Ferdinand Lundberg

Ferdinand Lundberg (30 April 1902 – 1 March 1995) was a 20th-century journalist who studied the history of American wealth and power.

Background

Ferdinand Edgar Lundberg, of Swedish and Norwegian parentage was born in Chicago and received his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Columbia University.

Career

He started working in Chicago in 1924, transferred to New York in 1926 and joined the Wall Street Journal staff in 1927. He became a specialist for financial reporting and he covered the Wall Street Crash of 1929. He held several positions in his lifetime: a journalist with United Press International, the Chicago Daily News, and the New York Herald Tribune (1927–1934); and editor for the Twentieth Century Fund. In 1934 he resigned from the Herald Tribune to do research for his two major muckraking books of 1936 and 1937. He also lectured as an adjunct professor of social philosophy at New York University from 1952 to 1968.

He was the author of a 1936 social biography of William Randolph Hearst entitled Imperial Hearst, detailing his political involvements, and of America's Sixty Families, an exposure of the leading groups in business and finance. A later exploration of American wealth entitled The Rich and the Super-Rich is less critical. He co-wrote, with Carol Bram, a strong critique of the US charter called Cracks in the Constitution. In Scoundrels All (1968), a collection of sceptical quotes on politicians, he admits to a preference for H. L. Mencken. Along with a psychiatrist, Dr. Marynia Farnham, Lundberg wrote a 1947 book titled, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, whose contention was that contemporary women suffered from neuroses they were likely to pass on to the next generation.

At the time of his death he lived in Chappaqua, New York.

Nazi Propaganda

Dr. Richard Ley, a Nazi politician and head of the German Labour Front from 1933 to 1945, mentioned Lundberg in a propaganda pamphlet geared at the German workforce. Distributed in 1938 and entitled "Roosevelt verrät Amerika!" (Roosevelt Betrays America!) he wrote "F. Lundberg’s book appeared in 1937, and is seen by American politicians as a reliable source. He begins with the blunt assertion: “The United States of America is owned and controlled by a hierarchy that at its core consists of the 60 richest families of the country, to which at most 90 families of somewhat lesser wealth may be included. These families are the center of the modern industrial oligarchy that controls the United States. They function discretely (sic) under a de jure democratic form of government, behind which a de facto government of abolutistic and plutocratic nature has existed since the Civil War.” This hollowing out of democracy was possible only because enormous fortunes developed in the United States that have no parallel in the rest of the world."

Further reading

• Imperial Hearst;: A social biography (1936) (reprinted with a biographical preface on Lundberg by Charles A. Beard (vii-x).
• America's Sixty Families (1937)
• Who controls industry?: And other questions raised by critics of America's 60 families ( 1938)
• The Treason of the People (1954)
• The coming world transformation (1963)
• The Rich and the Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today (1968)
• The Rockefeller Syndrome (1968)
• Cracks in the Constitution (1980)
• The Myth of Democracy (1989)
• Politicians and Other Scoundrels (1992)
• The Natural Depravity of Mankind (1994)

Other sources

• Benson, Adolph B. and Naboth Hedin, eds. (1938) Swedes in America, 1638-1938 (The Swedish American Tercentenary Association. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press) ISBN 978-0-8383-0326-9