Porter, Sylvia Field

(b. 18 June 1913 in Patchogue, New York; d. 5 June 1991 in Pound Ridge, New York), journalist whose daily syndicated newspaper columns reached some 40 million readers worldwide, and author of twenty-one books in addition to Sylvia Porter’s Income Tax Guide, issued annually since 1960, and Sylvia Porter’s Money Book (1975), which sold over 1 million copies.

Porter was one of two children born to Russian-Jewish immigrants Louis Feldman, a physician, and Rose Maisel. The family moved to Brooklyn, New York, where Porter’s father practiced medicine until his death in 1925. Porter’s mother, who later changed the family name to Field, supported the family as a proprietor of a dry cleaning emporium, as a real estate sales woman, and as a successful milliner. Their home life was intellectual and cultural. “We rather thought that intelligence added to womanliness,” Porter’s brother noted. Porter never forgot her mother’s pronouncement, “You! You will have a career.”

Porter attended New York City’s P.S. 69 and graduated from James Madison High School in three and a half years with an A average. At age sixteen she entered Hunter College in New York City expecting to major in English and history. However, family financial difficulties brought on by the 1929 stock market crash caused her to switch to economics. In 1931, while she was still in college, she married Reed R. Porter, a financier. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year, Porter graduated magna cum laude in 1932. Later she took courses at New York University’s business school.

After graduation, Porter started working at the Wall Street investment counseling firm of Glass and Krey. In anticipation of America’s abandonment of the gold standard, she converted $175,000 of the firm’s gold coins to British pounds in Bermuda and then to United Kingdom bonds, earning the company a profit of $85,000. From her work on Wall Street, Porter gained knowledge of bond markets, business cycles, and currency movements. She turned her knowledge into a weekly column on government securities for the American Banker at age twenty-one. Later this knowledge became the base for her own information service on government bonds.

In 1935, using the byline S. F. Porter to mask the fact that she was a woman, Porter began to write occasional columns for the New York Post. Soon a regular columnist, she became the paper’s financial editor in 1936. By 1937 her columns were nationally syndicated in 450 papers. She published her first book, How to Make Money in Government Bonds, in 1939. Her second book, If War Comes to the American Home (1941), received favorable reviews, and in 1942 her New York Post editor, T. O. Thackrey, decided her gender was an asset and changed her byline to Sylvia F. Porter. Her third book, The Nazi Chemical Trust in the United States, came out in 1942. She and Reed Porter divorced in 1941, and in 1943 Porter married G. Sumner Collins, a newspaperman. They had one child in addition to Collins’s son from a previous marriage. In 1944 Porter founded a newsletter, Reporting on Governments, and sold subscriptions for $60 a year. Her annual income in 1960 was more than $250,000.

In 1965 Porter began to contribute to such periodicals as Ladies Home Journal, for which she later became a contributing editor, and Woman’s Home Companion. Reader’s Digest printed her articles in condensed form. She appeared on the lecture circuit, radio, and television, and ABC’s Good Morning America featured Porter regularly. However, she experienced reverses; her 1983 venture into magazine publishing, Sylvia Porter’s Personal Finance, failed when the stock market crashed in 1987.

Sylvia Porter’s Money Book (1975), the eighth of Porter’s books, was updated in 1976 and again in 1979, when it was renamed Sylvia Porter’s New Money Book for the 80’s. Many of her books appeared on the New York Times best-seller lists. Her last book was Sylvia Porter’s Planning Your Retirement (1991). J. K. Lasser, a tax expert, collaborated with her on her financial handbooks, and she sought help from specialists on others. Her ability to make complex economic and financial issues, which she called “bafflegab,” accessible to nonexperts made her popular with consumers and small investors. Although one academic critic called her approach “eye-dropper” economics, public acceptance attested to her success.

Porter’s books were generally well received by critics, even in professional journals. R. Badger, a commentator for American Economic Review said of her government bond book, “Portions of the book could be used for reference purposes in courses on investment.” A New York Times reviewer held that, in her If War Comes to the American Home, “Facts, figures, broad word-pictures and succinct arguments are all presented with conversational ease.” The Library Journal critic S. A. Singer wrote that Sylvia Porter’s New Money Book for the 80’s was “very definitely worth reading” and urged libraries to purchase it even if they owned the first edition. Discussing this same book, the Saturday Review critic Ted Morgan said Porter “has a bargain-basement mentality” but added she is “good at reminding people of their rights in their various capacities as workers, veterans, and retired people.”

A brusque, tough competitor, a crusader on behalf of those with low incomes, and a liberal Democrat, Porter was also short-tempered. She attacked President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., for his handling of the bond market, questioning whether his actions were the result of his “obstinacy, stupidity or sheer ill advice.” In an interview in People (29 October 1979), she castigated the administration of President Jimmy Carter for being “inept,… lacking in leadership and geared to reacting instead of acting.” She won many academic and nonacademic awards, including fourteen honorary degrees. In 1964 she received the U.S. Internal Revenue Service’s Meritorious Public Service Certificate.

By 1976 Porter’s portfolio ran to seven figures, and she had worldwide fame. Standing at five feet six inches tall, she was a handsome woman who took pride in her sense of style and fine wardrobe. Porter said, “All I want from money is dignity and independence.” Her wealth provided these and much more.

Porter’s second husband died in January 1977. On 2 January 1979 she married James F. Fox, a public relations counselor. Porter divided her time between her Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City and her thirty-two-acre estate in Pound Ridge, New York. She golfed, swam, and hiked for exercise, played the piano, attended the opera and ballet, and read, particularly murder mysteries. She was fond of flowers in her home. An inveterate cigarette smoker, she died of emphysema at her home in Pound Ridge and was cremated.

Information on Porter is in Current Biography Yearbook 1980 (1981); “Sylvia and You,” Time (28 Nov. 1960); and “Super-Sylvia,” Ladies Home Journal (Jan. 1976). An obituary is in the New York Times (7 June 1991).

harold L. wattel