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By Root 383 0

it, was “recognized internationally as among the foremost financial authorities of the world.” At sixty-five, Barron was called “the father of American financial journalism.” Abundantly bearded, with bright blue eyes, and carrying 330 pounds on a five-foot-five frame, Barron looked like a cross between a sea captain and Saint Nicholas. Born in the city’s North End in a stone house covered with vines and overrun with cats, he was the son of “Honest Henry Barron,” a teamster who worked at the wharves and warehouses of Commercial Street. Some of his earliest memories were of tugging at the dress of his mother, Elana, as she stood at the door of their house talking to peddlers and tradesmen about President Abraham Lincoln, slavery, and the latest news. By fifteen, he had resolved to become a newspaperman and had taught himself stenography, which he put to use with a temporary job on the Boston Daily News. By twenty-one he had found work at the Evening Transcript, where he gravitated to financial reporting and soon inaugurated the paper’s financial section, which he boasted was responsible for increasing circulation by 15 percent.

In 1887, at thirty-two, he founded the Boston News Bureau, having concluded that Boston’s State Street, at the time a rival to New York’s Wall Street, needed financial news delivered more often than once with the morning papers and once with the evening papers. For the exorbitant sum of a dollar a day, Barron promised the city’s business elite that he would provide them with news as fast as he could report it, printing his stories himself on a hand-fed press in a basement office, then dispatching two messenger boys to deliver the goods. Barron was a gifted writer and an intrepid reporter. His rough-printed handbills were soon essential reading for the bankers, brokers, and business leaders of Boston. In 1902 he expanded to New York by buying control of the Wall Street Journal and its parent, Dow Jones & Company.

His success allowed him to keep a permanently reserved suite at the Ritz-Carlton in New York and to buy a grand town house on Beacon Street with views of the Charles River, a yacht named the Hourless, and a huge, seaside country home he called “The Oaks” in the South Shore town of Cohasset. He also was a gentleman farmer, raising prized Guernsey cows on a perfect swath of pasture and willingly selling their milk at a loss to nourish Boston’s sick children.

A demanding taskmaster, thorough in his reporting, he was unafraid to wade into unpopular territory if he considered something unjust. This was the same Barron who had successfully pleaded the case of Ponzi’s old Atlanta prison mate Charles Morse, the “Ice King.” Nevertheless, Barron would caution his reporters, “If you must fight, pick only worthy adversaries.” He instantly placed Ponzi in that category: Invited by the Post to give his opinion of Ponzi’s business, Barron emptied both barrels.

“No man of wide financial or investment experience would look twice at a proposition to take his money upon a simple promise to pay it back with a 50 percent increase in three months,” Barron said. He zeroed in on Post stories from that morning and the day before that said Ponzi had placed his profits from the enterprise in bank stocks, real estate, government bonds, and other conventional investments.

“If Mr. Rockefeller, the richest man in the world, should offer even 50 percent for money and be found to be putting his own money into 5 percent bonds, there would not be much money offered to him by financial people,” Barron scoffed.

Barron understood fluctuating currency rates better than most, and he acknowledged that “there is now probably opportunity for people to deal in a small way under these postal arrangements so as to make money out of the fall in foreign exchange. But it is unreasonable to ask anybody to believe that any large amount of money can be so invested.”

Even if it were possible, Barron said, it would be “immoral” because it would be profiting at the expense of a government. “When a man gets money from the government without