John Davenport (economic journalist)
John A. Davenport (September 11, 1904 – June 8, 1987[1]) was an American journalist and writer focusing on economics.
Davenport was born in Philadelphia. He graduated from Yale University in 1926 and became a reporter with the New York World from 1927 to 1930. From 1937 to 1949, he worked at Fortune magazine as a business journalist, where his brother Russell Davenport was managing editor. Since 1941, he was also a member of the board of editors at Fortune. In 1949, he became the managing editor of Barron's, another magazine owned by Henry Luce’s Time Life, Inc. company, where he stayed until 1954, when he returned to Fortune as an assistant managing editor (until 1969). Towards the end of his life, he lived in Middletown, New Jersey, and died at Riverview Hospital in nearby Red Bank.
Davenport was a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society. Politically conservative, he tried to serve neoliberal and conservative causes as a journalist, especially when it came to the economy. He was also a vocal opponent of universal suffrage, and defender of white minority rule, in Southern Africa. In the 1970s, he travelled to Rhodesia and lobbied for the racist regime of Ian Smith in the US, co-chairing the . He also opposed sanctions against Apartheid South Africa, opining that "the world owes South Africa a debt for refusing to go along with the mania of majority rule and “one man one vote once.”"[2]
His papers are held by the Hoover Institution Archives.
References[]
- ^ John Davenport obituary, in The New York Times, June 12, 1987
- ^ John A. Davenport, The Anti-Apartheid Threat, August 1, 1985. On Davenport's advocacy for Southern African segregationism, see Quinn Slobodian: Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA 2018, pp. 177f.
External links[]
- Register of the John Davenport Papers, with brief bio, at Online Archive of California
- Articles by John Davenport at the Foundation for Economic Education
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