John Davenport (economic journalist)

John A. Davenport (September 11, 1904 – June 8, 1987<ref>John Davenport obituary, in The New York Times, June 12, 1987</ref>) 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 conservative causes as a journalist, especially when it came to the economy. In addition to neoliberal economic causes, he was also a vocal defender of South African Apartheid, 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.”"

His papers are held by the Hoover Institution Archives.

 References 

 Literature 

 Quinn Slobodian: Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism''. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA 2018, ch. 5.

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

Category:20th-century American journalists
Category:1904 births
Category:1987 deaths
Category:Writers from Philadelphia