times of our times, The

Policy Review, Aug/Sep 2000 by West, Woody

Ochs was so mired in debt with his Chattanooga paper that he was practically a pauper. "So it was all the more remarkable that as his situation became more and more desperate, Adolph decided to dig himself out not only by acquiring another newspaper in order to generate income but by acquiring a newspaper in New York," write Tifft and Rose. "With his back against the wall - a position that always invigorated him - he determined to own a paper in the biggest, most competitive and sophisticated market in the country."

The New York Times, a paper established as a conservative counterpoise to Horace Greeley's Tribune, was sliding toward bankruptcy. With Western populism swelling, investors in the failing enterprise were eager to continue a conservative journal. Ochs, hearing of this situation, packed his bag for New York and set out to convince stockholders that he was capable of keeping the foundering ship afloat. "Now for the supremacy of gall for a country newspaper man burdened with debt!" he wrote to Effie.

He engineered a partnership in 1896 that would award him a majority stock interest if the company under his management showed a profit for three consecutive years. He fudged sales figures, played a wily game of bob-and-weave in promotion, and in a desperate tactic slashed the paper's price to one cent from three cents. Remarkably, by the end of 1898, his cleanly printed paper with its "elevated tone" had become a "paragon of respectability." It was selling 60,000 copies a day, then over 90,000 at the start of the new century. Revenues gained commensurately. Four years after taking over, the controlling stock of the New York Times belonged to Adolph Ochs.

OCHS CONSISTENTLY put profits back into the paper and earned a reputation for journalistic reliability and objectivity. "The blank impersonality of the New York Times conformed to his philosophy of good journalism; it also gave him a curtain behind which he could labor in relative safety. What Hearst, Pulitzer and Bennett sought was money, political power and notoriety; what Adolph sought was admiration."

As a peaceful transfer of power defines a stable polity, so does effective succession affect an institution. But Ochs procrastinated and dithered. His two obvious journalistic heirs were the man who had married his only child, Iphigene, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and his nephew, Julius Ochs Adler. The eventual choice of his son-in-law did not produce amity among the extended family - a pattern that would repeat itself. Ochs then created a trust that would insure that ownership of the newspaper would remain within the family (even after it would be taken public, decades later). The "trust" of the title obviously refers both to the stock agreement and to the family's sense of obligation to the institution.

Iphigene was rather a spoiled little rich girl, but one with a good head. Over the decades she would become the de facto power behind the editorial throne, her husband the (often resentful) operating generalissimo of the New York Times. Arthur Hays Sulzberger was, not to put too fine a point on it, a monster (the reviewer's judgment, not the authors'). He treated Iphigene with contempt, often denigrating her in front of others. A womanizer, he flaunted his extracurricular tootsies, especially a decades-long dalliance with British actress Madeleine Carroll, blatantly inviting her to the family estate, Hillandale, with his wife present.