The Press: Sylvia & You

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$250,000 a Year. Sylvia Porter is a press phenomenon. Her daily column, "Your Dollar," appears in 331 newspapers, giving her a distribution vastly wider than that of any other syndicated business columnist. Her potential readership exceeds 23 million. She appears in papers of the political left (the New York Post), of the center (the Portland Oregonian) and of the right (the Phoenix Arizona Republic); she runs in big papers (the Chicago Daily News, with 550,000 circulation) and small papers (the Fort Smith, Ark. Southwest American, with 18,000). Her column reaches into every state but New Hampshire and Alaska and goes to five countries abroad. It has made her emphatically a capitalist: Sylvia's annual income, including book royalties and the proceeds from a weekly newsletter she publishes, is more than $250,000 a year.

Columnist Porter's vast readership gives her a powerful and measurable impact. Last year, when she told her readers about the first 5% Government note issue in current history, her column helped prime a land-office rush to buy, notably in Houston ("Gimme some of those securities Sylvia Porter wrote about"), where her column had been appearing for years. Last April, when Sylvia invited readers to write to their brokers—or to the New York Stock Exchange—for assorted pamphlets on investing, 16,000 did just that.

Such impact carries her to the highest financial circles, which are understandably interested in what Sylvia is telling the rapt consumer. She has been required reading to the Secretary of the Treasury in every U.S. Administration since Franklin Roosevelt. Henry Morgenthau Jr. survived the rough edge of her tongue in 1935 to turn admirer, sent her roses on her birthday. Harry Truman's Secretary, John W. Snyder, asked for her autograph. Eisenhower's first Secretary, George M. Humphrey, mailed praise: "It is a treat to have good old Sylvia straighten people out." Incumbent Secretary Robert B. Anderson objects to any prolonged Porter absence from the capital. "When are you going to be in Washington?" he asked in a letter last year. "I haven't had the benefit of your always helpful advice for some time."

Rising with the Economy. Columnist Porter's rise to pre-eminence is paralleled —and, in part, explained—by a rising wave of popular interest in business and economic affairs. The surge picked up its momentum early in the 1950s. By then the nation's economy, having recovered from the Depression of the 1930s and the austerities of war, was reaching toward an unprecedented prosperity. Personal income was rising to new peaks. The postwar stock market was on the boom, encouraging millions of new investors to place their bets on business. Millions of other Americans, inspired by the bullish economy to test their credit, plunged in installments toward a new house, a new washing machine, a new car.

All these millions needed a plainspoken, clearly articulate guide to the intricacies of the U.S. dollar. Sylvia Porter became that guide. She did not create the surge of interest in business reporting, but she had seen it coming. "I had always assumed that people were interested in economic affairs, just as I was," she says. "My assumption was justified. The times caught up with me. I was ready. I was there."