Mark Twain’s Portfolio: Spider Aristocracy of Finance

In the same month Vanderhoof’s advertisement circulated, another professional publicist, Thomas Lawson, published the eighteenth and final installment of “Frenzied Finance,” a serial in Everybody’s Magazine which, among other things, gratuitously slandered Rogers. Lawson had helped Rogers and his primary business partner, William Rockefeller, promote a series of copper mining companies linked together like the subsidiaries of the Standard Oil Trust. Lawson promised to unravel for his readers the sordid history of the Amalgamated Copper Company and, by so doing, reveal the secret system of American corporate finance “which, if allowed to continue, surely will in time, destroy the nation by precipitating fratricidal war.”

Source: marktwainstudies.com