‘If there is one thing for which I admire you,” Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed said to his protégé, Theodore Roosevelt, “it is your original discovery of the Ten Commandments.”
“The Hour of Fate,” Susan Berfield’s account of a battle between man and the state at the turn of the 20th century, pays the crusading TR no such ironic tribute. Her history rather pits a noble Roosevelt against an avaricious J.P. Morgan in a struggle for American economic supremacy.
That someone must exercise dominion over the national economy is the erroneous premise of this story of almost pure good and pure evil. The free play of market forces makes its appearance only as an idea that history had supposedly passed by. Class conflict fills the gap.
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