William Peter Hamilton (January 20, 1867 – December 9, 1929), a proponent of Dow Theory, was the fourth editor of the Wall Street Journal, serving in that capacity for more than 20 years (i.e., January 1, 1908 – December 9, 1929).

Family

Of Scottish heritage, and the son of Thomas Hamilton (born 1835), and Jane Elizabeth ( Earnshaw) Hamilton (born 1845), William Peter Hamilton was born in Manchester, England on January 20, 1867. He married Georgiana Tooker in 1901. He married his second wife, Lillian Hart, in New York, on 19 May 1917.

Journalist

Having earlier worked as a clerk on the London Stock Exchange, he began his career in journalism in London, in 1890, with The Pall Mall Gazette, under the editorship of William Thomas Stead (1849-1912). In 1893 and 1894, he served in Africa as a Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers of the British Auxiliary Forces during the First Matabele War, and also as a corporal in the British Bechuanaland Police. He also served as a war correspondent for the Gazette during that time; and, once the war was over, he remained in Johannesburg, working as a financial journalist.

The Wall Street Journal

Having moved from South Africa to Australia, "where he represented London newspapers" (Hogate, 1929), he migrated to New York, and joined the staff of the Wall Street Journal in 1899. On January 1, 1908, when Sereno S. Pratt, who had been WSJ's editor since late 1905, and the author of The Work of Wall Street (1906), replaced George Wilson (1868-1908) as the secretary of the New York Chamber of Commerce, Hamilton was promoted directly at the behest of Barron's wife, Jessie Maria Barron (1852-1918), née Barteau, née Waldron to the position of editor of the Wall Street Journal, where he eventually became a strong advocate of Dow Theory (see: "The six basic tenets of Dow Theory).

Barron's National Financial Weekly

In addition to his regular editorials in the WSJ, Hamilton contributed a wide range of articles on financial and economic topics, from time to time, to Barron's National Financial Weekly, a weekly financial newspaper owned by Clarence W. Barron (1855-1928), who also owned the WSJ. Apart from twenty-or-so excerpts from his forthcoming The Stockmarket Barometer published sequentially between 1921 and 1922, his Barron's contributions included:

Editorial style

He was renowned for the concise precision of his editorials. In his obituary, the journalist, newspaper publisher, and financial editor of The New York Times from 1896 to 1906, Henry Alloway (1856-1939) spoke of "the logic, force and pungency of [Hamilton's] Wall Street Journal editorial declarations" (Alloway, 1929). For instance, in Hamilton's WSJ obituary it was noted that: In his extended 1922 Editor & Publisher interview, Hamilton directly addressed what he felt was the significant difference between a "real editorial" and others that were "merely lengthy dissertations":

Death

He died at his Brooklyn, New York home of pneumonia on December 9, 1929. His funeral services were conducted at Grace Church, in Brooklyn, on Thursday, December 12, 1929.

Works