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ОглавлениеPearl Harbor’s ‘Stark Reality’
All the debate about going to war would end suddenly on December 7, 1941, when the war came to America. Some 360 bombers and fighter planes launched from six Japanese aircraft carriers that had stealthily slipped to within 220 miles of the U.S. territory of Hawaii came streaming through the Kolekole Pass in the northern Oahu mountains to attack the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. The Japanese admirals had picked Sunday morning for the raid, correctly assuming that it would be a time when the Americans were in their lowest state of readiness.
The Journal’s coverage displayed the Journal’s new team at its editorial best. Bill Kerby, a Kilgore protégé who had been made assistant managing editor, was on duty when news service teletype bells began jangling at 3 p.m. on that Sunday afternoon alerting editors that there was big news coming. When reports of the attack started coming through, Kerby summoned Kilgore and Grimes. In short order, with a contribution from Washington bureau chief Eugene Duffield, they were remaking the Monday front page to meet the Journal’s press deadline, only three hours away. It was a superb achievement. Kerby’s lead story, written with Kilgore looking over his shoulder and offering suggestions, correctly predicted that the attack would mean a massive mobilization of American industry for the production of weapons and munitions. Duffield supplied the news that the president and Congress would put the United States on a war footing within hours.
Grimes, for his part, wrote an editorial saying that, with the Japanese attack, the war debate had ended. The Journal had been critical of FDR’s “lend-lease,” which involved, among other things, lending 50 U.S. destroyers to Britain and Canada in return for basing rights on British Caribbean islands. The Journal had feared that Roosevelt was leading America into the European war in violation of the American Neutrality Acts.
But on December 8, under the headline “We Have a Duty,” a Grimes editorial told of the “stark, horrible reality that American territory has been attacked” and that Japan had declared war on the United States. It said that everything had changed once the news of Pearl Harbor had set the teletype machines clacking on Sunday afternoon:
“In that moment, the events of last week seemed to have been removed to some remote era of antiquity. The things that business and finance discussed last week seem now to have no relation whatever to tomorrow nor to the many days to come after tomorrow . . . Every citizen has and knows his duty . . . It will be heavy for all . . . We say that the sacrifices will be made. The duty will be performed.”
Writing in short “takes” of five-by-eight copy paper sent immediately to the typesetters down below in the Journal building at 44 Broad Street, the editors totally remade the Monday edition in three hours. The new front page had three decks of banner headlines stretching across the top, something Journal readers had not seen before. The Journal was on a war footing.
With Roosevelt’s dramatic speech to Congress the next day declaring war and declaiming that December 7 was a “day that would live in infamy!” the administration became more realistic in its attitude toward business. Big corporations, which FDR had scolded with his populist rhetoric in the past, were suddenly urgently needed to mount the war effort. New Deal schemes to reorder the economy were set aside to unleash the creative and productive forces of a capitalist system. The problem of financing the war effort through bond issues was given serious attention. So was the danger of inflation as huge new demands were placed on the nation’s productive capacity.
The private sector responded magnificently to this new urgency, converting plants previously making autos and home appliances to the production of tanks, warplanes and munitions in a matter of weeks.
Journal editorials and editorial page articles offered advice to policy makers. On December 17, a Journal editorial surprised readers by departing sharply from traditional free-market arguments to support price and wage controls. It argued, rather disingenuously it would seem in hindsight, that the question was “simple.” Would controls aid the war effort and “help sustain the morale of the fifty million or more who must sustain themselves to equip, clothe and nourish our fighting forces? We believe a thoroughgoing price control will serve those ends.”
No doubt Congress and the administration didn’t feel they needed the Journal’s imprimatur, but they surely welcomed it. They quickly set up the Office of Price Administration to put ceilings on consumer prices. It worked reasonably well, although that was probably mainly due to the fact that the sale of war bonds was soaking up a lot of the extra cash civilians soon were earning by working overtime in defense plants.
Three years into the war, however, the Journal made it clear that its support for controls applied only to extraordinary circumstances. On February 28, 1944, almost three months before the Normandy invasion and 18 months before the war’s end, the Journal was arguing that all wartime restrictions on the economy should end when hostilities ceased.
In 1942, Hogate was incapacitated by a stroke. He decided to name as general manager a veteran executive named Joseph Ackell, who had invented the new high-speed ticker, consolidated the Dow Jones wire service into a nationwide web and was running the Journal’s production operations. Grimes objected on grounds that the appointment would weaken the power of Kilgore and that the company had always been run by newsmen. According to an account by Bill Kerby, Grimes called the Bancroft family business adviser in Boston, Jack Richardson, and told him that if the Ackell appointment went through, Grimes, Kilgore and Kerby would probably resign. The upshot: Kilgore became general manager of Dow Jones, Bill Kerby became managing editor of The Wall Street Journal and Buren McCormack, another DePauw graduate, became assistant managing editor. Grimes would remain editor and have general supervisory authority over news operations.
Barney had been a Hogate protégé, so the Kerby story is a bit puzzling. But although Hogate was very ill, he was still head of the company and may have felt that turning over routine management tasks to Ackell would not preclude his choosing a successor at some later date. He remained in nominal charge of the company, despite frequent absences because of successive strokes, until his death in 1947 at the young age of 49. At that point, his title was chairman. Barney had become president in 1945, but his elevation was not made public at that time. He became CEO on Hogate’s death.
Hogate’s early death was attributed by some of his associates to the heavy workload he had carried during the Depression out of devotion to the task of keeping Dow Jones alive. Hogate had literally worked himself to death, they felt. There is little doubt that he justified the faith that Barron and the Bancrofts had invested in him in 1928. He had built a solid journalistic organization.
Faced with newsprint shortages and other limitations, Dow Jones continued to struggle during the war, but Journal circulation rose, to 64,400 in 1946 from 35,395 in 1942, thanks no doubt in part to Kilgore’s efforts to make it more readable and concise. Editorials gave full backing to the war effort, although at one point the Journal cautioned against excessive rationing of consumer products beyond products, such as automobile tires, that were vital to keeping the military well supplied. It argued that there should be as little distortion of the normal workings of the market as possible so that production and distribution of nonessential goods would proceed normally.
Grimes set editorial policy. He was a scrappy, no-nonsense little guy with a talent for clear, logical argument. He had tutored young Barney Kilgore, his successor as Washington bureau chief, in the ways of Washington and the New Deal, and they remained close. As editor and chief editorial writer, he would bring crispness and cogency to the opinion page’s views on public policy questions.
A framed copy of the signed editorial Grimes wrote marking the opening of the Journal’s new Midwest edition in Chicago on January 2, 1951, still hangs on the wall of the editorial board’s conference room in New York to remind present-day writers of the direction set long ago. It’s titled “A Newspaper’s Philosophy.” The last paragraph sums up editorial policy with, “. . . we make no pretense of walking down the middle of the road. Our comments and interpretations are made from a definite point of view. We oppose all infringements on individual rights, whether they stem from attempts at private monopoly, labor union monopoly or from an over-growing government. We are not much interested in labels, but if we were to choose one, we would say that we are radical. Just as radical as the Christian doctrine.” Grimes’ declaration sounds a lot like what William Peter Hamilton had written a half century earlier when he asserted that there were not two sides to every question.
On July 8, 1944, a little more than a month after the successful Allied invasion of the European mainland, a Journal editorial offered an assessment of the government’s war finances, pointing out that only 33% of what the government spent in the most recent fiscal year was borrowed, whereas the percentage was 71% of a considerably smaller amount the year before. “We have, then, improved the financing of this grossly expensive war. But it is none too good yet.” The Journal was worried about the inflation that might be induced by war financing combined with price controls and the potential postwar transition from a wartime to peacetime footing as pent-up consumer demand overwhelmed the capacity to produce consumer goods.
The Journal also took note of deliberations on a postwar international monetary system then under way at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. It noted that some proposed provisions of the planned exchange rate stabilization fund (later named the International Monetary Fund [IMF]) might raise eyebrows in Congress. One proposal would direct a country to lend to the fund when its currency was in short supply among trading partners. The Journal observed that this would mean that the Federal Reserve, not investors or banks, would be indirectly financing U.S. exports. The Journal would support exchange rate stabilization in principle over the years to come but would have much more to say about the actual workings of the IMF, a lot of it critical, in the future.
One of the most significant events of the century, the dropping of atom bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would be treated in the kind of matter-of-fact tone that characterized Journal editorial writing. An editorial on August 7, 1945, was titled “The Power of the Atom” and referred to the long-standing hope, going all the way back to before World War I, that as weapons became more destructive, men would cease to wage war. “Between the destructive powers of armies of 1914 and those of today, there is probably as much difference as those of the Civil War and Caesar’s legends. President Truman’s announcement of the discovery and use of the atomic bomb raises the prospect that by tomorrow today’s explosives may seem like so many popguns.”
But the editorial contained a note of hope, anticipating what future president Dwight Eisenhower would call an “atoms for peace” plan as atomic fission was employed as an energy source. “The force that today blasts a city into dust may soon be harnessed to render obsolete all gadgets big and little. From the oxcart to the automobile, from the treadmill to the steam engine and the dynamo were but a brief few hours in history and the world as we know it now moves even faster.”
Raymond Moley, a member of FDR’s original brain trust who had broken with Roosevelt in 1936, was writing a column for the Journal in 1945. He noted that news services were carrying jokes and puns about the bomb, such as a line that the United States had sent Japan an “atomized statement.” That might sound shocking today, considering the thousands of Japanese civilians incinerated by the bombs, but most Americans in 1945 thought that no fate could be worse than the Japanese deserved after their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and their barbarous treatment of American prisoners of war. There was also joy to be found in the prospect that the bomb would likely end the killing, as it in fact did.
Moley had a serious point to make: that the bomb should impel intelligent men to think more clearly about the political arrangements this new destructive force would necessitate. “Political and economic devices result from, they do not cause, scientific discovery. They are conditioned by the known facts of the physical world. They do not anticipate. They follow.”
By forcing a Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945, the bomb did spare the lives of countless U.S. soldiers and both Japanese soldiers and civilians. Before that, the Journal had also turned its attention to the latest summit meeting on the future of Europe, where the war had ended with the surrender of Germany on May 8. The meeting at Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin, was the first for Harry Truman, who had ascended to the presidency after the death of FDR on April 12, and also for British Labour Party leader Clement Attlee, who had become Britain’s prime minister on July 26, after defeating wartime leader Winston Churchill. The other participant, Russia’s Joseph Stalin, was a veteran of wartime summits.
The Journal was skeptical of such “Big Three” proceedings and was hopeful that Potsdam would be the last, as it indeed proved to be. While the editorial writer admitted that there had been a certain glamour to these secretive meetings of the Allied chieftains, “there was about the practice a suggestion of personal government which was certainly alien to the traditions of both the United States and Britain.” As that sentence implied, Joe Stalin was no stranger to “personal government.”
The Journal decried the practice of lasting international decisions made by the “sudden inspirations of men whom circumstances have clothed with extraordinary power. However wise these men, they cannot in a period of days have all the information they should have . . .”
The editorial remarked that, after the death of Roosevelt, his successor, Harry Truman “discovered that there was no one who could tell him exactly what went on at the Yalta conference [February 4–11, 1945] and what agreements were made there.” Many historians have argued that FDR, in failing health and not in full command of his faculties, had in effect ceded the future of central Europe to the imperialistic Stalin.
The unsigned editorial, which bore the fingerprints of Grimes, concluded with a small bouquet for Harry Truman for negotiating machinery that would bring about more systematic negotiations by lower-level officials. “How expert Mr. Truman may be in foreign affairs, we don’t know. Whether he could beat Stalin in a game of poker, we don’t know. Whether Mr. Stalin liked him, we don’t know. We don’t think they make any difference. What makes a great deal of difference is that Mr. Truman seems to understand the process of government administration.”
After K.C. Hogate’s death in Palm Springs, California, in February 1947, Dow Jones was firmly in the hands of Barney Kilgore, who would proceed with his plans to turn The Wall Street Journal into a compact, readable, national business newspaper.
Later in 1947, Grimes won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded the Journal. His entry was a series of editorials in 1946 that, among other issues, deplored the postwar spread of dictatorships to much of the world, particularly in the nations of central Europe that were falling victim to Soviet imperialism. His editorials were again an expression of the Journal’s long-standing adherence to a belief that the preservation of personal freedom was of paramount importance in the conduct of both foreign and domestic policy.
Grimes in 1946 also had aimed a feisty and very brief parting shot at former vice president Henry Wallace, a leading New Dealer and early fan of Soviet collectivism who helped craft the 1933 farm bill that regimented farmers into a system of quotas and subsidies. Wallace might have become president if Democratic Party elders had not forced FDR to drop him from the ticket in 1944. After Truman fired him as Commerce secretary in 1946, he joined the left-leaning New Republic magazine. Wrote Grimes: “Henry Wallace has become editor of the New Republic. We suggest it serves both of them right.”
Grimes would guide policy through Truman and Eisenhower years, which were the early years of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, a war that quickly became a hot war when a Soviet-backed North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950 and Truman acted to protect the South. The Journal approved of Truman’s spunk in establishing a “containment” policy to curb Soviet imperialism. World War II evidently had destroyed any belief at the Journal, as it had for most Americans, that the United States could isolate itself from the troubles of Europe and Asia.
An editorial on March 13, 1947, had said that the president had not tried to hide the difficulties his containment policy would entail for the American people. But the “alternative is to withdraw from world affairs and see Europe and the Middle East, at least, come immediately under Russian domination. That means deportations, firing squads and the wholesale transfers of peoples. It means for a great many years at any rate the Christian idea of dignity of the individual will have to live underground if it lives at all, in a great part of the world.”
The editorial went on to say that the Soviet-U.S. conflict was not one for power or territory but a conflict of ideas. “The idea that man is an individual with inalienable rights and that one of these is the right to associate with other men in forming institutions of their own making is on one side. On the other is the idea that man is a cog whose function is to be part of a great machine built and engineered by the most ruthless and powerful . . . Between these two ideas there can be no compromise.”
That marker laid down by Henry Grimes would be a core Journal policy throughout the Cold War. The Journal supported the Marshall Plan, which provided economic aid to Europe to successfully counter efforts by Soviet-backed Communist parties to take over governments. There would, however, be differences between the Journal and Truman and his successors on Cold War tactics.
After North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950 and Truman sent American troops to counter the Soviet-backed invasion, the Journal cautioned against extending the war to China, a position that was mooted when China entered the war on its own. In December 1950, Grimes wrote that “if there must be a war then it should be fought with Russia, the inspiration and the brains of world aggression. It would be silly to fight China or any other Russian satellite. Undoubtedly, that suggestion will shock some of our readers, but we think logic will support it.”
The Journal’s reservations about war, and particularly U.S. involvement in wars in Asia, would apply later to Vietnam, when it opposed JFK’s plan to send American advisers to aid the South, the first step toward what would become an enormous American involvement. But when the United States was once engaged in wars, the Journal supported whatever was needed to prosecute them successfully.
On domestic policy, Grimes was suspicious that Truman might resurrect some of the high-handed policies toward American industry that had characterized the New Deal. But, as mentioned earlier in this book, it was Truman who chose to bring the differences between the two out into the open. During his 1948 campaign for reelection against Republican Thomas Dewey, Truman fired up an audience in McAlester, Oklahoma, by attacking the Journal as the Republican “Bible,” saying “they used half their editorial columns giving me hell because I am for the people!”
Grimes, of course, welcomed the challenge. What could be more fun for an editor than to have a public slugfest with the president? Wrote Grimes: “If President Truman is a consistent reader of this newspaper—as we certainly hope he is—he must be aware of the fact that our loyalties are to the economic and governmental principles in which we believe and not to any political party. We regret he chooses to distort this newspaper’s position.”
That was certainly true in principle, but Truman had a point. Although the Journal learned from its bad experience with Herbert Hoover that endorsing candidates can come back to haunt you, its defense of free-market capitalism had always had more adherents among Republicans than Democrats and still does.
When Truman, in response to a steel strike during the Korean War, issued an edict putting the mills under federal control on grounds that the strike endangered the war effort, Grimes had one of his fits of temper. His leading editorial writer, Vermont Connecticut Royster, writes that he was planning to ask Grimes for a raise. But when he peeked into the editor’s office, he observed Grimes jumping up and down on his hat in fury over this arbitrary exercise of presidential power. Royster decided to pick a better time. The hat didn’t look much different after the abuse. Grimes’ battered, gray fedora was one of his trademarks, marking him as a member of that ancient tribe of newspaper veterans contemptuous of personal decorum.
Royster, newly returned from war duty in the Pacific, became part of the Grimes editorial writing team in 1946. “Roy,” as his friends called him, had joined the Journal in 1936 and had been assigned to Kilgore’s Washington news bureau. But the navy upgraded him from reserve status to active duty in early 1941 and assigned him to an aged destroyer based in Panama for what he thought would be a short cruise. Pearl Harbor extended the cruise for five years, during which he prowled both the Atlantic and Pacific, finally with his own command of a destroyer escort. Kilgore was happy to have him back, perhaps sensing, correctly as it happened, that Roy would be at his best as a writer of opinion, rather than news, and had the potential to succeed Grimes as editor, which also proved to be correct.
Roy grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the son of a lawyer who had also taught Greek and Latin at the University of North Carolina (UNC). His father was teaching Roy to decline Latin verbs before he was in first grade, and he was further schooled in the Latin and Greek classics at the austere little Webb School in Bell Buckle, Tennessee. He later reflected that at UNC the classics were snap courses that helped him keep up his grade average.
That early training must have been partly responsible for the smooth flow of Roy’s writing. Like Kilgore, he gave readers the impression he was sitting them down for a little chat, presenting his views in a modest, sometimes self-deprecating and frequently witty way. His range of subjects was broader than those that had been addressed by Kilgore, who usually stuck to political economics and finance. Royster sometimes ventured into more philosophical areas of the type that Woodlock, whom he admired, had explored. On any given subject, he might quote Euripides or Aristotle or bring the conversation down to the earthy wisdom of Huckleberry Finn.
He also had the grit to stand up to Grimes on matters of editorial policy. When in April 1951 Truman fired the world-famous five-star general Douglas MacArthur, who had led America’s victory over Japan and was at that time conducting the Korean War effort, Grimes, like a lot of other Americans on the right, was shocked. But Roy stood up for Truman on grounds that the general had flouted civilian authority when he publicly threatened to attack China. Grimes gave in and told Roy to write the editorial. Roy graciously noted the arguments of Grimes and many others against the Truman shocker, but presented his own case that the president is commander in chief, and uniformed troops, even generals, risk chaos or worse when they disobey orders. Irate letters poured in from Journal readers loyal to MacArthur, and Grimes assigned Royster to respond to them, perhaps in retaliation for having to cede the argument to his junior editor.
Royster also was responsible for the Journal’s May 20, 1954, editorial after, in a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial segregation in public schools (Brown v. Board of Education) on grounds that segregation violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. Grimes had doubts based on his concern that the South would not accept the decision, but Royster, himself a southerner, argued otherwise and had little difficulty this time in persuading Grimes. In a May 20 editorial titled “Society and Law,” Royster wrote that the decision was inevitable. “The justices have not so much made history as followed it.”
He continued: “The philosophy of racial distinctions under the law could not have forever survived, in any event, because it does not comport with the majority view of the equity of government.” But in deference to the concerns of Grimes and others, he wrote that it was wise of the court to defer implementation of its decision because it “does not comport either with the equity of government to require the people of a large region to tear down overnight the whole social structure which, though we are apt to forget it today, is rooted in ancient social necessity.”
He wrote that for many southerners the concern over ending school segregation was not a matter of racial prejudice but rather “an honest conviction that their children will be injured in many areas by submergence in a culture that has not had time fully to mature . . . Laws and court decisions can give impetus to change when the pattern of society is changing, as it is now in the South and elsewhere. But laws and court decisions can avail little until the majority of people who must live under them are able to accept them.” That went partway toward explaining what Royster meant by “ancient necessity,” but only partway. The most likely explanation might be that Roy was being deliberately vague in an effort to cut his fellow southerners some slack.
The Royster editorial pleased almost nobody, and he was again assigned to handle the heavy flow of mail, most of it critical. But it was perceptive and prophetic. Many in the South did refuse to accept the ruling, and the federal government had to use force in some cases to gain access to formerly all-white schools for blacks. Freedom riders from the North were killed. Martin Luther King was martyred. But ultimately the rule of law prevailed, and many Americans today, North and South, regard Brown as the greatest victory for equal protection and civil rights in the history of America.
Royster had written earlier affirming his belief in the democratic process. On March 17, 1950, he had attacked the idea that American politics lacks an adherence to principles. “The Civil War could have been avoided by a compromise which retained slavery in half this country (which is what Lincoln favored) and the upheavals of the late nineteenth century over free silver could have been prevented by a compromise with inflation. A clash on principle brewed one revolt and almost a second one. But would we have been a better, greater nation for such compromises? And is it true the people refused to face an issue of principle when it was set before them?
“Perhaps politics and principles don’t mix. But the men who believe so don’t seem to have much faith in the democracy they are busily defending.”
Yet another event in 1954 would be of little moment for the country, but of enormous importance for the Journal. Henry Gemmill, in charge of the Journal’s news side as managing editor, was a large, personable young man born in Toledo, Ohio, with the talent and desire to fulfill Barney’s goal of making the Journal a more readable and interesting newspaper. He was as irreverent toward big business sacred cows as Grimes was of government pretensions.
What could be more interesting than the auto industry in a postwar era in which young families were buying houses and cars? The news from Detroit was that the auto companies were planning major redesigns of their 1955 models as GM, Ford and Chrysler competed for the dollars of an increasingly affluent public; disposable income had burgeoned by 70% in a decade. The American love affair with cars was resurgent after having gone unrequited during the war.
Gemmill and Page One editor Jack Bridge assigned Detroit bureau manager John Williams to do a story about what the new models would look like, supplying pictures if possible. This was in May, four months before the auto makers would unveil the 1955 models with their usual show business hoopla.
Gemmill, Bridge and Williams knew that the Detroit press, at the behest of the companies, had long observed a code of omertà about new models. It may sound strange to modern ears, but auto companies had significant influence with newspaper and magazine publishers back then because of their large ad budgets. Their self-serving argument was that if important model changes were heavily publicized, consumers would postpone their buying until the new models arrived. Dealer sales out of existing inventory would suffer. So new model information, pictures especially, were guarded like a military secret.
It was a dubious argument in that it assumed customers were so stupid that they weren’t aware of the “planned obsolescence” game the auto companies had been playing for years. Dealers had for years been discounting current models as the advent of new models approached. Gemmill and his colleagues decided that the Journal would not be a part of this Detroit keep-them-in-the-dark game.
Johnny Williams was faced with a tough assignment, but he knew that auto companies always have spies checking out the future designs of their competitors, and he found what he wanted from one of the smaller companies, probably Studebaker, which operated out of South Bend, Indiana, not Detroit. No one will ever be sure of the source because Johnny held steadfastly to his pledge not to reveal it, even to his wife, Jerri.
On May 28, the Journal ran Johnny’s front-page story. Necessarily, and in a departure from the long-standing Journal practice of offering nothing but gray type and charts, it included pictures. Readers got reasonably accurate images of the 1955 Dodge and Chevrolet sedans and an accurate sketch of the 1955 Ford.
General Motors was furious. The company and its affiliates withdrew advertising from the Journal worth $250,000 a year, a big sum for the Journal at that time. It shut off Journal access to its press releases and public relations flacks. It claimed that the Journal had stolen GM property.
GM no doubt expected an abject apology, which might have been forthcoming if a Detroit paper had committed such a sin. But Kilgore didn’t cave. Rather he ordered his editors to intensify their coverage of General Motors, using the Journal’s national network of skilled reporters. The Journal covered everything from the complaints against GM by the company’s independent dealers to strikes in local plants. It cadged sales and production statistics from subscribers to trade journals like Ward’s Automotive Reports.
The point Barney wanted to make was that a tough news organization didn’t need press handouts to cover a major corporation. It was a replay of something prodigious reporters Eddie Jones and Charles Dow of the original Dow Jones team had proved over a half century earlier in their coverage of the rampant and secretive railroad moguls.
Grimes waded in with a response to the several letter writers who sided with GM. An editorial titled “A Newspaper and Its Readers” reminded the writers that they themselves presumably read the Journal to get news. “Would they wish us to print only the banking news approved by bankers, only steel news approved by steel officials, only the real estate news approved by real estate agents? If we followed that practice would they not soon wonder how much information was not being printed and begin to doubt the usefulness of this newspaper’s service?
“The fact is that it would be of no use whatever. If our readers thought that every story in The Wall Street Journal was censored by the industry or the company which it is covering, they would not have confidence in it. Nor would the situation be any better if we ourselves undertook to censor the news by our ideas of what is “good for business.’”
The editorial concluded that “when a newspaper begins to suppress news, whether at the behest of its advertisers or on pleas from special segments of business it will soon cease to be of any service either to its advertisers or to business, because it will cease to have readers.”
That good sense didn’t move some Detroit reporters angry at having their conformity with advertiser dictates exposed. At a meeting of the local chapter of Sigma Delta Chi, the professional journalism society that Kilgore had worked hard to promote, a motion to support The Wall Street Journal was voted down by a majority of the large number of members who turned out to join the issue. Johnny Williams was crushed by this betrayal by his fellow journalists. The Time magazine correspondent who led the opposition to the support motion was later rewarded with a job at GM. But he paid a price in the form of lost respect from many of his former colleagues and was not very highly regarded by his new associates at General Motors as he accepted his sinecure.
In the end, however, it was GM that caved, denying that it had attempted to influence Journal news policy. The matter was settled at a meeting in Detroit on July 7, 1954, between Barney and GM president Harlow H. Curtice, a crusty little man who had little use for journalists and was uncommunicative even at press parties hosted by the company. The Journal agreed to print an exchange of letters between the two.
I was a Journal reporter, having joined the staff in Chicago in March 1952 after a stint at the Muncie (Indiana) Press. Our little crew in Chicago glanced at the Curtice letter, which voiced his familiar complaint that our story had hurt GM sales. But it was Barney’s letter that we seized on. We were not disappointed. He wrote that while the Journal certainly welcomed advertisers, its news columns were not for sale.
The effect on news staff morale was electric. We were working for an honest newspaper! Advertisers noted as well, and advertising manager Donald A. Macdonald would later observe, that the “response from our readers and advertisers and the public was magnificent! Our future was assured!” Indeed, it was. After that, the Journal’s readership began a rapid climb that would make it the nation’s largest-circulation newspaper and also the most trusted, according to many opinion surveys asking readers to list the publications they regarded as most reliable.
Its poor-mouthing notwithstanding, GM didn’t suffer either from the Journal’s advance disclosure. In 1955, production of Chevrolets surged far ahead of rival Ford to a record 1.7 million, a number that wasn’t exceeded by anyone until 1962, when Chevy broke its own record with an output of over 2 million cars.
