Matthew Josephson’s 1934 group portrait of the most powerful men of the Gilded Age—including Jay Gould, James Fisk, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan—is a study in unrelenting competition. Equity receivership, a bankruptcy-like proceeding used to reorganize troubled companies, was a favorite method these tycoons deployed to outplay rivals.

Gould was adept at the dark arts of financial distress. In Josephson’s phrase he “roved through the West eyeing the ruined hulks of transcontinental railroads,” scooping up the “rich debris.” Receivership was also a preferred weapon of Morgan. “With the prostrate client… in desperate need of fresh working capital,” Josephson writes, Morgan would offer a loan and “impose hard terms,” usually installing an ally as “a dominant voice in the management” after the debt was restructured.

Published during the Depression, when hostility to Wall Street ran high, this rollicking portrait of the former era’s business titans was a hit that popularized the phrase of its title.