In this book, James C. Nicholson explores the convergent professional lives of the major players involved in the Horse Race of the Century, including Zev's oil-tycoon owner Harry Sinclair, and exposes the central role of politics, money, and ballyhoo in the Jazz Age resurgence of the sport of kings. Zev was an apt national mascot in an era marked by a humming industrial economy, great coziness between government and business interests, and reliance on national mythology as a bulwark against what seemed to be rapid social, cultural, and economic changes. Reflecting some of the contradiction and incongruity of the Roaring Twenties, Americans rallied around the horse that was, in the words of his owner, "racing for America," even as that owner was reported to have been engaged in a scheme to defraud the United States of millions of barrels of publicly owned oil. Racing for America provides a parabolic account of a nation struggling to reconcile its traditional values with the complexity of a new era in which the US had become a global superpower trending toward oligarchy, and the world's greatest consumer of commercialized spectacle.

Why I Wrote Racing For America

I came across the central figure in Racing for America, Harry Sinclair, by accident. I was researching another early-twentieth-century oil man and became fascinated by Sinclair’s proclivity to use a might-makes-right approach in his pursuit of wealth and power. I was curious to explore how Americans in the 1920s responded when a man who had been celebrated as a personification of the American Dream was accused of having achieved that status through ethically questionable means. Much of the research for this book was conducted during the boisterous 2016 American presidential election. In that extraordinary political environment, I found Sinclair’s role in the infamous Teapot Dome oil scandal to be particularly intriguing. The mogul’s life and career proved to be a crucial piece of the historical context and broader cultural significance of the 1923 intercontinental showdown between Kentucky Derby winner Zev and Epsom Derby champion Papyrus, one of the defining American sporting events of the Roaring Twenties.