Читать книгу Free People, Free Markets - George Melloan - Страница 9
ОглавлениеPresident Harry Truman was right in a sense when, in a 1948 campaign speech in Chicago, he said that The Wall Street Journal was the “Republican Bible”—but only in a sense. Truman, of course, was applying the old FDR formula of identifying Republicans with the hated tycoons of Wall Street, while at the same time taking a swipe at the Journal, which had given him mixed reviews.
Yet being called by the president the “Bible” of a party representing roughly half the electorate, even if it applied only to the editorial page, must have had some benefits in gaining the Journal national attention when it was still a relatively small newspaper. The Journal of 1948, which for over a half century had supported free-market capitalism, certainly had more admirers among Republicans than among Democrats. With the advent of the New Deal, the Democrats had become infatuated with a more radical version of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Progressive” politics. Its guiding theorists were experimenting with laws that attempted to control market transactions through federal regulatory interventions that were shaking the confidence of business owners and investors. The Journal deplored much of what the New Deal was attempting.
But Truman was wrong if he was trying to suggest that the Journal was a party newspaper. With one unfortunate exception, it adhered to the Charles Dow injunction against endorsing political candidates. The exception came in 1928 with an editorial by Hamilton, ordered up by the dying C.W. Barron, that endorsed Republican Herbert Hoover. Barron apparently feared that the election of Democratic New York governor Al Smith would undo the economic achievements of his good friend Calvin Coolidge.
What Barron didn’t seem to realize—although it may have made no difference—was that although Hoover was a Republican, he was not cut from the same cloth as Coolidge or the earlier William Howard Taft. His penchant for market interventions was almost as intense as what would later be displayed by the New Deal Democrats. For example, he signed the excessive and ruinous Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act in 1930, which had a lot to do with deepening and prolonging the 1930 recession, turning into what we know now as the Great Depression. It scuttled many businesses and almost did in Dow Jones itself. The Journal never again endorsed a political candidate.
But the Journal’s free-market ideas usually have been more compatible with those of Republican candidates than Democrats over the years, or at least more compatible with what Republicans professed to believe, even if they were less dedicated in practice than in their rhetoric. The Dow policy of no endorsements has served the Journal’s opinion editors well because it has freed them to criticize Republicans, often more fiercely than Democrats, when they have strayed off the free-market path.
Republicans, with the exception of the election of Democrat Grover Cleveland to the presidency in 1884 and for a second term in 1893, had controlled the White House for 37 of the 45 years leading up to the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1913. Even Cleveland, a former New York governor admired for his probity and conservatism, was of a different ilk from the statists who would later become a powerful wing of the Democratic Party.
But there was one extremely important issue on which the Journal would differ sharply from the prevailing opinion in the conservative wing of the Republican Party: Prohibition. In the late teens of the early 20th century, there was a groundswell of anti-alcohol sentiment in the country—fanned among other odd things by a World War I animus against German Americans and their prominence in the brewing industry and their fondness for beer.
The Journal was against Prohibition, even though it got much of its support from conservative Republicans. But the Journal’s opinion counted for little against this avalanche of do-goodism. The 18th Amendment passed and was implemented on January 16, 1920, by the Volstead Act. New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia estimated that enforcing it in his city alone would require 250,000 additional cops and a like number of investigators to police the cops. As Clarence Barron had foreseen, the results were disastrous, with the act giving rise to bootlegging, the rise of criminal gangs and widespread lawlessness and corruption.
In a fiery editorial in 1921, the Journal castigated Republicans for their support for Prohibition, writing that the party had succumbed to Prohibitionist bigotry when it should be the party of freedom. “You cannot ameliorate a cesspool by sowing the surface with forget-me-nots and daisies,” the Journal editorial said.
At the beginning of the 1928 election campaigns, the Journal even saw fit to briefly suspend its Republican leanings and pass a left-handed compliment to Democratic candidate Al Smith for advocating repeal of the 18th Amendment. A Journal editorial, presumably written by Hamilton and referring to the governor’s annual message to the New York legislature, archly praised him for his attacks on Prohibition while at the same time criticizing him for his support for government ownership of electric utilities. Publicly owned versus privately owned electric power utilities was also a big issue in those days, and the Journal was, of course, a defender of private ownership against political involvement in the provision of a vital service.
But there were other momentous happenings as America entered the 1920s. A Journal editorial on September 17, 1920, shortly after the 19th Amendment to the Constitution forbade “sex-based discrimination in state and federal elections,” correctly predicted that the vote of women would swing the November presidential election to the Republicans. The Republicans had pushed the amendment through Congress in 1919 against Democratic opposition, so it was natural that suffragettes would favor Republicans when their right to vote was guaranteed nationally. Moreover, wrote the Journal, “the country is tired of Wilson, his uncompromising autocracy, his monopoly on all the political virtues, the inefficiency and extravagance of his administration.” The Journal was right. Senator Warren G. Harding won in a landslide over Democrat James M. Cox, with 404 electoral votes to Cox’s 127.
The president who Barron formed his closest attachment to was Calvin Coolidge, the Vermonter who ascended to the presidency on the death of Warren Harding in 1923. Barron had met Coolidge at a dinner party given by H.B. Endicott, a prominent New England industrialist who was father-in-law to one of Barron’s two stepdaughters, Martha Endicott. Coolidge was then governor of Massachusetts, where he would become famous for his firm suppression of the 1919 police strike in Boston, proclaiming in a reply to a message from American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers that “there is no right to strike against the public safety by anyone, anywhere, anytime.”
Coolidge and Barron had a long conversation at the dinner party and developed a liking for each other, even though their two personalities could hardly have been more opposite. Barron was an extroverted, garrulous newspaper tycoon, whereas Coolidge was a taciturn, flinty Vermonter serving as governor of a populous eastern state that had once been one of the most influential 13 colonies. What they had in common were keen intellects focused on public policy issues and a shared belief that allowing markets to do their work in resolving economic dislocations produces better results than government interventions. Barron thereafter promoted Coolidge’s political career. He rode on the delegate campaign train to the June 1920 Republican convention in Chicago where Warren Harding was nominated for president and Coolidge for vice president. He gave the Republican ticket praise in the Journal but held to the Charles Dow stricture against endorsing candidates.
After Coolidge became president in 1923 on the death of the scandal-tarred Harding, Barron continued as his friend and counselor. The new president proved to be particularly resistant to the pleadings of lobbyists, particularly the powerful farm lobby, for subsidies and import protections. The economy soared in the Roaring Twenties as automobile sales and housing starts burgeoned and American industry brought forth labor-saving household appliances like motorized washing machines and vacuum cleaners. Radio came into its own, and in 1927, the first “talking” motion picture, “The Jazz Singer” starring Al Jolson.
The Wall Street Journal prospered along with the new Barron’s weekly business newsmagazine introduced in 1921 at the suggestion of Hugh Bancroft, husband of Barron’s other stepdaughter, Jane Bancroft, and a proper Bostonian. Bancroft, a lawyer, had had an off-and-on relationship with Barron and Dow Jones over the years, but for all practical purposes was the company’s business manager at the time he proposed the magazine launch.
Barron displayed his admiration for Coolidge in a late 1924 interview with the Boston Traveler, saying that the fundamental factor in the outlook for 1925 was “the strength of the government in Washington.” He went on to tell the interviewer that there had been a great deal of “sloppiness” in government over the last 50 years, but for the first time in a generation “we now have a firm hand at the helm and a man who stands for plain speaking and fundamental principles in national security and defense.”
He said that since Coolidge had delivered his first State of the Union address to Congress early in 1924, the outlook for business had steadily improved. Barron was right again; the economy soared to new heights in the mid-1920s. Incidentally, his reference to sloppiness encompassed a half century that included the incumbency not only of Warren Harding, who was indeed sloppy, but also Teddy Roosevelt, whose genuine achievements, such as the Pure Food and Drug Act, had no doubt been forgotten by Barron in his resentment of the 1912 election debacle that put Wilson in the White House.
The Journal’s growth in circulation and prominence in the 1920s was in large part due to Barron’s fame and popularity. But some of the credit should go to the talents of his new protégé, a large young man from Indiana named Kenneth C. “Casey” Hogate. Barron had come upon Hogate during Barron’s quest for an interview with Henry Ford. Ford had rebuffed his requests, perhaps because of the unkind treatment the Journal had given Ford’s World War I “peace ship.” Barron had termed the 1915 mission to Europe by Ford and other amateur statesmen hopeful of arranging peace negotiations among the warring powers overly altruistic. It failed, as he predicted.
To patch things up, Barron was advised to work through the 24-year-old Hogate, already at such a tender age editor of the Detroit News, who had had an interview with the reticent auto tycoon. The portly Barron and the young Hogate, who nearly matched Barron in weight but was better proportioned with his pounds spread over a six-foot, two-inch frame, dined together in Detroit in 1921, and Hogate’s intercession with Ford got Barron his interview.
Barron took an instant liking to Hogate, once telling a friend that he regarded him as the son he never had. He offered him a job as Detroit bureau chief for the Journal, which seemed like a big step down from editorship of the News. But Hogate could foresee that the Journal opened opportunities for him to enlarge his audience from local to national and that bureau chief was just the entry door to this wider realm. He was right. Late the next year, Barron made Hogate managing editor of the Journal.
Hogate, whose father had owned a newspaper in Danville, Indiana, a small college town just west of Indianapolis, had graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. He had earned his degree in three and a half years and had won a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was so well liked and admired at the Journal that the existing managing editor, Walter Barclay, willingly stepped down to a lesser position to make way for him.
William Peter Hamilton would continue writing editorials under the new Hogate regime, and Barron would continue to be the true voice of the paper with his frequent columns. But clearly Barron intended for Hogate to be the future custodian of a newspaper that had achieved national prominence as the font for Barron’s prolific, forthright and often prophetic writings. Under Barron, the paper’s reach had advanced far beyond the small but attentive audience it had had under Dow. Circulation had risen fivefold, to 56,000 in the 1920s from 11,000 when Barron took over. It was still small relative to mass circulation metropolitan dailies, but its readers were important decision makers in business and finance, and to some degree, in politics. So its influence was far greater than its circulation numbers would suggest, and for that reason it had little difficulty in attracting advertising, a “demographics” advantage that still serves it well.
The ease of getting ad revenue from the Journal was fortunate in the Barron years because it enabled Dow Jones to support the owner’s elaborate and expensive lifestyle. He was a man who traveled first-class, sometimes in a private railcar to accommodate his retinue and family. He repaired to Florida, one of his favorite holiday destinations, on a private yacht, stayed in the best hotels and traveled on ocean liners in royal style for his frequent visits to Europe. In addition to his Beacon Street mansion in Boston, he had a summer home at Cohasset, Massachusetts.
But he was hardly idle during all this luxury living. While he moved about, he dictated thousands of words in the form of articles, letters and staff memos to his two secretaries. He also employed a male nurse and masseur and made frequent visits to the sanitarium of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg in Battle Creek, Michigan, to try to cope with his weight problem, with only limited success.
Barron’s lavish style paid dividends for The Wall Street Journal. It made him conspicuous, and his air of royalty combined with his assertive and logically persuasive writings persuaded heads of state and industrial tycoons that he was a man to be reckoned with. It certainly impressed lesser journalists, who often called on him for comment on financial developments, thus enhancing the Journal’s reputation and authority among readers of large-circulation metropolitan newspapers.
But all this had to come to an end, and on October 2, 1928, C.W. Barron died at the Battle Creek Sanitarium at age 73. He was by then so famous that his picture appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Eulogies poured in from all over the world and were duly printed in the Journal by Casey Hogate. The Saturday Evening Post, at that time one of the nation’s most widely read magazines, called him the “father of financial journalism.” And Calvin Coolidge wrote, in a telegram to Barron’s stepdaughter Jane Bancroft: “To me it is a personal loss as I valued his friendship and his counsel.”
An article by Ken Hogate announcing his death said: “The staff of the Wall Street Journal bows in reverence to the high principles ever enunciated by Clarence Walker Barron and in appreciation of his sweet personality and lovable, warm-hearted regard for them—which personality—so virile and endearing—can never die in their affections.”
Jane Bancroft was Barron’s principal surviving heir. So Hugh and the Barron-anointed Casey Hogate would carry on the business after Barron’s death.
Barron scattered some pithy aphorisms in his lifetime of reporting on major events. So great was his fame in the 1920s as a financial guru that the Illinois Merchant’s Trust Co. chose him to supply two of the eight epigrams to be inscribed on the walls of its new Chicago bank building along with the writings of such classical philosophers as the Roman Cicero and the 16th-century Lord Chancellor of England, Francis Bacon. The lines he provided:
“All Progress of Men and Nations is Based Upon the Sacredness of Contracts.” And “A Wealth of Nations is Not in Prices, But Production and Reserves in Store and in Service.”
Barron’s daily outpouring of wisdom could be described as overly loquacious, not so surprising when you consider that he was dictating stream of consciousness observations to his secretaries. But he left future writers some useful guidelines: “The soul of all writing and that which makes its force, use and beauty is the animation of the writer to serve the reader. Never write from the standpoint of yourself but from the standpoint of the reader.”
That last bit of advice would be embraced by Hogate and his successors and would guide Journal writers thereafter, with excellent consequences.
