Douglas Steeples, Advocate for American Enterprise: William Buck Dana and the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, 1865-1910. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. xxvii + 237 pp. $69.95 (hardcover), ISBN: 0-313-32102-7

Reviewed for EH.NET by John Paul Rossi, History Program Chair, The Behrend College, Pennsylvania State University Erie.

Douglas Steeples, a Mercer University emeritus professor of history and former dean, provides us with a long overdue account of one of the U.S.'s most important business journalists, William Buck Dana, and his newspaper, the Commercial and Financial Chronicle. The history of business journalism has been sadly neglected and Steeples' pioneering study helps fill one of the major blanks in it.

Dana founded the Commercial and Financial Chronicle on the lines of the English business journal, The Economist, in New York City in 1865. The paper set out to provide objective and timely (weekly) news coverage of commerce, finance, and industry. Steeples notes that the Chronicle quickly became "a comprehensive and accurate source for all aspects of domestic and many aspects of world business" that was "unequaled" in its field. (p. xxii). Despite its limited circulation (c. 4,000 in 1872 and c. 26,000 in 1911), the paper was widely read by America's business elite. And, Steeples informs us, Dana's journal was influential in forming business opinion on a wide variety of economic, business, and political(1) issues.

Advocate for American Enterprise tells its story in two sections -- a biographical sketch of Dana and the Chronicle, and an exploration of Dana's thoughts on political economy through topical chapters such as "The Fruits of Labor" and "The Role of Government." In the first section Steeples explains how Dana capitalized on the nineteenth century's "information age" to make the Chronicle a success. The editor recognized the potential that the then new communications networks created by the telegraph, undersea cable, steamship mail delivery, and railroad mail dispatch held out to publishers. With the Chronicle he exploited them to compile and print timely intelligence on a broad range of national and international economic activities. Much of this information the paper received Dana had aggregated into detailed statistics for his readers. His purpose was to meet the tremendous demand for information generated by the U.S.'s industrialization and the concomitant rise of corporations and corporate finance. The wild swings in the business cycle during the second half of the nineteenth century and the financial booms and busts that accompanied them, underlined the importance of accurate economic intelligence to the Chronicle's audience. Advocate for American Enterprise shows how the paper worked to supply that information.

Steeples contends that Dana's Chronicle was "a bold new undertaking that would transform business journalism in the United States and make him its unrivaled leader" (p. 40). Unfortunately, the book provides little information about business journalism in the mid-1800s or after to support these claims. Publishers of non-business papers made use of the new communications networks to cover stories, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, one assumes that Dana's competitors did so as well. There were between sixty and eighty-five business papers (depending on how one defines the term) in publication around the time the Chronicle was started in 1865.(2) While many of these were trade publications such as the Wine and Fruit Reporter, a few were more general and well-regarded business papers such as Hillyer's Wall Street Journal (1852-1879) and the Wall Street Journal of Charles Dow and Edward Jones (1882-; no connection with Hillyer's publication).(3) Why Dana was able to outstrip the competition in his field, and just how the Chronicle transformed business journalism are questions that the book does not adequately answer.

To be fair, however, Steeples focuses much of the book on Dana's economic ideas and his promotion of business. In addition to recording and disseminating economic data, Dana used the Chronicle's editorial pages to articulate the ideology of classical economics and apply it to American business activity. His columns explored the functioning of natural economic laws through a laissez-faire market economy. Here rational self-interest and competition, Dana argued, facilitated economic development and humankind's progress. Steeples observes that the Chronicle pages which resulted from this process often rationalized the emerging industrial-corporate order and its excesses. But Advocate for American Enterprise also shows that Dana was more than a narrow ideologue. Although he hewed closely to the orthodoxy of classical economics, Dana's empiricism led him to examine the role of investor confidence in the swings of the business cycle. In this way, Steeples reports, Dana anticipated Keynes.

As a publicist Dana's ideas were important because of the influence they commanded. Steeples acknowledges some of the difficult questions that studies of journalistic influence often raise: How do papers (and their editors) influence their readers? How do they mold public opinion? Reflect it? He tries to answer them in a five page Afterword, a space not sufficient to the task. Advocate for American Enterprise would be a much richer and more illuminating book if it had explored these questions in more detail throughout the book.

Despite these criticisms, Steeples' groundbreaking study of William Buck Dana and the Commercial and Financial Chronicle is an important contribution to American history. In writing it, the author overcame the obstacles of the field's neglect and its consequent limited secondary literature and lack of clearly developed sources. Backed by painstaking research, Steeples provides readers with a compelling portrait of Dana and his paper.

Notes: (1)The Chronicle was a non-partisan paper which addressed political issues in the broad sense of the term., e.g., the role of the state in the economy.

(2)Peter Kolchin, "The Business Press and Reconstruction," Journal of Southern History 33:2 (May 1967), p. 184.

(3)David P. Forsyth, The Business Press in America, 1750-1865 (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1964) pp. 69, 81, 115.

John Paul Rossi is the history program chair at The Behrend College, Pennsylvania State University Erie. He has published Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Automobile Insurance: Samuel P. Black, Jr. and the Rise of Erie Insurance, 1923-1961 (Routledge, 2001) with Samuel P. Black, Jr., and has written on various aspects of the U.S.'s international communications in the early twentieth century. At present he is at work on a study of the American response to motor vehicle accidents.