A machine boss owns a Midwestern city; a young woman of the best family joins the socialists who mean to take it from him, and finds her own father's money is part of the machine. Phillips was the muckraker whose Treason of the Senate so enraged Theodore Roosevelt that the President coined the word muckraker to insult him; he was shot dead in the street at forty-three, and this 1911 novel is his most direct about who owns America. Fifty-nine plates by painters including Thomas Nast and Albert Bierstadt carry the novel's themes of money, class and the American scene from 1850 to 1927.