Composition
The man with the greatest impact on the list was arguably Andrew W. Mellon, who had been dead for 20 years: the second category, covering the second to eighth richest individuals, included his son, daughter, niece and nephew. The list also included seven members of the Rockefeller family, five members of the Ford family, four members of the Du Pont family (and a non-family DuPont executive), and four General Motors executives.
Five separate categories divided the list based on the amount of the fortune: $75,000,000–$100,000,000; $100,000,000–$200,000,000; $200,000,000–$400,000,000; $400,000,000–$700,000,000; and $700,000,000–$1,000,000,000. Fortunes smaller than $75,000,000 were not considered worthy of inclusion in the list. For comparison, equivalent amounts in 2005 US dollars are given below each subheading; the presumed source of the wealth is enclosed in parentheses.
Read more about this topic: Wealthiest Americans (1957)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)