Cyrus Veeser

A World Safe for Capitalism unravels a little-known incident: A Wall Street corporation's takeover of the foreign debt, national railroad, and national bank of the Dominican Republic in the 1890's. Working with the republic's tyrannical president, the American firm tried to turn self-sufficient peasants into cash-crop farmers, with disastrous results. By 1904, the company's narrow pursuit of profit clashed with Theodore Roosevelt's goal of making...