Unlikely Trust (eBook)

Gerard Helferich is a regular book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal and the author of four highly praised histories: Theodore Roosevelt and the Assassin: Madness, Vengeance, and the Campaign of 1912, which was a New York Times e-book bestseller; Stone of Kings: In Search of the Lost Jade of the Maya, which was selected by the American Booksellers Association as an Indie Next title; High Cotton: Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta, which was a Book Sense Notable Title and winner of the Authors Award for Nonfiction from the Mississippi Library Association; and Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey That Changed the Way We See the World, which was a Discover magazine Science Bestseller. He lives with his wife, the writer Teresa Nicholas, in Jackson, Mississippi, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. For more information, see http://www.gerardhelferich.com.

One of those rare chronicles of American business that brings its subjects to life. In An Unlikely Trust, Gerard Helferich brilliantly highlights an often uneasy relationship between two larger-than-life leaders which did so much to shape the twentieth century.

This book demands a more complex view of the history as it fills long-held black–and- white images with grays that define a nuanced relationship born of the culture, economic environment, and national interests shared by Roosevelt and Morgan. Helferich’s well-researched and well-written work will serve the needs of scholars and informed readers who enjoy American history told as a great story.

At first glance, financier J. P. Morgan and President Theodore Roosevelt appear as natural foils: the trust-builder and the trust-buster. In his well-researched and highly readable new book, Gerard Helferich instead presents the two men as complementary. Helferich shows how instead of demonizing each other, these two giants of the era set aside their equally-giant-sized egos to work for the benefit of the nation.

J.P. Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt—the great trust builder and the great trustbuster—ought logically to have been enemies. And yet, as Gerard Helferich shows in his captivating new book, Morgan and Roosevelt shared a great many attitudes, including a genuine concern for America. At a time when Americans are again struggling to figure out the right relationship between business and government, An Unlikely Trust is extraordinarily relevant.

This is an outstanding work of scholarship that is so intelligently crafted that there were times when I couldn’t put it down. Everyone knows that Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan circled each other with bemused wariness, but Gerard Helferich has shown that beneath the surface bluster they were essentially cautious allies, certainly not enemies. An Unlikely Trust provides an indispensable account of the 1902 anthracite coal strike that tested and then established Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential authority. It brilliantly illuminates how these two giants of American history, both New Yorkers, found ways to work together during key episodes of the Roosevelt presidency, including the Panama Canal affair, and the near-collapse of the American economy 1907. They even worked out an uneasy accommodation over the place of trusts in American life.