Free People, Free Markets. George Melloan
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.
Grimes retired in 1958 after a heart attack, and Royster became editor. In March 1959, Roy discoursed on the Journal’s philosophy in an interview with business writer John Brooks for an article in Harper’s: “Basically we are for minimum government. We believe that the primary reason for government is to provide police power—to keep me from knocking you over the head. In foreign affairs, we don’t think the United States can run the world, or even the Western world.”
In his memoir, “My Own, My Country’s Time,” Royster wrote, “I think of myself as a radical, for there is much I would like to change in both society and politics. I have no desire to return to the nineteenth century romanticized as the pinnacle of an enlightened age. Yet I do believe our heritage from the past contains many values worth preserving as we approach the end of the 20th century.”
Royster further revealed his personal philosophy in what he called a “Forewarning” rather than a foreword, to a 1967 collection of his writings titled “A Pride of Prejudices” (Alfred A. Knopf): “I have been called a ‘conservative’ and something referred to as a ‘nineteenth century liberal.’ Both labels are, I think, inaccurate. Anyway, if conservative means, as it often seems to nowadays an opposition to change for opposition’s sake or a disposition to return the country to some imagined halcyon past, I beg to be excused. This is more an awareness that the past is as romanticized in history as youth is in memory than any want of awareness about the imbecilities of the present. My prejudice is that we might often better things by changing them.
“There is much to be said for the nineteenth century, but who, really, would want to take the world back to it? Besides the latter part of it marked a reversion among the intellectuals to the medieval philosophy of the all-wise king and his ministers who should manage all the people’s affairs in proper fashion. That century’s seminal thinkers, let us not forget, included the Fabian socialists and Karl Marx, all of whom were self-styled liberals. . . .
“I am often pessimistic about the immediate future, waxing indignant sometimes when our long heritage is abused or past lessons ignored. Who can avoid pessimism, looking at the state of the world and the behavior of the people in it? About the long future, however, I am stubbornly optimistic. Although mankind does forget old lessons to its pain, just as young people do those of their fathers, it always relearns them. It is comforting to remember that the Dark Ages only lasted five hundred years.”
That last line, with its amusing irony, was pure Royster.
The Journal editorial writers were not enthusiastic about Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election campaign, but they also had doubts about John F. Kennedy, even though both Royster and Joseph Evans, his chief editorial writer, knew and liked JFK from their prewar days in Washington. They were afraid that JFK was too much under the influence of neo-Keynesians like John Kenneth Galbraith and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Nixon at that point didn’t seem to have neo-Keynesian deficit spending tendencies. That would come later after he, in 1968, actually won the prize he failed to get in 1960, the U.S. presidency.
On January 20, 1960, shortly before his inauguration as president, JFK invited Royster to lunch at the Carlyle Hotel in New York. The presidential floor of the hotel was so chaotic, Royster reported, that it only belatedly dawned that someone was supposed to order lunch. JFK scolded