Free People, Free Markets. George Melloan
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.
The Dow Jones board met four days after Barron’s death. It consisted of three people: Jane Bancroft, now the principal owner; her husband, Hugh; and Casey Hogate. Hugh was elected president and Casey vice president and general manager with authority to write checks on the company’s accounts and access to its safe deposit vault. With that, the post-Barron phase of Wall Street Journal history was launched.
From the beginning, the Bancrofts would follow a principle of leaving the news and editorial policies in the hands of a talented professional journalist, perhaps because they knew that it was the abilities of a fine journalist, Clarence Barron, that had built Dow Jones to its present status. That would be the practice down through the years. Their descendents would leave the running of the newspaper, and ultimately the entire Dow Jones, up to a series of editors who had won their spurs initially as writers. It would serve Dow Jones and its employees and owners well.
Casey Hogate was the first in that series, and no doubt his talent and personality helped strengthen the Bancrofts’ decision to leave management up to the professionals. Hogate and Bancroft, who by then had proved himself as a talented executive, immediately set about to bring order to the loosely coordinated Dow Jones subsidiaries, such as the Boston and Philadelphia news bureaus. Casey also searched for talent to beef up the Journal’s editorial staff. William Peter Hamilton died in December 1929, leaving a big gap, and was replaced by 52-year-old Frederick Korsmeyer, a thoughtful Nebraskan who had been his understudy but who couldn’t match the force and bite of Hamilton’s editorials.
Hamilton had based Journal editorials on the liberal ideas of 18th-century philosophers such as Adam Smith and John Locke. The former had created the logical base for letting markets find the most efficient employment of resources and the latter the arguments upholding the principle of “natural rights” of man that had so influenced the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Like