The publication of Gerald Johnson’s full-length, heavily documented biography of the late Adolph S. Ochs, “the man who built the New York Times,” affords us an excellent opportunity to study one of the key figures of our era and the social surroundings that produced him. To be sure, one must read between the lines, but happily the writing there is quite legible.
It was patently the biographer’s intention to add Ochs’ portrait to a flattering gallery of “empire builders” that contains such magnificos, giants of finance and industry, as J. P. Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and James J. Hill. But his subject looks forth so anxiously from the gilded frame that Johnson has supplied as to make it clear he is not at ease there. The very title of the picture, An Honorable Titan (Harper, 1946), is misleading, and would have greatly embarrassed the late publisher, a modest man, in his lifetime.
“From the neck of the Typhon (the Titan),” says my book on mythology, “dispread themselves a hundred dragon heads; his eyes shot fire, and from his black-tongued chaps proceeded the hissing of snakes, the bellowing of bulls, the roaring of lions, the barking of dogs, pipings and screams, and at times the voice and utterance of the gods themselves.”
This might have applied to the elder Pulitzer or the younger Hearst, but hardly to Ochs, who was content with one head and a tongue no louder nor more versatile than was proper and respectable. Ochs avoided both the storming of Mt. Olympus and the descent into Tartarus. Amidst volcanic convulsions in the newspaper world, he sought a citadel of safety, and devoted his life to strengthening its bulwarks.
True, the citadel became a mighty fortress. But from its sally ports, none advanced to give battle. It was the London Times, not its New York simulacrum, that was the Thunderer.
Nevertheless, surveying the ramparts of the New York Times, admiring the excellence and strength of its scarps, ravelins, bastions, and abutments, Mr. Johnson is impressed. None but a giant, he reasons, could have reared this lofty structure. Accordingly, his chapter headings are monumental: “A Discourse on Titans . . . A Man Masters His Environment . . . The Man Increases in Wisdom and Stature. The Man Traffics with the Mighty . . . The Man Works Wonders. The Twilight of an Era . . . The Man is Sore Afraid.” There you have it—the Myth of a Hero, complete with Goetterdaemmerung. But, alas, the Hero will not cooperate!
“He [Ochs] was never either swinish or gaudy, which is to his credit as a man, but does nothing to assist the biographer in writing an interesting narrative. Indeed, by comparison with the lurid figures of his time, a quiet, hard-working, family man is downright drab.”
Ochs the Public Figure is just as proper and just as unspectacular, his faults and his virtues equally undramatic. “One looks in vain for those inspirations of genius that have immortalized great artists, great philosophers, and great soldiers.” Ochs’ philosophy was commonplace: success is the reward of honesty, industry, and common sense. His faith was not flaming: “I am willing to believe the things that give peace, hope, and plenty.”
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His one great achievement, the revival of the moribund New York Times, was the result neither of clear vision, lofty aspiration, nor any stirring struggle. “In the beginning,” observes Mr. Johnson, “no deal so colossal [as purchasing the Times] entered his mind.” The youthful Ochs was in hot water financially as a result of unwise speculations in Chattanooga real estate. But the Chattanooga Times, which he owned, was making money. Ochs thought he might extricate himself if he could get possession of another such profitable newspaper. A small-town paper, which he felt equipped to handle, was what he had in mind.
The New York Times fell his way almost by accident. Its great publisher, George Jones, had died; the staff was struggling, in a time of financial panic, to maintain it without a head. Ochs came to New York with only $75,000 (how he raised the money is still a mystery) and acquired control.
It was a neat and creditable deal. Mr. Ochs possessed in large measure the qualities he himself most admired: personal honesty, industry, and common sense. He was without question an able administrator. Also, he was an amiable man who made friends. They helped him.
From his predecessor on the New York Times, he inherited an excellent staff and a tradition of great respectability. He was in awe of both and did nothing to disturb them.
The master stroke that restored the waning prestige and dwindling finances of the Times was no scoop that made newspaper history, no stirring appeal to the masses of readers, no drastic change in policy. With sound merchandising instinct, he reduced the price of the paper from three cents to one, to enable it to compete in price with the penny dreadfuls of Pulitzer and Hearst. His associates opposed the change on the reasonable ground that the readers of the Times were respectable people and could afford the extra two cents. But Ochs knew his public. His own father had been poor but respectable. Ochs made his paper available to a growing lower-middle class—schoolteachers, librarians, ambitious bank clerks—and it became their Bible. Circulation mounted from 26,000 to 75,000, and advertising with it. The Times was out of the red!
And here perhaps is a clue to Ochs. We must not try to measure him against the giants of newspaperdom—Bennett, Munsey, Hearst, Pulitzer, McCormick, Villard. Rather, he was a merchandiser of news, and his place belongs with other great merchants—the Strauses, Gimbels, Bloomingdales, Kirsteins, Kaufmanns, Lazaruses, Younkers, Niemans, Marcuses—honorable purveyors of dependable goods at fair prices to the expanding American middle class. They were neither tycoons nor industrial empire-builders—to their credit, they did not claim to be.
Another of Ochs’ significant contributions was the motto: “All the news that’s fit to print.” Some laughed at this and others wondered what it meant, but none could deny that it sounded eminently respectable—a challenge to the yellow press. For Mr. Ochs and for the New York Times, respectability was an ideal.
But respectability is at best a minor virtue. Poets and moralists alike quarrel with it: the poets because of its curbs upon freedom of thought and action—”When was genius ever respectable?”—and the moralists because its temptation (perhaps its ultimate logic) in our kind of society is to accept the appearance of virtue for the thing itself. Ochs’ instincts were decent, but he was overwhelmed by Hearst’s magnificence and charmed by the fascist Grandi’s social graces; he paid, as his biographer sorrowfully notes, unseemly tributes to both. He had a naive faith in “responsible sources,” close to the seat of government. These betrayed him frequently, as when he accepted Wall Street’s estimate of the significance of the stock-market crash. “It cannot be too strongly emphasized,” says Mr. Johnson—and the reader can only concur—“that Adolph Ochs was not a seer.”
Nor was he a leader. Ochs’ Times was never a paper of strong convictions. Convictions lie outside the scope of mere respectability. Even the paper’s vaunted independence was all too often mere caution, a trimming of sails: too often, it lagged behind the march of events; too often, it supported interests already deeply entrenched. “While the Times followed the advance of American liberalism, it is indubitable that, like the Apostle Peter, it followed ‘afar off,’ ” says Mr. Johnson. And often fled at the first assault, he might have added.
What then made the Times a great newspaper? Again we may safely quote Mr. Johnson: “There have been other men who equaled or surpassed his [Ochs’] organizing ability, his news sense, his resourcefulness and his driving energy, but no publisher in American journalism has surpassed his sense of responsibility to his country, to his readers, and to his men.”
This responsibility was almost an obsession with Ochs. Under his aegis the Times became more than a newspaper; it became a newspaper of record, printing in full and at considerable cost all important contemporary speeches and documents for history’s later use. No paper has ever surpassed the Times in its extensive coverage of the news. Ochs created the Times Index and the Dictionary of American Biography as non-profit-making adjuncts of the Times, and purely in the public interest. He started a business, and developed a public institution.
Indeed, he built a veritable temple, a journalistic cathedral dedicated—alas!—to a Roman deity, Status Quo.
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Ochs was a Jew. That was his real background. He would have denied that his Jewishness entered into his conscious calculations, but just the same it was an important factor in making the Times the kind of paper it became—the most un-Jewish of newspapers, to be sure. There is a dynamism of recoil, a positive of the negative, an affirmation in denial. “Religion,” Ochs stoutly insisted, “is all I stand for as a Jew. I know. . . of no other definition for a Jew except religion.” His biographer quotes this statement as a triumphant proof of Ochs’ undiluted Americanism. But, the world being what it is, a fellow Jew can only smile.
Whether Ochs’ religion was in essence Jewish, whether it did not more closely approach the hazy theology of a church deacon or a Sunday-school superintendent, is arguable. His own biographer is wary on the subject. “His theology was of the sketchiest and he was shaky on dogma. Jew or no Jew, he cheerfully accepted the dictum of Christian St. James: ‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’ “ An excellent doctrine but hardly one to distinguish Christian from Jew, or to justify the distinction that Ochs set such store on as the one and only hallmark of his Jewishness. But that is not the point. Jewishness may be less a conviction than an experience—an unfortunate one for many people.”
Ochs neither escaped this experience nor rose above it. It is much easier to establish his place in the Jewish community than it is to define his relationship to the American community as a whole. The pattern of his drinking was all too familiar: it was that of the conventional, class-conscious German Jewish group (a clannish one) to which he belonged.
These “Yahudim,” as the East Europeans called them, half in awe, half in mockery, were in Ochs’ day a singularly homogeneous group, to the subjective eye scarcely to be distinguished one from the other in manners, ideas, customs, or appearance. They did not mix socially with the East Europeans, worshiped in a decidedly different manner, in a temple instead of a synagogue, and married only among themselves; intermarriage with a Polish or Lithuanian Jew would almost have been miscegenation. Earlier immigrants, they had made their fortunes rapidly in this country, then a land of unlimited expansion and unrivaled business opportunity, and they soon forgot—or tried to forget—the peddler packs and the basement tailor-shops that gave them their start. They acquired well-rounded waistcoats and the dignity that goes with them. To the newly arrived East Europeans, the Yahudim were the gentry. To the Yahudim, the ragged newcomers were an embarrassment.
In pronouncing himself “Jew by religion only,” Ochs was merely voicing the theory prevalent among his kind. It was a theory convenient, among other things, for distinguishing themselves from the uncouth hordes of East Europeans, with their clamorous outlandish ideologies, their doctrines of Russian socialism, their dreams of Zion.
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It Was the fate of Ochs’ group, nevertheless, to find itself more involved in Jewish secular affairs, communal matters, and inner politics, than the theory allowed. German-Jewish philanthropy made itself responsible for the welfare—if not the conduct—of the later immigrants, “their less fortunate co-religionists,” as the saving phrase went. Ancestral ties were not to be denied altogether. Or might not the wretched plight and the consequent social behavior of the newcomers reflect unfavorably upon the status of the wealthier and more established German-Jewish community, which remembered shudderingly how only yesterday it was itself regarded?
Whether for these or better reasons, it must be admitted that some elders of the German-Jewish community plunged deep into Jewish affairs. Schiff, Marshall, Straus, Felix Warburg—to name a few—are remembered today by the Jewish masses as much for their Jewish warmth as for their philanthropies. They founded excellent Jewish institutions, hospitals, charities, and welfare agencies. Their generous aid did not stop there, but extended overseas to relieve the plight of distressed Jews the world over, and even to share in the upbuilding of Palestine. (Parenthetically, no one ever questioned their Americanism.)
In all fairness, too, it must be stated that a newer generation of Yahudim has arisen whose interest in communal Jewish matters is deep and unapologetic—it is their more courageous answer to anti-Semitism. Ochs, however, remained strictly old-line. He sought, first to last, to be consistent with the older philosophy. “He was aware of the distressed condition of the Jews in many countries of Europe, and he admitted his obligation to relieve that distress as far as he could, but he flatly denied that the obligation rested upon him as a Jew. In sending his subscription of $25,000 to the Jewish fund for the relief of the distressed Jews, he filed a protest against the policy of calling it a Jewish fund and of confining subscriptions to Jews. . . ”
Mr. Ochs balanced this uneasy contribution with his munificence to Hebrew Union College, seminary of creedal Reform Judaism—that being permissible—and by a propitiatory offering of $10,000 to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, “for the purchase of a pair of magnificent candlesticks.”
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A Catholic Irishman, contributor to the I.R.A. and marcher on St. Patrick’s Day, would not have found such a gesture necessary. Mr. Ochs’ anxiety about divided loyalties betrayed the too-nervous Jew. One might even add that it revealed the hyphenated character of his Americanism. For the unqualified American inclines, if anything, to boast of particularism. The Southerner damns the interference of other Americans in his regional affairs, though these be vital to the Constitution and our theory of government. The Texan openly avows himself a race apart. The Westerner threatens to secede from the Union. One might go on: Anglophiles want union now with Great Britain, miners defy government injunction for higher wages, and manufacturers withhold essential goods from the public for higher prices. This, some even say, is America—both its pride and its peril, certainly its tradition, and perhaps its danger.
At any rate, the American citizen has always considered it his prerogative to further the interests of his special group, whether defined by race, color, religion, or politics, with the proviso only that his highest loyalty be to his country as a whole. Nor can it be said that Ochs served no special interests. But what he permitted the capitalist, he denied the Jew. And in this, perhaps, he was remiss in his highest responsibilities as a citizen and as a man. For while all his life he asserted the glories and primacy of American citizenship, he accepted for himself and for his fellow Jews the principle of second-class citizenship, the guest-in-the-house theory of Jewish existence in the Diaspora. It was a theory that strongly paralleled the Zionist argument. It was a theory that could only serve to limit his contributions to his country.
For a guest-in-the-house is a bound conservative. He cannot criticize the household arrangements, scold the cook, or participate, except as peacemaker, in family quarrels—at least not if he wishes to remain welcome. Mr. Ochs’ political independence was the product of caution; his lagging liberalism evidenced fear. He could be neither a staunch conservative nor yet a forthright liberal. Ma yomru ha-goyim— what will the Gentile say?
Mr. Ochs’ Jewish humility extended even to the New York Times. It is to be questioned that he ever felt he owned the paper, in the sense that Pulitzer (a Jew of a different sort) owned the World, or Hearst the Journal, or in more recent years, Colonel Patterson the News. Rather he operated it in fee for services rendered. He was a good and faithful servant: for the five talents entrusted to his care, he returned ten. But whom actually did he serve? Was it the truth, or even the search for truth? Or was it that vague approximation called the “public interest”? As a Jew, his loyalty was to God. But did he serve his God or the high priests in the Temple? One thing is certain: he missed none of the authorized devotions.
The doctrine of stewardship is an aristocratic one, provided no intermediary is admitted between a man and his God. Ochs bore indeed a strange halfhearted resemblance to an aristocrat, puzzling until one remembers the prototype—the medieval figure of the Hofjude, the court Jew of Polish and Westphalian nobles, stately in appearance and yet so deferential, admitted to the councils but barred from the feasts. That Ochs should have been overwhelmed by the invitation to San Simeon—he whose single newspaper towered over Hearst’s whole empire—is then not surprising.
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Ochs, as we have said, was not an isolated phenomenon. He is dead, but his successors on the Times carry on with the same devotion and, too often, in the same spirit. We are even given to understand that the loyalty of the present owners of the Times, Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Julius Ochs Adler, to their Americanism does not permit them—with or without reservations—to contribute to the United Jewish Appeal, devoted to overseas and refugee aid, and the up-building of Palestine. To be sure, the UJA has the support of the chief editorial writer of the Times— but he is not a Jew.
This refusal is within the rights and privileges of Sulzberger and Adler, but, nevertheless, it defines them. They do but improve upon the early pattern of their group—a Jewish pattern. In vain they protest, for they protest too much.
A similar, or perhaps even stronger, case in point is that of the good people who lead the American Council for Judaism. “Jews by religion only,” their interest in Zionism should be a weak one. But no, they oppose it with almost psychopathic fury. For them Bevin is too Zionist, and President Truman as well. To be sure, many Americans, even Jews, view with misgivings the political aims of the Zionist movement, but none with the passionate wrath of these people who, by their own definition, should simply have contented themselves with being non-Zionists, like most Americans who are not Jews.
Can it be that behind this agitation is the fear that the conduct of their fellow guests may threaten their own uncertain tenure? One is reminded irresistibly of Jimmy Durance’s story of the flies who were permitted to settle on his nose without being molested. Unfortunately one of them—no fly really, but a bee—settled himself too emphatically, whereupon, as Durante tells the story, he yelled out: “There’s always got to be a wise guy! Just for that the whole bunch of yez gets off!”
Was it not such an uneasiness that led to the proposal that Felix Frankfurter pass up his right to sit on the Supreme Court bench, lest a Jew make himself conspicuous and provoke the malice of the anti-Semites?
May we not find here an explanation of the cultural uncreativeness of the group? These otherwise excellent and able people have defaulted on the kind of leadership in this democracy that their probity and responsibility might entitle them to. Being cautious Jews, they cannot be bold Americans. No household could ask for more proper guests, no lord for better stewards. They make excellent public servants, obeying all the rules, leaning backwards to exonerate themselves from the charge of originality or pathfinding. But, by the same token, they cannot lead. They fire no popular feelings. They head no popular movements. Unimaginative and uninspired, they contribute very little to culture—either Jewish or American. One may safely patronize their hospitals or their department stores.
But if one seeks far-visioned or courageous political leadership—or if one wants to read a book. . .
How else? “What will the Gentile say?” is hardly a slogan by which a people may express itself, or contribute its particular and useful genius to others. Too great a desire to please leads often to impotence—in politics as in love.
How long, one wonders, will it take these particular Yahudim to believe in their heart of hearts what they so stubbornly profess to believe—that America means liberty and equality for all men, even Jews?
There may be room and reason for their scepticism. Not all Americans read the Constitution aright, and the American ideal has not been fully realized for Negroes and Jews and other minority groups. But the right, so unreservedly granted by the Founding Fathers, and fought for, must not be yielded up out of weakness and fear.
One is tempted to say to these cautious Jews: You have been told again and again, gentlemen, that this is your home, that here all are equal. You profess to believe this, and so you should, though some deny it. Relax. Take off your shoes, loosen your collars. Breathe and speak freely. This is America, not Germany, and it belongs to you as surely as it belongs to Bernard Baruch, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Mrs. Ogden Reid, Nicholas Murray Butler, or Mrs. Dorothy Schiff Thackrey.
