Review of Reviewers

At the end of 1935: 1) the Dow-Jones industrial stockmarket averages stood at 144, a net gain of 38% for the year; 2) weekly carloadings were running more than 10% ahead of December 1934; 3) steel mills as a whole were operating at 47 1/2% of capacity as against 41% the year before; 4) the Federal Reserve index of industrial production (November) stood at 97% of the 1923-25 average: twelve months before the figure was 75%; 5) the Annalist index of wholesale commodity prices was 129.4, up 8% for the year; 6) the Labor Department's cost of living index stood at 80.8 (Oct. 15), an eleven months' gain of 2.2%.

The price of wheat was about $1 per bu., virtually the same as at the end of 1934. Cotton at 11 1/2-c- per lb. was nearly 1-c- cheaper. Copper cost 8 1/4-c- per lb., up nearly 2-c-. Coffee at 8-c- per 1b. was down 2 1/2-c-. Hogs at $9.20 per cwt. were up 26%.

Automobile production for 1935 was 4,150,000 units, an increase over 1934 of 45%. The building industry, notably in the Residential field, turned sharply upward. Volume of 1935 retail trade was estimated to have been as high as $33,000,000,000--18% above 1934. Industries with new all-time records included power, shoes, gasoline, electric refrigerators, Diesel engines, cigarets, oil burners, plate glass, rayon, airlines. Excess bank reserves climbed $1,000,000,000, and U. S. gold stocks increased from $8,200,000,000 to nearly $10,000,000,000. Capital markets reopened; the Blue Eagle was killed; business confidence picked up almost as much as business, and further recovery was unanimously predicted for 1936. Upon such facts & figures as these, together with a great number of irrelevant ones, the U. S. Press last week reared, as it does each year, that airy edifice, the Annual Business & Finance Review. In infinite variations, combinations and permutations the business chronicle of 1935 was amplified, summarized, dissected, debated, digested, analyzed, expounded, recapitulated and generally spun out to in credible length in thousands of columns in hundreds of U. S. dailies. For innumerable predictions, prophecies and prognostications for 1936 and far beyond the same set of simple facts also served. Year-end reviews are largely newspaper promotional efforts limited in size only by the amount of advertising available. As publishing phenomena they are not confined to the lay press, but trade journals and business dailies hew closer to the record, indulge in less unadulterated opinion. Preparations for fat year-end business supplements often begin two months in advance, though small news papers may buy a canned review in mat form from United Press for $3. Except for a few charts and tables, however, most of the space-filling articles are contributed free by tycoons, sub-tycoons and assistant sub-tycoons. Most of their stuff is "ghosted" by hirelings. The week of business reviews is the one time in the year when a businessman can be sure that his sound-off will not be cut. For pressagents it is the week of business weeks.

On the basis of sheer poundage the New York Sun won hands down last week, its special "Voice of Business" edition running 80 pages. So pressed for filler was the Sun that it included a book-length history, The Making of America, and several of Grover Cleveland's state papers.

For blatancy the palm went to the Denver Post, which concentrated in color on Colorado's contributions to the Union. Something of a record for frankness was set by the Boston Transcript, whose financial editor Laurance P. Morse observed in connection with business forecasts: "This annual folly has gradually come to have the sanction of years and with it a sort of gentlemen's agreement . . . that no one shall check up on what the other one said last year."

The Business Page was an inconspicuous feature of the U. S. Press until the middle 1920's, when public interest in the stockmarket made editors clamor for Wall Street news. United Press did not even furnish stockmarket quotations when Elmer Conrad Walzer, after a few years of teaching and a turn at reporting, became UP's financial editor in 1926. As editors expanded their business section, UP geared itself to fill more space, hired specialists, furnished columnists, commentators and quotations.

Associated Press today feeds financial news to 1,300 newspapers. A huge service requiring 25,000 miles of wire for its exclusive use, AP's financial department is headed by able young Claude Jagger. Hearstpapers feature the syndicated optimism of B. (for Bertie) C. (for Charles) Forbes and the more informative comment of Merryle Stanley Rukeyser.

On most dailies outside Chicago and New York, the lot of the financial editor is unenviable. He has to take much of his material secondhand, may have to compete with syndicated columnists on his own page, usually sees his big local business stories played on the front page. Only a few financial editors have built up a personal following. Best-established in San Francisco is John Stackhouse Piper of the Scripps-Howard News. Born in Caribou Me. 39 years ago, he crusaded last year against the realty reorganization racket, oil royalties, "boiler rooms," bucket shops.

In Boston the Herald's Edson Bernard Smith is the city's leading financial editor, writing a daily signed-and-boxed column called "The Investor." Son of the Herald's onetime political editor, he has been on that daily ever since he graduated from Harvard (Class of 1909) except for War-time service in the Air Corps. Close to the best news sources in a city that makes considerable financial news, Editor Smith often in demand as a speaker and lecturer. Probably read in more corners of the earth than any other U. S. financial editor is the Christian Science Monitor s learned Herbert Berridge Elliston, whose column "The World's Business," appears three times per week. British-born, he was the Manchester Guardian s Far Eastern correspondent for several years, late: served as an economic adviser to the Chinese Government.

In the Memphis Commercial Appeal George Williamson's cotton column is a signed department. Bylines also go to Oil Editor Claude V. Barrow of the Daily Oklahoman and the Dallas Morning News Oil Editor North Bigbee, whose column ot bristling jargon is incomprehensible to anyone except an oilman. The Milwaukee Journal's financial editor is Gustave Pabst Jr., son of the brewing house that helped to make Milwaukee famous.

Manhattan, as No. 1 financial city of the Western Hemisphere, leads the U. S. business Press in both quantity and quality The New York Times often allots one-fourth of its entire editorial space to business news. The Times' financial editor is Alexander Dana Noyes. His job, however, does not give him his unchallenged position as dean of financial writers. In years, as in wisdom, he stands apart from and above his colleagues. Born the year that Farragut took New Orleans, he learned about the Panic of 1873 first-hand from his merchant father. He was only a year out of Amherst and just breaking in as a Wall Street cub when the Panic of 1884 struck. By the Panic of 1893 he had been financial editor of the old New York Evening Post for two years. Under his command the Post became a famed training school for financial journalists and its business section a leader of the lay press. To Editor Noyes the Rich Man's Panic" of 1903, the Panic of 1907, the closing of the Stock Exchange in 1914, the post-War collapse, are as fresh as his birthday last month when he was 73. And in the classic periods of his signed editorials, Mr. Noyes is as likely to discuss the state of the Union under Chester A. Arthur as under Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the eyes of scholars Mr. Noyes occupies a special niche for his two standard histories, Forty Years of American Finance, and The War Period of American Finance, both notable for that rare combination in business literature: pleasing prose and unerring accuracy. At a meeting of the Academy of Political Science in November 1929, he was asked how long Depression would last. For an answer he quoted Ecclesiastes 1:9: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun."

The Times' principal competitor is the Herald Tribune whose financial section is edited by C. (for Charles) Normal Stabler, a quiet, scholarly Swarthmon graduate (Class of 1923). For smart layout and able writing the Herald Tribune financial section ranks ahead of every other in the U. S. Editor Stabler will celebrate his 35th birthday next week on a Caribbean cruise to recover from the strain of putting out the Herald Tribune's annual review of 22 pages. Better publicized than his superior is brilliant Associate Financial Editor Edward H. Collins, whose Monday morning essays have as large a following as those of old Mr. Noyes on the Times.

Youngest Manhattan financial editor is Julius George Berens of Hearst's American. Now 31, short, swart, he entered his profession as a newsboy, has been office boy, stenographer, reporter, columnist (under the pseudonym "Broadan Wall"). Wasted on the majority of its 600,000 straphanging readers is the Evening Journal's alert financial section run by able, aggressive Leslie Gould.

Manhattan's two afternoon dailies with Wall Street followings are the World-Telegram and the Sun. The World-Telegram's Ralph Hendershot writes a boxed feature which is syndicated to about a dozen other Scripps-Howard papers. The Sun's Carlton Adamson Shively has established himself as the sprightliest financial columnist in the U. S.

A shy, fair, blue-eyed Kansan, Editor Shively went to the University of Nebraska and to Columbia, is exceedingly modest and possessed of considerable charm. He writes with a cynical gusto that sometimes startles the Sun's sedate readers, occasionally breaks from earnest interpretation into verse such as this, which was run under a subhead "Ask the AAA":

Little tax for process,

Little loans in hand

Witt make a mighty desert

Of Southern Cotton Land.

Editor Shively always has a few stock subjects which he whips unmercifully up & down his column on the slightest provocation. Jesse Jones' slow ticker service and the Administration's silver policy are current favorites. He seldom passes up a chance to hop on fatuous statements, particularly those in brokers' market letters. Great was the glee of Hard-money-man Shively when he spotted a Treasury statement in which "lawful money" erroneously appeared as "awful money." Another typical Shively item appearing last December: "The latest issue (July) of the illustrated monthly magazine, U. S. S. R. in Construction, to reach this country has a bit of Tartar humor in the caption to a photograph. It reads: 'General View of the Proletarian Section, Moscow.' Presumably that is the part of town where only the poor people live."

Chicago's leading financial editor is dapper, nervous Royal F. (for Freeman) Munger of the Daily News. He writes more for businessmen than for investors and speculators, dishing up an idea per day in a signed feature called "Old Bill Suggests." Once in the 1920's Mr. Munger was put on the carpet for a savage radio attack on real estate bonds, then in high favor with unsophisticated investors. Lately Publisher Frank Knox has been letting out his business section budget, and Editor Munger has expanded, hired a battery of specialists. In his year-end review Editor Munger had a stock-market chart for 1935 with major movements explained by cartoons of Chief Justice Hughes, the Blue Eagle exploding, Haile Selassie with shield and spear, etc. Most exciting moment in Editor Munger's journalistic career occurred in 1934 when his appendix burst while he was writing the story of a proxy fight to oust Montgomery Ward's Sewell Lee Avery.

The Chicago Tribune's financial department is popping with onetime police and political reporters. A onetime police reporter himself, Financial Editor Howard Wood believes that it is easier to turn a good newshawk into an economist than a good economist into a newshawk.

A contemporary of the News' Munger at the University of Chicago was Robert P. (for Peter) Vanderpoel, lanky, critical financial editor of the Evening American. He was the first Chicago editor to treat the Board of Trade not as a privileged private club but as a public institution susceptible of improvement. With Royal Munger he was viewing the Insull empire with quiet alarm two years before it fell. In his column called "VANDERPOEL" he is usually to be found in any economic corner except the popular one. One of his punching bags currently is the general theory that real Recovery waits on a revival of heavy industry.

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