Skip to main content

Susan Berfield

Biography

Susan Berfield

Susan Berfield is an award-winning feature writer and investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News where she’s exposed how Walmart spies on its workers, uncovered a con man who talked a small Missouri town out of millions, and revealed how Beverly Hills billionaires bought up an enormous water supply in the Central Valley.

She’s been interviewed on "PBS NewsHour", NPR's "All Things Considered," "Marketplace," "On Point" and "The Brian Lehrer Show." Her story about the biggest food fraud in US history was the basis for an episode of the Netflix documentary series, Rotten.

THE HOUR OF FATE, her first book, was supported by a Logan Nonfiction Fellowship.

Susan Berfield

Books by Susan Berfield

The Hour of Fate: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, and the Battle to Transform American Capitalism
by Susan Berfield - History, Nonfiction

In the summer of 1901, J.P. Morgan was assembling his next mega-deal: Northern Securities, an enterprise that would affirm his dominance in America's most important industry --- the railroads. Then a bullet from an anarchist's gun put an end to the business-friendly presidency of William McKinley. A new chief executive bounded into office: Theodore Roosevelt. By March 1902, battle lines were drawn: the government sued Northern Securities for antitrust violations. But as the case ramped up, the coal miners' union went on strike, and the anthracite pits that fueled Morgan's trains and heated the homes of Roosevelt's citizens went silent. With millions of dollars on the line and revolution in the air, it was a crisis that neither man alone could solve.