Victor Berger's writing was voluminous, but rarely reproduced in book or pamphlet form outside of the newspapers in which it first appeared. In 1912, the Social-Democratic Publishing Co published a collection of his works in a publication entitled Berger's Broadsides. In 1929, the Milwaukee Leader published the Voice and Pen of Victor L. Berger: Congressional Speeches and Editorials (1860–1929) which also included an obituary. This publication included Berger's phrase regarding draining the swamp in reference to his assertion that the economic crises such as the Panic of 1893, were "hastened' by excessive profits—the $900,000,000 to Standard Oil "magnates." According to Daniel Yergin in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (1990), at the time the general public considered the Standard Oil conglomerate which was controlled by a small group of directors to be "all-pervasive" and "completely unaccountable".
