This book examines the critical period in the development of the modern life insurance business. The discussion of ideology, managerial and business techniques, the foreign market, investment policies, and government regulation centers on the Big Five. The New York Life, Equitable Life, Mutual Life, and Metropolitan Life insurance companies in New York and the Prudential Insurance Company in Newark at the end of the nineteenth century possessed enormous power. Their problem was how to accommodate themselves to the conditions of a free society.

Keller vividly portrays the quest for power of a late-nineteenth-century American corporate group -- their sophisticated business, marketing, and investment techniques; the attempt to persuade the State Department and its ambassadors to assist American companies expanding into the foreign market; and the use of the enterprise's substantial assets to influence state and federal regulation. Finally, he sketches the beginning of the end of power with the Armstrong Investigation of 1905 and the legislation that followed.

Keller Morton:

Morton Keller received his M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Harvard University, and is author of numerous books and articles, including In Defense of Yesterday: James M. Beck and the Politics of Conservatism and The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast. He has also edited books on the New Deal and the age of Theodore Roosevelt. Mr. Keller is currently Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History at Brandeis University.