The Populist Plutocrat: Thomas W. Lawson and the Plan to Sabotage Wall Street

At the turn of the twentieth century, Thomas W. Lawson was America's boldest stock manipulator. Phenomenally wealthy, restless, unpredictable, given to bellowing out pronouncements in the media, he soon gathered a following of investors eager for his stock picks. What he did with his followers had never been done before--or since. The Populist Plutocrat tells the story of Lawson's rise to the inner sanctum of Standard Oil, where he helped to form a giant copper trust and sell shares to ordinary investors in the world's largest stock promotion. Then Lawson about-faced. He published Frenzied Finance, revealing the mad genius behind Standard Oil--it wasn't John D. Rockefeller--and confessing the way the two of them had manipulated the market to their own ends while lying to their own investors. Lawson positioned himself as a radical hero of the common man, an outsider against the corporate elite, and he designed a stunning plan to mobilize his followers for a mass revolt against the financial system. In the meantime, he swatted down critics who accused him of continuing to profit from his enormous conflicts of interest. Thomas W. Lawson's biography illuminates a lost moment in American history--and holds a mirror to the contemporary moment. He was the needle that threaded between the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties, transforming a popular distrust of high finance into the eager participation in capital markets that hasn't since abated.