Background
Alexander Dana Noyes was born on December 14, 1862 in Montclair, New Jersey, United States. He was the second of four sons and third of six children of Charles Horace Noyes and Jane Radcliffe (Dana) Noyes. Both parents were of New England stock, the mother a descendant of Richard Dana, who settled in Cambridge, Massachussets, in 1640, the father a descendant of the Reverend James Noyes, who emigrated from England in 1634 and was a co-founder with his cousin Thomas Parker of Newbury, Massachussets. Charles Noyes, a Congregationalist, had invested in several Montclair stores and a bank. The family lived in "easy circumstances" and there was "abundant good reading" in the home. As a boy Noyes dreamed of a literary career.
Education
Noyes graduated from Amherst College in 1883. He completed his education with several months of European travel.
Career
After a year as a space reporter for the New York Tribune, Noyes joined the New York Commercial Advertiser as an editorial writer in 1884. Though he had dropped his one economics course at Amherst and had to learn finance on Wall Street and by spare-time reading, in 1891 he became financial editor of the prestigious New York Evening Post.
Noyes first won widespread attention in 1896, when public demand for free coinage of silver reached its height in the presidential campaign of William J. Bryan. To counter the influential free-silver tract by William H. ("Coin") Harvey, Coin's Financial School, Noyes wrote The Evening Post's Free Coinage Catechism, a popular and effective question-and-answer reply. Two million copies of his pamphlet were printed, many for distribution by campaign supporters of McKinley.
During the 1890's, while continuing on the Evening Post, he contributed many articles to the Political Science Quarterly and the Nation, and later to other magazines. His first book, Thirty Years of American Finance . .. 1865-1896 (1898), described financial events rather than investigating motives, but was well received; he brought out an extended version, Forty Years of American Finance . .. 1865-1907, in 1909. His brief History of the National-Bank Currency (1910), prepared for the National Monetary Commission, showed why bond-backed national bank notes did not expand or contract with the needs of business and was influential in promoting the Federal Reserve System's more elastic type of notes. Noyes wrote his Financial Chapters of the War (1916) to explain war financing to the public. From 1915 to 1930 he frequently contributed a financial column to Scribner's magazine.
By now he was increasingly troubled by the liberal policies of the Evening Post's owners, and in 1920 he accepted a long-standing offer to become the financial editor of the New York Times. Another book appeared in 1926, The War Period of American Finance, 1908-25, a sequel to Forty Years. The third of an informal trilogy was The Market Place: Reminiscences of a Financial Editor (1938); although autobiographical, it also brought his financial history down to 1933. Long before 1929 Noyes warned the public in his New York Times and Scribner's articles of the likelihood, judging by financial history, that America would have further depressions. Yet he included enough qualifications to protect himself. He told a Senate committee in 1933 that his pessimistic views had made him "the most unpopular man in the community" at the time. But when events bore him out, he became a hero and a prophet. In 1933 and 1934 Noyes said that relief measures produce only transitory recovery, expressed fear of inflation, and opposed devaluation of the dollar.
From the mid-1930's Noyes confined his work on the New York Times to his Monday column and general supervision of foreign financial news. Since Adolph Ochs, publisher of the Times, had specified that no editor should be retired against his will, Noyes hung on to the end.
Views
His eye was generally on the longer trends because he believed that "even financial history repeats itself"; his writings are full of historical analogies.
Membership
Noyes was a member of the Century Club, of which he was secretary for twenty years (1918 - 37).
Personality
Noyes was a methodical individual, decided in his opinions and short on humor, but he could be most charming.
