Free People, Free Markets. George Melloan
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Teddy’s early assault on the nation’s leading banker, J.P. Morgan, with the 1902 breakup of his Northern Trust railroad holding company was still a fresh memory. It surely must have occurred to Barron that Wall Street was in an uneasy mood before the bank runs began and that maybe Teddy deserved some of the blame.
It can’t be certain what the 1907 panic did to Teddy’s reputation because he didn’t run for reelection in 1908. He had promised not to run for what amounted to a third term and proposed William Howard Taft as his successor. Once elected, Taft continued Teddy’s antitrust campaign but on the whole was a steadier hand at the tiller than the famous Rough Rider of Spanish-American War fame. So, in 1912, the party chose to renominate him in preference to Teddy, who had again sought the nomination. Teddy, petulant over the rejection, formed his own Progressive “Bull Moose” party and split the Republican vote in the general election, opening the door for a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, to become president.
Hamilton was not happy with the Wilson victory, and probably also not with the role his onetime hero Teddy had played in bringing it about. But he made the best of it, writing that Wilson actually was a conservative and that business leaders would welcome his presidency. He may have been right. Wilson, the former president of Princeton University, may have been more of an economic policy conservative than Teddy, who had lost much of his luster in the 1912 defeat and had gone into something of a funk, attempting to regain his self-esteem by launching an expedition to an unexplored region of Brazil’s Amazon that almost cost him his life.
Barron, having recovered from his illness, formed a relationship with Wilson as he had with Taft and Teddy and offered him advice when asked. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Barron and the Journal supported Wilson’s efforts to mobilize the nation, although he was never as jingoistic as some of the editors of the era, such as the famously truculent Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier Journal, who ended an editorial on September 3, 1914, marking the outbreak of World War I with the words, “to hell with the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs!” referring to the royal families of Germany and Austria.
The banking panic of 1907 had turned the attention of bankers and the Wall Street Journal to the issue of financial reform. The Journal supported efforts by Morgan and his fellow leading bankers to create the Federal Reserve System, and when Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913, Barron gave it a lot of attention in his writings for the Journal. He opened an informative series of articles by writing that “Next to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, the Federal Reserve Act . . . may be the most important measure ever put before the people of this country. Upon its wise administration depends the good or ill of 100 million and as a nation we shall probably live under it, not only for the 20 years named in the act, but for many generations.”
How right he was about that. The act seemed like a good idea, but Barron has certainly been proved correct in qualifying his support by saying its usefulness depended on “wise administration.” Congress and the president had insisted, over intense objections by the banks, that the new Federal Reserve Board be under the effective control of presidential appointees, including, of course, the powerful chairman. That control was further strengthened by the New Deal in the Banking Act of 1933.
Barron had hoped that the powers given the 12 Regional Reserve bank presidents, who would be elected by member banks of the region, would actually strengthen states’ rights and decentralize financial regulation. But, after the 1933 changes, the regional banks would always be outvoted by the seven presidential-appointed governors on the monetary policy decisions made by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), as the regional presidents were allotted only five voting members of the committee at any one time.
Even though the Fed was widely billed as an “independent” body and even is to this day, it was at the outset, and still is, subject to strong political pressures. So Barron was justified in conditioning his approval on whether the act would be administered wisely, and he also has been right so far in forecasting that the Fed’s decisions would have a powerful influence over the lives of Americans in perpetuity. Proof of what tragedies could occur when the board was deficient in wisdom would arrive 17 years later when the Fed proved ineffective in dealing with the dollar deflation that was an important factor in causing and prolonging the Great Depression.
In his series of columns, Barron set about explaining to Journal readers why the creation of 12 reserve banks and the creation of a national currency (Federal Reserve notes) to supplant bank notes issued by individual banks would improve the workings of the financial system. He was certainly right in predicting that it would bring about cheaper credit, although in our modern age, that has proved to be a dubious blessing. After the 2008 financial crisis, the modern Fed pushed short-term interest rates down to near zero, thus denying savers a decent return on their money and igniting a federal borrowing binge that doubled the national debt in the space of only seven years.
Barron himself had lost his confidence in the Federal Reserve by December 1920. In one of his “Wall Street Sermons” on the front page of the Journal, he wrote, “The Federal Reserve System has to date been a promoter of inflation and of deflation and both have been and are the economic crimes of the war and the peace.”
Barron’s weight and period of illness didn’t slow him down. After his recovery, he was again a human dynamo, not only running the Dow Jones business but also writing extensively for his Boston and New York news services and the Journal. As his views on markets and other issues became better known, he was often quoted by other journalists, and his growing reputation for worldly wisdom expanded the popularity and circulation of the Journal.
His pronouncements were backed by prodigious reporting. His influence on Wall Street gained him wide access to high-level sources, including heads of state. He was on good terms with President William Howard Taft, another 300-pounder to whom he bore some resemblance. Calvin Coolidge was a friend for whom he had a special affection and respect.
Barron traveled frequently to Europe in regal style with steamship cabins for his entourage of family, a nurse and two secretaries. He needed two secretaries because two shifts were needed to handle his constant flow of dictation, as he sent back dispatches to the Journal and his news services on what he learned. He interviewed Nicholas II in Saint Petersburg when the czar was considered to be a powerful leader, only a few years before he was brought down by military defeat in World War I and then assassinated, along with his family, by the Bolsheviks. He had a certain empathy for Kaiser Wilhelm II in those prewar years, but after the bloody World War I conflict began in 1914, he would increasingly regard him, and the German people he governed, as the scourge of Europe.
Barron was one of the first reporters to warn of the dangers of that terrible war as he surveyed the ferment in the Balkan states, predicting that the alliance between Russia and Serbia would ultimately clash with the Austro-Hungarian empire and its ally, Germany. It was, of course, the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, by a 19-year-old Bosnian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, that triggered the great war. Austria-Hungary declared war against Serbia, and that brought in Russia and Germany and later France, Britain, smaller European nations and, ultimately, the United States.
The perceptive Barron also foresaw that this would be a different kind of war in that it would be fought with modern machines like tanks, airplanes, and warships and cannons hurling high explosives long distances. It would thus be far more destructive of human lives, including civilians, than wars of the past. He was certainly right about that. It would claim the lives of 9 million combatants and 7 million civilians during its four-year duration.
But Barron’s crystal ball also was a bit clouded after the war broke out in late July 1914. With the war a month old, a Journal editorial on August 28 titled “The War to Date” allowed as how “Russia is the only country with something to gain and nothing to lose. Whatever happens, with even the most sweeping victory and the largest war indemnity, Germany is now so bankrupt that it will take her years to recover.”
The editorial allowed as how Great Britain and Russia “can feed themselves, while Germany and Austria will starve, at least as long as Britannia rules the waves. This is, in