Free People, Free Markets. George Melloan
the voice of the newspaper. Hamilton, a former war correspondent for British newspapers who had covered the 1893–94 Matabele uprising against the British South Africa Company in what is now Zimbabwe, had a forthright style equal to that of Woodlock. He once famously said: “You can’t write a 50-50 editorial. Don’t believe the man who tells you there are two sides to every question. There is only one side, the truth.”
That, of course, assumed that the editorial writer would actually know and be able to utter the truth, which is always a bit problematical. But Hamilton was counseling editorial writers not to shrink from expressing what they believed to be the truth out of fear of criticism, disfavor or punishment. The principle he expressed—be bold, take a position and don’t equivocate—would become a hallmark of Journal editorials for many years thereafter and is still observed today.
Editor Hamilton on May 11, 1911, had some doubts about the “muckrakers,” writers who were gaining public notice with their attacks on the industrial tycoons who had built large national business organizations, at that time called “trusts.” Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, who both wrote for McClure’s Magazine, were among the most prominent, Tarbell for her assaults on Standard Oil’s John D. Rockefeller. She had a special grudge against Rockefeller because he had put her father, an oil tank manufacturer, out of business.
The Journal itself was already known for its investigative journalism, but Hamilton thought the muckrakers went too far. He wrote that one consequence, surely unforeseen by the proprietors of the magazines that carried their articles, was that they conveyed the impression that great wealth could only be acquired by dishonesty, which he argued was patently untrue. He added that “there is no place which has less use for a liar and a cheat than Wall Street,” observing that market transactions require a high degree of trust. He added: “We prefer not to extend the comparison to politics. The returns from Ohio are not all in.”
A few days later, he argued that most laymen have “no objection to the accumulation of large individual wealth if the public is better served thereby.” But he added that “our natural distrust of corporations is doubtless well founded. The Standard Oil Company is sentenced to be hanged for crimes almost outside the statute of limitations. Probably nothing would have happened to it if it could have confined the record to the past ten years and lived down the admitted atrocities of the previous thirty.” The 10 years of good behavior he was referring to was a period when Standard Oil had served the public interest rather well by using its economies of scale to push the price of kerosene, a fuel almost everyone used at that time, by something like 70%. It was broken up anyway into separate companies by Teddy Roosevelt under terms of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Hamilton had a gift for cutting satire. A brief item appended to a May 22, 1912, editorial noted, “[A] new farmers organization of 150,000 farmers [has been formed] to ‘influence’ legislation—and any other combination with the same end would be denounced by every farmer in the land.” Hamilton’s sarcasm was prophetic. The farm lobby in the early 20th century, when over half the U.S. population was agrarian, had a powerful influence on federal legislation. The farm lobby’s success in getting subsidies and protections from Congress would cause the country—and farmers themselves in the end—a lot of grief over the next two decades. Federal “aid” to farmers led to overproduction and low commodity prices, and ultimately, to the Hawley-Smoot tariffs that virtually shut down global trade and prolonged the Great Depression.
In March 1912, the Journal quoted an article by former president Theodore Roosevelt, making his unsuccessful bid for a return to the White House, in which he explained his views on “trust-busting,” which had won him lasting fame when he was president from 1901 to 1909. He argued that “the people have a right to govern themselves, that they have a right to rule and that we must obtain social and industrial justice through genuine popular government.”
But he cautioned “that our aim must be to control business not to strangle it . . . What our people want is that the evils of big business be eradicated and the advantages, the benefits preserved.” Teddy himself was not enamored of the muckrakers, at one point charging that they were simply antibusiness, not instruments for reform.
Hamilton and his predecessor Thomas Woodlock were less circumspect about political partisanship than Dow had been. Woodlock was caught up in the excitement generated by the charismatic Republican Teddy Roosevelt in the presidential election of 1904. So were a lot of other people. Roosevelt, who as vice president had succeeded to the presidency on the assassination of President William McKinley in Buffalo on September 14, 1901, defeated Democrat Alton B. Parker in a landslide with 56% of the popular vote.
Although Teddy had been founder of the Progressive movement, which was antagonistic toward big corporations, he was not antibusiness. He simply felt that government should hold the trump cards, so he used the new antitrust laws to assert government power over the private sector. He railed against “malefactors of great wealth.”
Whatever Teddy was, he was certainly not content to let competition take its natural course, as it often does, toward survival of the fittest, even if bigness brought greater efficiency. He clearly thought that breaking up the big companies would intensify market competition. In that sense, he wasn’t a free marketer. But Woodlock, and later Hamilton, was nonetheless taken with the flamboyant president as were a good many voters.
Hamilton would not be the sole voice of The Wall Street Journal for long. In 1912, when the Journal’s finances were getting shaky, Clarence Barron took over management from his wife. Reportedly, the big man with a beard and brush mustache stormed into the newsroom at 44 Broad Street banging his cane on desks and loudly proclaiming that he was now the boss and would tolerate no slacking. For all that fierceness, he was never known to fire anyone, a forbearance unusual for newspaper proprietors of almost any era.
Barron was a large presence in more ways than one. In 1942, Ella Fitzgerald popularized a song about “Mr. Five by Five,” who “don’t measure no more from head to toe than he do from side to side.” That was Barron, who was not five feet wide, but fit the model at five feet, five inches tall with a large girth, weighing somewhere around 300 pounds. It’s said he married Jessie Waldron, a widow with two daughters, in part because of his fondness for her cooking when he was rooming at her upscale boarding house on Boston’s Beacon Hill.
Although Barron was acquainted with Teddy, the Journal proprietor was more attuned to his own look-alike, the more moderate and steady William Howard Taft, Teddy’s handpicked successor in 2008 when Roosevelt chose not to run.
Hamilton and particularly Barron may have started to have second thoughts about Teddy during the banking panic of 1907, in which Barron played an exhausting role in helping J.P. Morgan organize his famous rescue of the banks that were under threat.
A letter from Barron to a friend, quoted in the Lloyd Wendt book, describes his own role in organizing aid from sound banks for those banks that were experiencing heavy withdrawals by depositors. He conducted a marathon of phone calls from his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. His letter said: “As trouble approached I told President Theodore Roosevelt that it would take $500 million to stop the panic. Later [after the system was stabilized], I footed up the total relief from Washington, London and the New York banks and it was just $520 million.
“Nobody will ever know how hard I worked through many channels to keep the Wall Street fire from spreading. When it was over I went home [to Beacon Street in Boston] and slept for a very long time, and it took nearly a year to recover my nervous energy.”
Barron had not only suffered what amounted to a nervous breakdown from the panic but had also lost a lot of money, so much so that for a while he had trouble servicing the notes he had signed to buy Dow Jones. But he recovered and would take over full management of the company and its editorial policies five years later.
Although trustbuster Teddy Roosevelt’s antitrust assaults on corporations were never directly connected to the 1907 panic, business confidence certainly was not high during the latter part of his 1905–09 term of office. The October-November panic came on the heels of a stock market slump aggravated by the toll on business inflicted by the horrendous April 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Further anxiety was created by the feared impact on railroad stocks of government’s