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84 3 Expert with an Empire The il l ust r a ti on on th e c over of Time magazine’s November 28, 1960, issue portrayed a young-looking Porter as she might have appeared in the 1930s: hair upswept, wearing a beret and an art deco necklace, in front of a vague cityscape resembling Park Row in Manhattan. But while the Time cover might have appeared to celebrate the early years of Porter ’s career, it actually marked a new beginning as Porter evolved from an authoritative financial journalist to a national celebrity and the head of an editorial team that published content under her name. From 1960 to 1975, Porter relied on a team of assistants who wrote her syndicated newspaper column; a question-and-answer column in Ladies’ Home Journal; an annual series of tax books; her newsletter, Reporting on Governments; and occasional magazine articles. Porter also began writing an annual economics overview for the World Book encyclopedias and continued her numerous television and radio appearances. She also published a personal finance book, How to Get More for Your Money, in 1961. This period in Porter’s career culminated in the publication of the compendious Sylvia Porter’s Money Book, a collaborative effort by Porter and numerous other writers. The book was an immediate bestseller, reaching the market just as the public’s interest in personal finance exploded. By leveraging her hard-earned reputation, exploiting the labor of others, and participating in government endeavors, Porter propelled herself from a recognized expert to a marketable brand. As the 1960s opened, Time used its punchy, idiosyncratic writing style to express awe toward Porter, who embodied the kind of individual achievement the magazine’s editors loved to trumpet.1 She was—and still is, more than fifty years later—the only financial journalist ever to appear on the newsweekly’s cover. Titled “Sylvia & You,” Time’s revealing profile E X P E R T W I T H A N E M P I R E | 85 took note of Porter’s personal writing style, her commitment to explaining economics to average readers, and her impressive influence.2 The article reported that 16,000 readers had recently written to the New York Stock Exchange asking for pamphlets on investing after Porter had advised them to do so. It also claimed her newspaper column was published in every state except New Hampshire and Alaska, an expansive network of distribution that contributed to her estimated annual income of more than $250,000. Casting her as a force of nature, the magazine published photographs that showed Porter speaking to the Detroit Economic Club and said the men in attendance were “well aware that more car buyers, more stock market investors and more plain everyday consumers listen to Sylvia Porter than to any other economics writer.”3 After the article was published, Porter’s column gained thirty-four subscribing newspapers, including one in New Hampshire, which made Alaska the only state in which she did not have a presence by 1961.4 Time portrayed Porter’s success partly as a reflection of the increasing interest in business and finance. Decades before, she had entered the changing field of journalism with the expertise to meet a need nobody had quite realized was there.5 Americans’ demand for understandable writing about economics had been driven by the expansion of the middle class after World War II, by which time Porter was in a position to capitalize on it. However, the article also credited Porter’s unique wisdom and unapologetic talent for self-promotion. To get the Dallas Times Herald to publish her column, for example, Porter had torn a dollar bill in half and given one half to the editor, promising to give him the other half if his newspaper subscribed to her column. One of Porter’s most celebrated lines came from this 1960 interview in Time: “One of the soundest rules I try to remember when making forecasts in the field of economics . . . is that whatever is to happen is happening already.”6 This sort of sound bite, a hallmark of Porter’s simplified approach, did not necessarily earn the approval of Wall Street insiders, one of whom described her writing as “economics by the eyedropper .” According to Time, insiders preferred the columns of Joseph Livingston of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, who was more sophisticated and respected.7 (Livingston’s column ran in 87 newspapers at the [18.117.153.38] Project MUSE...

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