John Davenport (economic journalist)

In the 1970s, he travelled to Rhodesia and lobbied for the racist regime of Ian Smith in the US, co-chairing the American-Rhodesian Association. 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.""

Davenport resigned from Fortune in 1949 to take over the editorship of Barron's with the avowed aim of refashioning that weekly financial paper into "an American Economist," but the Dow Jones Co., owner of Barron's, proved less financially committed to that ambitious project than its new editor. "Hell, John, want do they want for a nickel?" sympathetically growled Henry Luce, founder of Time-Life, in welcoming Davenport back to Fortune in 1954. He stayed there until 1969.

Davenport served on the Hoover Commission and on the Harriman Committee on Foreign Aid. He attended the 1947 meeting of the newly formed Mont Pelerin Society and was a lifelong member of the organization. He was an early supporter of William F. Buckley's National Review. He espoused, among other causes, the gold standard, a vigorous check on the Soviet Union, the right to work (i.e., to work without compulsory union membership) and the right of the present-day Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and of South Africa to reform their respective racist political and social institutions free from American trade and investment sanctions.

Davenport was the co-author, with Charles J.V. Murphy, of "The Lives of Winston Churchill" [Scribner & Sons, 1945] and "The U.S. Economy," [Regnery,1964].

Davenport and his wife, Marie Hayes Davenport, who were married on October 11, 1941, resided in New York City until 1974 when they moved to Middletown, NJ. They had seven children, Ann Davenport Dixon, Glorianna Davenport, Susan Brooke, Amy Davenport, John Davenport Jr, Sharon Davenport and Caroline Johnson.

Restored to health, Davenport in 1937 followed his older brother Russell Davenport to Fortune (Russell had just become that magazine's managing editor), where, over the course of the next 28 years, Davenport wrote more than 150 pieces and edited at least a hundred more.

Davenport was born in Philadelphia, the son of Russell W. Davenport, Sr., a vice president of Bethlehem Steel Corp., and Cornelia Whipple Farnum. He attended the horsey, orange-blossom redolent Thacher School in Ojai, California (a happy cultural shock for a boy from the Philadelphia Mainline), followed by a year at Deep Springs College. He graduated from Yale University in 1926 and joined the staff of the New York Worldin 1927, where he remained until 1930.

John A. Davenport (September 11, 1904 – June 8, 1987) was an American journalist and writer, the editor of Barron's, a longtime editor of Fortune and a career-long exponent of the moral and economic case for free markets.