Hats Off to the Wall Street Journal

Tocqueville noticed a connection between “associations” and “newspapers,” concluding that associations fostered newspapers, and newspapers, associations. If he were writing today, he would point to the Wall Street Journal as a nice example of his theory.

Fifty years ago the WSJ had a circulation of 33,000 and was on the ropes. It was even then the voice of what could have been called conservatism, but there was no audience to create the newspaper.