John Davenport (economic journalist)
John A. Davenport 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. 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 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.”"
His papers are held by the Hoover Institution Archives.
