How Ray Kroc Became an American Villain

“I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns,” Ray Kroc wrote in Grinding It Out, his 1977 autobiography and a seminal document on 20th-century American capitalism. “But I was convinced that the best was ahead of me.”

Kroc would go on to famously mastermind the franchising system, turning McDonald’s from a San Bernardino sapling into an American roadside staple and, eventually, the world’s most-recognizable brand. The Golden Arches now glimmer in thousands of cities in 100 countries on six continents and Kroc’s mantras, triumphs, and war stories are of legend in American business schools and boardrooms. More than 30 years after his death in 1984, Kroc’s, , and aspirant marketeers. Though time has dulled his fame, by most contemporaneous accounts, Kroc was a hero. named Kroc to a list of 50 people who contributed to American life in the 20th century, placing him in a category of visionaries, alongside the likes of Abraham Maslow, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1998, listed Kroc one of the of the entire 20th century in an entry written by the famed chef Jacques Pépin.