.L.

Note: This enormous (and enormously important) book is "under construction." As each chapter is finished, it will be added. (22 August 2000)

I. The Elect and the Damned
II Room at the Top: The New Rich
III. Crime and Wealth
IV. The Inheritors: I
V. The Inheritors: II
VI. Where Are They Now?
VII. The American Plantation: A Profile
VIII. Understructure of the Finpolitan Elite
IX. The Great Tax Swindle
X. Philanthropic Vistas: The Tax-Exempt Foundations
XI. Ministers of Finpolity: The Upper Executives
XII. The Republic of Money: The Pubpols
XIII. The Cleverness of the Rich
XIV. Finpolitan Frontiers
XV. The Divine Spark among the Rich
XVI. The Cream of the Quest
XVII. Oligarchy by Default
APPENDIX A. Largest Net Taxable Incomes since 1940 (after Deductions)
APPENDIX B. Companies with Largest Total Assets