The Kingdom and the Power (15 page)

Adolph Ochs was three years older than George, the first in a family of three sons and three daughters. They were a remarkable combination of conflicting character, of strong dissent nearly always overcome by a stronger devotion to each other; they were the progeny of German Jews who had met and married in the American South before the Civil War, parents whose political allegiances clashed during the war—their father, Julius Ochs, was a captain in the Union Army; their mother, Bertha Ochs, was loyal to the South and was accused, with some justification, of being a Confederate spy. Their family may well have been separated in later years if Adolph, the child genius, had not at the age of twenty begun to buy and build newspapers that would become towering totems of nepotism, elevating and shaping his family, his grandchildren, nephews, cousins, and in-laws for almost an entire century, committing them to an orthodoxy stronger than their religion—and establishing Adolph Ochs as their benefactor, a little father-figure even to his own father.

Julius Ochs, who immigrated to America in 1845, was a wise and well-educated man of many talents, but making money was not one of them. He was a fine guitar player, an amateur actor, a
classically educated student of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew and fluent in English, French, and Italian. He had been born in 1826 in the Bavarian city of Fürth, in southwest Germany, a cultured and relatively tolerant city with a large Jewish community that, while well respected, was denied certain civil rights and privileges. These restrictions, however, did not apply to Julius Ochs’s family, which had lived and prospered in Fürth for several generations. In the old Jewish cemetery in Fürth there were tombstones of Ochses going back to 1493. Julius Ochs’s father had been a successful diamond broker, also a linguist and Talmudic scholar, and his mother was a handsome and refined woman who had nine children, Julius being the youngest. During Julius’ second year at a military academy in Cologne his father died and Julius’ older brother, becoming head of the family, withdrew him and placed him in an apprenticeship with a bookbinding firm. Julius rebelled and in the spring of 1845 he left Fürth with a friend, tramped to Bremen, and sailed on a full-rigged ship across the Atlantic, arriving seven weeks later in New York. He first settled in Louisville, where two of his sisters were living and where a brother-in-law, refusing to subsidize Julius’ reentry into college, put him to work as a peddler. He soon quit that and later found a job teaching French at a girls’ seminary at Mount Sterling, Kentucky. When war was declared against Mexico in 1848, Julius Ochs enlisted and, because of his military background in Germany, was made a drill sergeant, but the war ended before his unit was sent to the front. He spent the next several years trying to find work that would suit his intellectuality and wistful idealism and curb his restlessness, but he never found it, being neither very determined nor very lucky, and so his life was one of travel and variety between New York and New Orleans. He was a road salesman for a jewelry company, owned and operated dry-goods stores, organized small theatrical clubs; he dabbled in small-town politics and held municipal government jobs; he occasionally served as a rabbi in marriage ceremonies, and during his ventures into Mississippi he played the guitar at plantation parties. In Natchez, Mississippi, where he briefly settled and ran a store, he met an attractive, somewhat dogmatic young woman named Bertha Levy.

Born in Landau, Bavaria, she was then living with an uncle in Natchez, having been sent there by her father so that she could escape prosecution from German authorities following her role, while she was a sixteen-year-old student in Heidelberg, in political
demonstrations at the graves of several martyrs of the revolutionary uprisings of 1848. Julius Ochs met her in 1851 but his stay in Mississippi was too brief for any romance to flourish, and three years later, during the yellow-fever epidemic in the Mississippi valley, he read in a newspaper list of the dead the name Bertha Levy of Natchez. Two years later, at a reception in Nashville, Tennessee, he saw her again; yes, she had been very ill, she said, but as a final desperate attempt to save her life the doctors had resorted to ice-packing, and now she was fully recovered and living in Nashville with her parents, recently immigrated from Bavaria. Within a year, Bertha Levy and Julius Ochs were married. Three years later, in March of 1858, in Cincinnati, where Julius Ochs was based as a traveling salesman, was born the future publisher of
The New York Times
, Adolph Ochs.

Julius Ochs joined the Union Army when the Civil War began, becoming a captain in a battalion assigned to guard the railroad between Cincinnati and St. Louis. His wife stayed with him during the war but she remained intensely loyal to the South. On one occasion a warrant for her arrest was issued after she had been caught by Union sentries while attempting to smuggle quinine, hidden in the baby carriage of her infant son George, to Confederate troops positioned on the opposite end of a bridge across the Ohio River. This put Captain Ochs in a most embarrassing and crucial situation, requiring of him a performance far more persuasive than any he had been able to demonstrate during his career as a salesman; but he somehow managed to get a senior officer whom he knew to dismiss the warrant, an act of generosity that inspired no sign of gratitude from Mrs. Ochs. She persisted in her dedication to the Southern cause and way of life, being unappalled even by its system of slavery, and years later when the family settled in Chattanooga she became a charter member of the local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy. Before her death, which came in 1908 during her seventy-fifth year, she requested that a Confederate flag be placed on her coffin, and this was done. Next to her grave, on a knoll overlooking the city of Chattanooga, is that of her husband; he died in 1888 in that city and, as he instructed, his funeral was conducted by the Grand Army of the Republic with the Stars and Stripes placed on his coffin.

Such displayed partisanship and commitment to causes, particularly to lost causes, never enticed their son Adolph. He was a
hard worker, an unfanciful middle-of-the-road thinker who saw no virtue in offending one faction to please another. He wished to do business with all groups, offending as few people as possible. He was a truly precocious young man who recognized early the aimless, varied course of his father’s life, and he set out to concentrate on
one
thing, to stay with it, succeed with it. This vehicle for him was the newspaper business, which promised some of the prestige and excitement that he sought, and an opportunity to follow in the tradition of his boyhood hero, Horace Greeley, who rose from a farm in New Hampshire to the ownership of the
New York Tribune
.

Ochs began at fourteen by sweeping the floors of the
Knoxville Chronicle
. Three years before he had been a newsboy at the
Chronicle
but had left to earn a bit more money as an apprentice in a drugstore, then as an usher in a theater, finally as a clerk in his uncle’s grocery in Providence, Rhode Island, attending business school at night. He was bored by these jobs, experiencing none of the exuberance he had felt during his newsboy days at the
Chronicle
office; and so in 1872, when he applied to the
Chronicle
for a fulltime job, and was hired as an office boy, he decided that newspapers would be his life’s calling and his parents did not attempt to dissuade him. Ochs’s nature, combining the idealism of his father and the
chutzpa
of his mother, seemed well suited to the running of a newspaper. It might have led him into politics, where he could have fulfilled some of the social-worker spirit within him, but the spotlight would have distracted him and overemphasized the awkwardness he felt whenever undue attention was focused on him. He was acutely aware of his limitations, both educationally and socially, and he was forced to compensate in an endless variety of ways even after he had achieved greatness at
The New York Times
, or possibly
because
he had achieved this greatness. He would usually smile or grin after delivering a comment or observation to his editors so that, should it seem inane or be in some way wrong, it might appear that his words were not really meant to be taken all that seriously. At times his grammar was faulty, his words poorly chosen, but he balanced this by an enthusiasm for detail and an enormous sympathy and tolerance for subject. His mind was always quietly at work challenging the obvious, and this was true even when he was driving through the countryside and stopped to ask directions; he never accepted the directions without asking if he could not also get to the same place by taking a different route. He was both cautious and
optimistic, sentimental and tough, a short, dark-haired, blue-eyed little man who, when someone observed that he resembled Napoleon, replied, “Oh, I am very much taller than Napoleon,” and yet he was very humble. He was a modest organizer of grand designs, possessing a sure insight into human nature and into what would sell, and still he was dedicated to the old verities that in another age would mark him as “square.” But he truly believed that honesty was the best policy, and he honored his father and mother and was never blasphemous, and he was convinced that hard work would reap rewards.

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
news
paper 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.