by Gay Talese
Shortly after his debut as an office boy on the Knoxville Chronicle, Ochs was promoted to printers’ apprentice, learning a skill that would become a hallmark on the papers he would own, and this would also make him a printers’ hero throughout his later years and even decades after his death—in the Nineteen-sixties, during a newspaper strike in New York, picket lines of printers would respectfully part ranks, forming a path whenever Ochs’s white-haired daughter, Iphigene, then in her seventies, would approach the front entrance of The New York Times building.
When Adolph Ochs was eighteen, he was setting type for the Louisville Courier-Journal, living with cousins and sending his savings to his family in Knoxville, and working during his spare hours as a part-time reporter, proving to be a dull writer but a very reliable gatherer of facts. When he was nineteen he and two older men obtained an interest in a failing newspaper, the Chattanooga Dispatch, which they could not revive, but it provided for Ochs an introduction to a new city, one that was on the brink of a building boom, which Ochs sensed, and thus he stayed.
Chattanooga, whose ridges and plateaus had been singed and scarred by the cannons and rifle fire of thousands of battling troops during the Civil War, had a population in 1865 of less than 2,000 but this had grown to 12,000 when Ochs arrived in 1877. There had been rumors of iron ore in the mountains, and now the dirt roads were being covered with planks, and stores and homes were being built; there was an atmosphere of optimism, a promise of prosperity among the new settlers. There were no telephones or information centers in Chattanooga then, and newly arrived strangers seeking information had to ask around—until Adolph Ochs came up with the idea of printing a city directory. In it he listed every store in Chattanooga, its location and the type of merchandise it sold, and in the process of collecting this information he walked back and forth through every block in the city, getting to know the merchants, politicians, bankers—people who would be very helpful and useful when, one year later, in 1878, he needed a loan and advertising support to buy and rebuild the Chattanooga Times. The Times was then a mismanaged four-page paper so poorly printed as to be almost illegible, with a declining circulation and little hope of recovery. Its owner was so desperate to sell that Ochs was able to buy it with an initial down payment of $250 and a total cost of $5,750. Ochs’s father, Julius, came down to Chattanooga from Knoxville for a ceremony that highlighted the change of ownership—not for purely sentimental reasons, but also to sign the legal papers in his son’s behalf. Adolph Ochs was eight months shy of twenty-one.
What he did with the Chattanooga Times was what he would later do, on a much grander scale, with The New York Times—he made it into a newspaper and not a gazette of opinion, or showcase for star writers, or a champion of the underdog or topdog, or a crusader for political or social reform. Ochs had something to sell-news—and he hoped to sell it dispassionately and with the guarantee that it was reliable and unsoiled and not deviously inspired. Adolph Ochs wanted to be accepted in Chattanooga, to grow with the town and help it grow, and he knew that one way to do this was not to criticize it but, inoffensively, to boost it. As the building boom continued in Chattanooga, as land speculators and investors moved into the valley and up along Lookout Mountain, chopping down trees and leveling the land that had been a Civil War battleground, Adolph Ochs saw this as progress and he did not, as his nephew John Oakes could afford to do almost a century later, worry about the destruction of trees or desecration of natural beauty.
Ochs worried about, and advocated on his editorial page, the dredging of a deeper channel in the bordering Tennessee River, the construction of an opera house for the increasingly cultured community, the building of better libraries and schools for the young who would one day read and support his newspaper. When the yellow-fever epidemic spread into Chattanooga, stalling the economy temporarily and killing 366 citizens, the Chattanooga Times helped conduct an emergency relief fund and Ochs wrote in an editorial: “Will this ruin Chattanooga? No! If this city was born to be ruined, it would have been blotted out years ago.”
Ochs’s most salient characteristic was optimism, and it was this more than anything else that attracted financial support from bankers and businessmen, although in his first years in Chattanooga Ochs was also a fantastic wheeler and dealer. He printed his own checks on high-quality paper of exquisite design, signing them with a flourishing hand—and then he would just barely get to the bank on time with newly borrowed money to prevent his check from bouncing. He was forever juggling a loan here to repay one there, but he was very honest and punctual, and he demanded that his debtors be equally scrupulous in their dealings with him. Subscribers who had fallen behind in their payments would receive stern notes from Ochs: “The Times will be discontinued if not paid for within five days after the presentation of the account. We will not carry a Deadhead list. Everyone must pay.” He then needed every nickel he could lay his hands on to help with the purchase of legible type, better machinery, and to expand his staff. And after he achieved these goals he met larger challenges, his horizons ever widening, his success inspiring him toward greater risks rather than toward smugness or quiescence. Within not too many years, without his realization at first, Adolph Ochs began to outgrow his town.
Chattanooga, to be sure, was not fulfilling its promise as the South’s leading industrial center. While it had recovered from epidemics and small economic crises, it suffered a serious setback when its ore proved to be too sulfurous to produce the high-quality steel of which Birmingham was capable. This discovery took much of the momentum out of Chattanooga. It made money very tight at a time when Ochs—who had lost considerably in land speculation, a victim of his own optimism—was desperately in need of more loans to continue to improve his newspaper and to complete its new six-story granite building that would be topped by a glittering gold-painted dome.
There was no question in his mind, or in anybody else’s, that he was a good business risk. He had demonstrated as a young man in his twenties that he could take a wreck of a newspaper and, within a decade or so, convert it into a large and enterprising journal earning $25,000 annual profit. He also owned a small farmer’s weekly that was making money. He had bought a big, rambling brick house in one of the better residential areas of Chattanooga and into it he had moved his parents and brothers and sisters from Knoxville, and then his wife from Cincinnati, and there, too, he entertained many distinguished people when they were visiting Chattanooga. When President Grover Cleveland came to Chattanooga, Ochs was on the greeting committee. Borrowing an elegant gray coat for the occasion, he rode in an open carriage near the President in a parade, and during the festivities he conversed privately with the President, confident he was as impressive to the President as the President was to him—and after Grover Cleveland returned to Washington, Ochs kept in touch. And yet despite Ochs’s pluckiness and his profitable management of the Chattanooga Times, he was deeply in debt. This was partly the result of the overborrowing he had done to keep improving his growing paper, and partly the result of his land-speculation project across the Tennessee River which had cost Ochs more than $100,000.
He could not recover, he knew, unless he could make more money at a faster rate, and he could not do this in Chattanooga during a recession. He would have to expand elsewhere. He must try to keep his Chattanooga Times running at a profit while he traveled through Tennessee and beyond in search of another newspaper that he could buy cheaply and rebuild as he had the Times. Any thought of trying to make money in a nonjournalistic way was rejected by Ochs from the start. The real-estate fiasco had taught him his lesson. From that point on he vowed that he would never again invest in anything but newspapers, the only business he really liked.
Newspaper publishers in those days were given free rides by many railroad companies, a forerunner of the “junket,” and Ochs made good use of his pass as he traveled back and forth between Nashville, Knoxville, Cincinnati, Louisville, and even New York, familiarizing himself with the larger newspapers a
nd the men who ran them. Much of the responsibility for the running of the Chattanooga Times was meanwhile transferred to his family, whom Ochs had started to employ shortly after he had acquired the Chattanooga Times. His father, Julius, had been appointed treasurer of the newspaper. His younger brother, George, and then his youngest brother, Milton, were trained as reporters. Following the marriage of two of his three sisters, Ochs brought their husbands into the business; and then there were cousins, nephews, family friends—Ochs’s dynasty had begun. Those who did not work for Ochs in Chattanooga might, after he had bought The New York Times in 1896, work for him in New York or, after 1901, work on the newspaper Ochs would own for more than a decade in Philadelphia. Everybody at one time or another seemed to be working for Adolph Ochs, and they blended into his institutional framework with proper modesty and reverence—all but one, his brother George.
George Ochs, or George Ochs-Oakes as he wished to be called after 1917, joined the Chattanooga Times in 1879 as a reporter, earning nine dollars a week. He had completed three years at East Tennessee University in Knoxville and achieved such high grades that, though he joined his family in Chattanooga rather than complete his senior year, the university awarded him a Bachelor of Arts degree with his class of 1880. He was a sensitive and an articulate young man, having been a member of the university’s debating society, and he was very different from his older brother Adolph. While Adolph sought to avoid controversy, George seemed to court it. Adolph did not crave personal attention, having had more than he wanted as the family’s favorite son; George, three years younger than Adolph, could never get enough of it. He clung to the memory of every honor he ever received. He never forgot a compliment, no matter how small. He never tired of hearing his mother retell the story of how, during the Civil War, she had concealed supplies for the Confederates in his baby carriage, with him asleep within, and he would become infuriated and often cry whenever Adolph would teasingly suggest that it was he, Adolph, who was actually sleeping in the carriage. But Adolph did not often try to provoke his younger brother, a thing too easily done; instead Adolph tried to help George as he had helped the entire family, guiding and inspiring as he earned their respect and devotion, maintaining his position as the loving older brother, the imperturbable marvelous manchild who was his mother’s favorite. Adolph was her first son to survive—a previous son had died in infancy—and after Adolph had been delivered and lived his mother knew no joy to equal it, except possibly the joy that would come as he delivered her, and her family, from poverty to prominence. Adolph could be counted upon, she knew, as her husband, good man that he was, could not. Adolph always made the right moves. Except for the land-speculation deal, he was shrewd about money. He had married a girl that his mother greatly approved of, Rabbi Wise’s gentle Iphigene, and Adolph did not, like his brother Milton, marry outside the faith; nor did he, like George, lose his temper in public and bring embarrassment to the family. George seemed almost driven to prove how different he could be. As a young boy, if told not to do something, he would be sure to do it. As a young man, working on his brother’s staff at the Chattanooga Times, he became embroiled in dramatic situations, controversies, threats—and once he almost killed a man.
George was then a twenty-two-year-old newspaperman on the Chattanooga Times and on this particular day, while he was in the county courthouse making notes from a divorce record that involved the name of a prominent county official, the same county official strolled by and noticed what George was doing, became very angry, and warned that if George printed the item he would “shoot him full of holes.” George printed it. A few days later, as George was conversing with a friend on the main street, he suddenly felt on his head a sharp blow from behind; turning, he saw the county official holding a cane upraised to strike again. George shouted, “If you strike me again, you’ll pay the penalty.” As the county official hit him again and also reached into his pocket, possibly for a pistol, George reached into his pocket, pulled out a gun, and shot the man through the lower abdomen and hip. Though staggering, the man continued to raise his cane and attempted to draw the object from his pocket, whereupon George pushed his gun to the man’s throat and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. But the man collapsed to the ground and George did not fire a second shot. A large crowd had now gathered, and the victim was removed to a hospital where, after being in critical condition for several days, he recovered. George surrendered to the sheriff but no warrant was issued. Nor did George cease to carry a gun. When he was approached a week later and was threatened by the brother of the victim, George dissuaded him by pointing two guns at him. The aftereffect of this encounter left George emotionally shaken but he soon recouped his sense of daring—and a few months later he was knocked unconscious by a large Negro for publishing the fact that there had been an angry dispute in the train station between the Negro and a railroad official who had refused to let the Negro sit in the parlor car. A posse was instantly organized to capture the man, but he fled to Texas and did not return to Chattanooga for several years, by which time George Ochs had drifted into politics and had been elected mayor of Chattanooga. As mayor he graciously accepted his assailant’s apology.
Having entered political life over Adolph’s strong but futile objections, George turned out to be a very successful mayor. He won two terms as a Democrat, beginning in 1893 when he was thirty-one years old, and he could have won the party nomination a third time had he wished. His administration was so efficient that it lowered taxes while improving the welfare of the citizens, but George Ochs remained as independent and unpredictable as ever. In 1896 he refused to support the Democratic party’s choice for President, William Jennings Bryan, and the local leaders in Chattanooga demanded that Ochs resign as mayor, which he would not do. On another occasion Ochs withheld patronage from one of the local political bosses who had strongly supported him, and this provoked a protest visit to the mayor’s office from a delegation of leading Democrats that included George’s younger brother, Milton, and one of his in-laws. But George remained implacable. He had made no deals, he said, adding that he would run the city in a manner he thought proper. He fancied himself an incorruptible man, independent and different, and while he occasionally flaunted his integrity, he nevertheless behaved in accordance with his self-image, doing as he wished and saying what he wanted to say even if the subject was controversial, which it often was.
As a Jew, a German Jew, George Ochs shared with some members of his family, and many German Jews around the nation, a feeling of superiority and disaffection toward the more recently arrived Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe—and, unlike Adolph, George was outspoken on this subject. While he sympathized with their poverty and struggle, George had little tolerance for Jews who adhered to foreign customs after settling in America, Jews who persisted in speaking Yiddish along the street, who read Yiddish newspapers on trains and saw Jewishness in terms of a nation or race rather than in terms of a religion. Such Jews, he felt, encouraged by their clannishness the bigotry that kept them aliens, disqualified them socially, stereotyped them commercially, made life not only more difficult for them but, regrettably, also for the more established Jews who had assimilated themselves and prospered in America. He was equally critical of the get-rich-quick Jews who displayed their wealth with ostentation, if not vulgarity.
Throughout his lifetime to the year of his death, which came in 1931 when he was seventy, George Ochs-Oakes overwhelmingly opposed the Zionists and all other advocates of a Jewish state in Palestine, and this view was also endorsed by Adolph Ochs and for years it was part of the editorial policy of The New York Times. When Arthur Hays Sulzberger became publisher of The Times he made speeches and statements urging Jews not to agitate for a Jewish Palestinian state, and in 1939 Sulzberger was among a group of influential Jews who urged President Roosevelt not to appoint Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court because they believed that it would intensify anti-Semitism in America, a notion that Roosevelt resented and ignored. In 1
946 The New York Times canceled an advertisement submitted by the American League for a Free Palestine, infuriating Zionists and causing Sulzberger to explain at length that while The New York Times had in the past often run the ads of organizations that it opposed editorially—it had previously carried many Zionist ads, Sulzberger reminded them, and had even run advertising by the Communist party; had in fact once lent the Daily Worker newsprint when the Communist journal was short of it—the decision to cancel the Zionist advertising on this occasion was based, first, on The Times’ conviction that the American League for a Free Palestine was directly connected with one of the Jewish terrorist groups in the Middle East; and second, the anti-British charges in the ad were not supportable by facts, and thus Sulzberger said he could not be responsible for the ill will that the advertisement in The Times would stir between Britain and the United States. “We happen to believe that the British are acting in good faith and not in bad faith,” Sulzberger wrote to one of the Zionist leaders. “From our standpoint, therefore, your advertisement is not true; but since there is no yardstick by which truth of this kind can be proved, it means that we are putting our judgment ahead of yours—something of which you will not approve and which we do only with the greatest hesitancy.”
By the time that George Ochs-Oakes’s son, John Oakes, became influential on The New York Times, the state of Israel had become a reality and The Times’ editorial page has been generally friendly to it in recent years, reaching a high point in 1967 when, during the Israeli-Arab war, The Times reminded the United States government of its commitment to defend the sovereignty and independence of Israel and even advocated the intervention of American military forces if the Israeli army needed help, which, as things turned out, it did not.The New York Times’ News department has also maintained for a number of years, and still maintains in the Nineteen-sixties, a full-time reporter who specializes in covering Jewish activities in America, a very sensitive assignment whose aims include, according to one editor, “keeping the New York Zionists off Sulzberger’s back.” And yet the old German-Jewish attitude that George Ochs-Oakes expressed more than thirty years ago, the disenchantment with American Jews who dwelled on their Jewishness, the desire that Jews blend into the American scene—this thinking on occasion still pervades the hierarchy of The New York Times. Veteran reporters in The Times’ newsroom have long been aware of higher management’s sensitivity to things Jewish. The editing and handling of stories that are about Jews or are of special interest to Jews is a bit more delicate and cautious, if such is possible to perceive—and even if it is not, the reporters’ mere supposition sustains some of the past consciousness of George Ochs-Oakes. The New York Times does not wish to be thought of as a “Jewish newspaper,” which indeed it is not, and it will bend over backwards to prove this point, forcing itself at times into unnatural positions, contorted by compromise, balancing both sides, careful not to offend, wishing to be accepted and respected for what it is—a good citizens’ newspaper, law-abiding and loyal, solidly in support of the best interests of the nation in peace and war.
