From The Wall Street Journal Centennial Edition, June 23, 1989
BY GEORGE MELLOAN
Thomas F. Woodlock, editor of this newspaper in its earliest years, once wrote that the first "strictly editorial" utterance of The Wall Street Journal addressed the bitter 1902 strike of 140,000 miners in Pennsylvania's anthracite fields. To Wall Street's shock, the Journal was sympathetic to the miners.
Journal editorials have provoked public debate ever since, vigorously supporting Teddy Roosevelt's trust-busting, backing the Federal Reserve Act and creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, excoriating John Maynard Keynes and the New Dealers for suggesting that government can create wealth, chiding FDR for his flirtations with the war in Europe, lambasting Harry Truman for seizing the steel mills, predicting defeat in Vietnam in 1968 when it became evident that there was no will to win that war, ripping Richard Nixon for price and wage controls and championing the supply-side tax reforms and monetary rigor that would become policy under Ronald Reagan.
Charles H. Dow's little column, "Review & Outlook," remains today in both name and spirit. Though often out of step with prevailing opinion, the paper's editorials through the years have had a remarkable consistency. With rare exception, they have been firmly grounded in individualist philosophies of the 18th century, when the divine "rights" of monarchs and ruling classes were being challenged by firebrands asserting the "rights of man."
By the time Dow died in December 1902, Woodlock was firmly established as editor in chief. Few people could have been better suited to lay the Journal's philosophical base. Woodlock was an Irishman, with the libertarian instincts of that race. He also was learned, a man who enjoyed reading Euripides and Aristophanes in the original Greek who had learned banking and finance in his father's London securities house.
Teddy Roosevelt was a Woodlock hero. A 1904 editorial celebrating Teddy's landslide election victory was almost effusive: "Against such a frank, fearless, honest personality, capital and combination beat as vainly as break the waves upon rockribbed shores." Woodlock left the Journal in 1905 as a result of some dust-up involving Mrs. C.W. Barron, who had acquired Dow's holdings three years earlier. Sereno S. Pratt was editor until his death in 1908, at which time Dow's apostle, William Peter Hamilton, took over.
Although Hamilton was a vigorous writer and would pen Journal editorials for the next 20 years, he was soon overshadowed by C.W. Barron, who assumed an active role in Journal management in 1912. Barron, more than 300 pounds of energy and erudition, became a national presence, a man with access to presidents, prime ministers and leading tycoons.
The Journal supported U.S. preparedness for World War I, but its views on war were put forth in a 1912 editorial castigating the New York Herald for writing that a Balkan war would bring heavy European buying of American securities. "If there is a war in the Near East we may make up our minds that it will not mean one penny of investment to the American market which would not come here in any case, while it will involve the liquidation of American securities held abroad. . . . War is a waste, and one country cannot dissipate its savings in gunpowder smoke without hurting the rest of us."
Following the old Charles Dow injunction against commitments to parties or politicians, Barron and Hamilton stopped just short in 1924 of endorsing Calvin Coolidge, an old friend of Barron's from Massachusetts. They were well-pleased with the Coolidge era, but as prosperity rolled on, the Journal increasingly warned against stock market speculation and urged the Federal Reserve to tighten credit, something the Fed did too late to prevent a speculative bubble.
Barron died in 1928, well before the bubble burst. Hamilton, who wrote editorials both for the Journal and Barron's, distinguished himself with his famous "A Turn in the Tide" editorial in Barron's on October 21, 1929, that in effect called the crash three days before it happened. He too died only two months later.
With both Barron and Hamilton gone, it was left to Kenneth C. "Casey" Hogate--a Barron protege who could match his mentor pound for pound and was a head taller--to nurse the Journal through the aftermath of the crash and then the Great Depression. He assumed responsibility for editorials, although most of the writing was done by Frederick A. Korsmeyer, who had backed up Hamilton.
The Journal, not surprisingly, opposed most of the New Deal, although Hogate, a Hoosier, and Korsmeyer, a Nebraskan, were sympathetic to the plight of farmers. Indeed, Hogate and FDR had neighboring farms in New York's Dutchess County and were personal if not political friends.
Tom Woodlock came back in the late 20s at age 65 to write a page-one column after a successful business career and a stint on the Interstate Commerce Commission. In the New Deal program, Woodlock detected the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, which both he and Barron had long despised. Woodlock's writing was remarkable for a newspaper. His "Thinking It Over" column, the predecessor to "Thinking Things Over," often was deeply philosophical, quoting European thinkers, such as the Spaniard Jose Ortega y Gasset and the Italian Guglielmo Ferrero, sometimes in their own languages. In a column deploring the historical influence of French Romantic Jean Jacques Rousseau, he cited Irving Babbitt as having written that "the last stage of humanitarianism is homicidal mania."
William F. Kerby, a former Dow Jones chief executive who died last March at age 81, mentioned Woodlock with warmth in his 1981 book of memoirs, "A Proud Profession." Kerby wrote that Woodlock's writing all centered on a basic philosophy, "the dignity and rights of the individual as opposed to the steady movement toward governmental authoritarianism. It is no exaggeration to state that Woodlock's philosophy established the tone for The Wall Street Journal's editorial page position, a position which has been firmly maintained ever since by a line of distinguished editors--Grimes, Vermont Royster, Joseph E. Evans and Robert Bartley, the current Journal editor."
William Henry Grimes, a key man at the Journal through the '30s, helped engineer the accession of Bernard Kilgore to Dow Jones general manager and Bill Kerby to Journal managing editor in 1942. He chose for himself to continue as editor, a job he had taken on early in 1941. Before Pearl Harbor, the Journal was suspicious of FDR's efforts to aid England. But the Journal's front page on December 8, 1941, carried a Grimes editorial saying that everything had changed when the news of Pearl Harbor had come across the wire: "In that moment, the events of last week seemed suddenly 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. . . . We say the sacrifices will be made. The duty will be performed."
Those words displayed the crisp Grimes style. He won the Journal's first Pulitzer Prize in May 1947 for the general excellence of his editorials. One was only two sentences: "Henry Wallace has become editor of the New Republic. We suggest that it serves both right."
Grimes jousted with Harry Truman, who persisted in calling the Journal "the Republicans' Bible" during his 1948 campaign swing. Replied a Grimes editorial: "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." But the Journal had high praise for Truman's 1947 speech enunciating the Truman Doctrine of resistance to Soviet expansionism.
When Grimes retired in 1958, Vermont Connecticut Royster, a North Carolinian who like Woodlock had early training in the classics, became editor. He soon found himself matching wits with a new, young president, John F. Kennedy. In one visit to the White House, Kennedy graciously thanked Royster for supporting his free-trade policies. "Young man," Royster replied in his Carolina drawl, "The Wall Street Journal was supporting free trade before you were born." Following in the footsteps of his mentor Grimes, Royster too won a Pulitzer for editorial excellence, in 1953. He won another in 1984 for "Thinking Things Over," a logo he inherited from previous editors; Grimes had touched up the old Woodlock title.
One of Royster's most dramatic moves was his decision to sharply question U.S. policy in Vietnam. A February 23, 1968, editorial, titled "The Logic of the Battlefield," started with the words: "We think the American people should be getting ready to accept that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed; it may be falling apart beneath our feet. The actual military situation may be making academic the philosophical arguments for the intervention in the first place." Coming from the Journal, and on the heels of the Tet offensive of that year, the editorial attracted nationwide attention and helped catalyze changes in public sentiment and policy, though ultimate withdrawal did not come for another six years.
LBJ's big boosts in federal spending for the war and his domestic programs also were creating concerns about the U.S. economy. In March 1968, the Journal called for stronger efforts to defend the dollar, in effect anticipating the breakdown of the dollar-gold-based Bretton Woods international monetary system that would soon follow. When that breakdown finally came, with President Nixon closing the gold window in August 1971, the Journal reluctantly accepted "temporary" price and wage controls. But it soon saw that it had been mistaken even in this small concession and went on the attack against Nixon's price-control policies.
When Royster resigned his editorship, although continuing as a columnist and Dow Jones director, he left the page in the hands of Joseph E. Evans, editorial page editor. But Joe suffered a fatal heart attack in December 1971. His successor was a 34-year-old editorial writer, Robert L. Bartley, who by now has directed policy longer than any previous editor except Hamilton.
Journal editorials had broadened in scope under Royster. For example, on the death of Martin Luther King, in April 1968, an editorial said: "Dr. King was the first to realize that his tactics, however necessary he felt them, undeniably brushed with dark impulses buried within men. Always he sought instead to awaken the good conscience he knew also lay somewhere within men of every color."
Bob Bartley would continue to broaden the range of the editorial page, delving into such knotty sociological issues as the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision reserving abortion as a matter of private choice in the first trimester of pregnancy. Although the Journal would have some reservations in later years when the issue refused to disappear, it supported the court's attempt at compromise.
In 1974, the Journal began to challenge some of the established economic theories, whether Keynesian or monetarist. A Canadian economist, Robert Mundell, was given prominent attention for a set of ideas that clashed with then-current orthodoxy, although not at all with Journal editorial traditions. He was calling for fighting the "stagflation" of the era with a policy mix of tighter money and lower taxes, the opposite of conventional wisdom. Arthur Laffer, who had been chief economist of the Office of Management and Budget, was arguing that cutting the highest marginal rates of taxation would create new incentives for investment and production. The orthodoxy of the time, strange as it may seem, was that people work harder when you raise their taxes.
These two economists were befriended by editorial-page staffer Jude Wanniski, who has gone on to his own successful consulting business. Both he and Art Laffer recently joined economists advising President Bush at Camp David.
Bartley took the raw work of the new "supply-siders" and shaped it into lucid editorials and features understandable to intelligent readers. The Journal's first big break came in 1978 when a Wisconsin congressman, William Steiger, proposed a cut in the capital-gains tax to stimulate investment. The Journal gave him its hearty endorsement. The tax cut sailed through and, sure enough, generated more investment and higher revenues.
The next big break came when Ronald Reagan, running in the 1980 Republican primary, adopted supply-side ideas and went on to win the presidency. With a supply-sider in the White House, the Journal promoted policies to restore the health of the dollar and to flatten the federal tax schedule so as to make it less punitive toward work and investment. The result was most gratifying--uninterrupted economic growth now in its seventh year.
Bartley won his own Pulitzer in 1980 for a collection of wide-ranging editorials. One was titled "Down With Big Business." It argued that General Motors' support for Jimmy Carter's wage-price guidelines was in fact little more than a means of making things tougher for small competitors, like "XYZ Bumperlight Lens Co." The editorial concluded: "Historically, capitalist economies have prospered through competition, innovation and particularly a sensitive price mechanism transmitting unimaginably efficient signals for less production here and more investment there. If you freeze the system, you will lose its thrust toward progress. But in many ways, GM's life will be easier. So don't look to big business for unequivocal defenses of capitalism. We guess that's up to the folks at XYZ Bumperlight Lens."
That editorial doesn't sound much different from Charles Dow's jab at the coal barons or Tom Woodlock's cheers for trust-busting. It has been a long road from that first "editorial utterance" in 1902. The remarkable thing is not how much Journal editorial policies have changed over those years, but how little. Thomas Woodlock once responded to attacks by "progressives" on intellectual constancy. A stationary pool in a forest does not become stagnant if it is fed by fresh springs, he wrote. Journal editors feel that the verities their predecessors have argued are as sound today as ever and the springs that feed those arguments, the minds of new generations of editors and writers, are as fresh as they were at the beginning.
Mr. Melloan is now deputy editor, international of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page and author of the weekly column "Global View," which appears Tuesdays in the Journal.
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