American Monsters 44 Rats, Blackhats, and Plutocrats

Among our most celebrated and notorious Americans, these monsters are the corrupt, greedy, power-mad, and vicious betrayers of the dreams of fair play and equal opportunity, the practitioners of a catalog of anti-democratic vice: from anti-Semitism and union-busting to racism and murder. Organized in Dantesque circles, American Monsters remembers history a little differently than it is taught in school. Indian exterminator President Andrew Jackson, Jew-baiting propagandist Henry Ford, and nearly forty other malefactors whose evil cores have been relegated to footnotes, are brought to account. From Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Roger Taney, to robber barons and captains of industry like Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie; from Ezra Pound and Col. Tom Parker to cops and criminals like Alan Pinkerton and Charles Manson, American Monsters is provocative and entertaining history that you won't read anywhere else. With specially commissioned essays by veteran chroniclers such as Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, Ishmael Reed, Steve Earle, Danny Schechter, Nat Hentoff, James Ridgeway, Joe Conason, Michael Wolff, Danny Goldberg, Will Blythe, and Legs McNeil, this collection of national malfeasance—edited by award-winning columnist Jack Newfield—holds up a dark mirror to the national character.