LISTS

Dynasties listed below were included in America's 60 Families, Ferdinand Lundberg's 1937 expose on the super-rich. Lundberg used tax records to uncover the often impenetrable financial and political machinations of the 60 Families, effectively publishing a directory of names and occupations of family scions as well as estimates of their fortunes.

"The United States is owned and dominated today by a hierarchy of its sixty richest families, buttressed by no more than ninety families of lesser wealth... These families are the living center of the modern industrial oligarchy which dominates the United States, functioning discreetly under a de jure democratic form of government behind which a de facto government, absolutist and plutocratic in its lineaments, has gradually taken form since the Civil War. This de facto government is actually the government of the United States -- informal, invisible, shadowy. It is the government of money in a dollar democracy."

Families are listed in ranked order (according to 1924 tax records) with their primary sources of wealth.