JOHANNES
EISELE/AFP via Getty Images
It’s far worse than I thought. In addition to the many
links between the family that owns The New York Times and the Civil War
Confederacy, new evidence shows that members of the extended family were
slaveholders.
I've recounted that Bertha Levy Ochs, the mother of Times
patriarch Adolph S. Ochs, supported the South and slavery. She was caught
smuggling medicine to Confederates in a baby carriage and her brother Oscar
joined the rebel army.
I have since learned that, according to a family history,
Oscar Levy fought alongside two Mississippi cousins, meaning at least three
members of Bertha’s family fought for secession.
Adolph Ochs’ own “Southern sympathies” were reflected in
the content of the Chattanooga Times, the first newspaper he owned, and then
The New York Times. The latter published an editorial in 1900 saying the
Democratic Party, which Ochs supported, “may justly insist that the evils of
negro suffrage were wantonly inflicted on them.”
Six years later, the Times published a glowing profile of
Confederate President Jefferson Davis on the 100th anniversary of his birth,
calling him “the great Southern leader.”
Ochs reportedly made contributions to rebel memorials,
including $1,000 to the enormous Stone Mountain Memorial in Georgia that
celebrates Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. He made the donation in
1924 so his mother, who died 16 years earlier, could be on the founders’ roll,
adding in a letter that “Robert E. Lee was her idol.”
In the years before his death in 1931, Ochs’ brother
George was simultaneously an officer of The New York Times Company and a leader
of the New York Chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
All that would be bad enough given that the same family
still owns the Times and allows it to become a leader in the movement to
demonize America’s founding and rewrite history to put slavery at its core. As
part of that revisionism, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham
Lincoln are suddenly beyond redemption, their great deeds canceled by their
flaws.
But shouldn’t such breathtaking self-righteousness
include the responsibility to lead by example? Shouldn’t the Times first clean
out the Confederates in its own closet?
That was the question last week. It is now more urgent
because of the new information.
A week ago, I was “aware of no evidence or claims that
any members of Bertha’s family owned slaves or participated in the slave
trade.”
That statement is no longer accurate. I have found
compelling evidence that the uncle Bertha Levy Ochs lived with for several
years in Natchez, Miss., before the Civil War owned at least five slaves.
He was her father’s brother and his name was John Mayer
because he dropped the surname Levy, according to a family tree compiled by the
Ochs-Sulzberger clan some 70 years ago.
Mayer was a store owner and prominent leader of the small
Jewish community in Natchez and, during the war, organized a home-guard unit,
according to family letters and historians.
Neither the 1860 census nor its separate “slave schedule”
lists the names of Mayer’s slaves. They are identified as two males, ages 70
and 26, and three females, ages 65, 45 and 23.
That makes it likely that Mayer had slaves when niece
Bertha lived with him for several years before she married Julius Ochs in 1853.
Mayer and his wife had 14 children and were affluent enough that it would have
been unusual if they didn’t own slaves, according to Robert Rosen, author of
“The Jewish Confederates.”
Bertha, who came from Germany as a teenager, might have
been horrified by the experience of witnessing and being served by human
chattel. Instead, she fully embraced the barbaric practice and became devoted
to the “peculiar institution.” She was a charter member of a Daughters of the
Confederacy chapter and requested that a Confederate flag be draped across her
coffin, which it was.
Separately, there is also compelling evidence that the
brother of a Revolutionary War-era ancestor of the Sulzberger branch of the
family was involved in the slave trade.
His name was Abraham Mendes Seixas, and he was born in
New York City in 1750. He was an officer in the Continental Army during the
war, then stayed in South Carolina, where accounts describe him as a slave
merchant and/or auctioneer.
“The Final Victims,” a 2004 book about the slave trade by
James McMillin, reprints a poem published in a Charleston newspaper in 1784
advertising an upcoming sale.
It reads in part:
“Abraham
Seixas . . . He has for sale, Some Negroes, male
“Will
suit full well grooms,
“He
has likewise Some of their wives
“Can
make clean, dirty rooms.
“For
planting, too, He has a few
“To
sell, all for cash, . . . or bring them to the lash.”
A few lines later, Seixas adds, “The young ones, true, if
that will do.”
The discovery of these lurid histories gives me no
pleasure. The Ochs-Sulzberger family is a great American family that has served
our nation in war and peace since its founding. Ochs himself turned the
struggling New York Times into the gold standard of journalism and the paper
under his heirs often took great risks to defend the First Amendment.
I will forever be grateful to the lessons I learned
during my 16 years there. But it was a different paper then, one where
standards of fairness were enforced and reporters’ biases were left on the
cutting-room floor.
Now the standards are on the cutting-room floor, with
every story dominated by reporters’ opinions. The result is a daily train wreck
that bears little resemblance to the traditions of what used to be a great
newspaper, trusted because it was impartial.
Even worse, the Times has moved beyond overt partisanship
to declare itself the decider of all things relating to race. Its 1619 Project insists that slavery was the key to the
nation’s founding, and that the war for independence was primarily about perpetuating
white supremacy.
This narrative is deeply misguided, according to a long
list of top historians. Yet the paper is not deterred, and has ramped up its
demonization of any who disagree with that or its reckless support for the
Marxist-inspired Black Lives Matter agenda.
Handcuff the cops, tear down the statues, rewrite the
textbooks, make America the world’s bad guy — that’s what today’s Times is
selling.
Anyone with such an activist agenda better be purer than
Caesar’s wife. The Times clearly fails that test and owes its staff,
stockholders and readers a full account of the slave holders and Confederates
in its past.
My hope is that after taking a dose of their own
medicine, the owner and editors will focus their efforts where they belong: on
making The New York Times a great newspaper again.
____________________
RELATED
ARTICLE
Why
New York Times praises ‘cancel culture’ but skips over its own racist history
By Michael Goodwin
Times
patriarch Adolph S. Ochs contributed money to Confederate memorials the paper
now finds so objectionable. Getty Images
In a recent article about Mount Rushmore, The
New York Times said of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham
Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt that “each of these titans of American history has
a complicated legacy.”
Reporters Bryan Pietsch and Jacey Fortin casually
summarized the woke herd’s litany of grievances: Washington and Jefferson owned
slaves, Lincoln was “reluctant and late” to issue the Emancipation Proclamation
and Roosevelt “actively sought to Christianize and uproot Native Americans.”
Rushmore’s sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, didn’t escape
unscathed. “Borglum had been involved with another project: an enormous
bas-relief at Stone Mountain in Georgia that memorialized Confederate leaders,”
the reporters wrote.
There was little in the story that was remarkable, and
that was the point. The Times, as the chief media cheerleader for the chaos
unfolding across the nation, routinely eviscerates America’s heroes, its
culture and, through the paper’s 1619 Project, its founding.
Four years after it abandoned its traditional standards
of fairness to try to defeat Donald Trump, the paper is now fixated on
rewriting the story of America. The drive-by attack on the Rushmore presidents
was part
of its cancel-culture agenda.
Yet the Times has never applied to its own history the
standards it uses to demonize others. If it did, reporters there would learn
that the Ochs-Sulzberger family that has owned and run the paper for 125 years
has a “complicated legacy” of its own.
That legacy includes Confederates in the closet — men and
at least one woman who supported the South and slavery during the Civil War. In
fact, Times patriarch Adolph S. Ochs contributed money to the very Stone
Mountain project and other Confederate memorials the Times now finds so
objectionable.
To be clear, I detest the Times’ determination to judge
and revise history using criteria conceived 20 minutes ago. The paper’s
Marxist-inspired activism and race-based fetish have taken it so far off course
that it no longer functions as an actual newspaper.
Having spent my formative journalistic years at the Gray
Lady, I came away with immense respect for the editors’ commitment to fair and
impartial news coverage. That commitment started with Ochs, who, from the day
he took control of the Times in 1896, insisted on a strict separation of news
and opinion, a tradition that lasted more than a century. It was those
traditions — fairness and safeguards against reporters’ bias — that gave the paper
its credibility and made it the flagship of American journalism.
But those days are gone, with the standards eroded slowly
at first and then abolished under
current Executive Editor Dean Baquet. Every story these days is an
editorial as the paper demands that every institution and individual conform to
the Times’ views, or be denounced as racist, homophobic, Islamophobic and misogynistic.
Because of the Times’ exceptional influence, its demagoguery is playing a major
role in shredding the fabric of our country.
At the very least, the paper ought to be honorable enough
to apply its freshly minted standards to its own past. If it did, I believe the
owners, editors, reporters and stockholders would be shocked by what they
discover.
Perhaps then they would understand that their company was
built and run by people who, while great in some respects, shared many of the
views and flaws they now self-righteously condemn in others.
The legacy complications begin with Ochs, a Tennessee
businessman who took control of the struggling New York Times when he was just
38 years old. He already owned the Chattanooga Times, which he called a conservative
Democratic newspaper — at a time when nearly all black citizens in the South
were Republicans. As Ochs put it when he took control in 1879, the Chattanooga
paper would “move in line with the conservative democracy of the South.”
He and his descendants continued to own the paper until
1999, including during the enforced segregation of the Jim Crow era. An example
of the Chattanooga Times’ tenor involves the infamous Scottsboro Nine case of 1931, which
involved false allegations of rape against nine black teens by two white women.
An editorial was headlined “Death Penalty Properly Demanded in Fiendish Crime of Nine Burly
Negroes,” and the paper’s trial reporter called the defendants “beasts
unfit to be called human,” according to “Racial Spectacles,” a 2011 book on race,
justice and the media.
When Ochs came to New York, he brought his Southern
sympathies with him. Ten years after he took over The New York Times, it ran a
glowing profile of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy during the
Civil War. The 1906 article was billed as a “Celebration of the Davis Centenary” and was published on
“the anniversary of the great Southern leader’s death.”
Ochs’ parents, Julius and Bertha Levy, were German Jewish
immigrants who met in the American South, yet had very different views on
slavery.
While living with an uncle in Natchez, Miss., Bertha
developed a fondness for it, a fact noted in family histories.
In “The Trust,” a 1999 authorized biography of the
Ochs-Sulzberger families, authors Susan Tifft and Alex Jones write that Julius
had witnessed slave auctions and described them as a “villainous relic of
barbarism,” but Bertha “embraced a contemptuous antebellum view of blacks, and
for the rest of her life was dogmatically conservative, even reactionary.” She
was, they said, determined to preserve “the South’s peculiar institution.”
One of her descendants referred to her as “that
Confederate lady.”
I am aware of no evidence or claims that any members of
Bertha’s family owned slaves or participated in the slave trade.
During the Civil War, Bertha had at least one brother who
joined the rebel army, and she herself was suspected of being a spy. On one
occasion, she was caught smuggling medical supplies from Ohio into rebel-held
Kentucky.
At the time, the family was living in Cincinnati, where
Adolph was born in 1858, and a river separated the border states. Gay Talese,
in his 1969 book on the Times, “The Kingdom and the Power,” recounts that Bertha had been
threatened with arrest after she was caught taking quinine and other supplies
over a bridge into Kentucky.
According to Talese and others, Bertha hid the contraband
in a baby carriage.
In later years, Adolph Ochs and his younger brother,
George Washington Ochs, each claimed to be the baby in whose carriage their
mother hid the contraband. In 1928, The Confederate Veteran magazine admired
Bertha’s boldness, writing that “for a Mother of Israel to defy her husband and
an entire army was no mean assertion of militant feminism in those days.”
Her husband, however, was rattled by the smuggling, and
Julius, who had served in the Union army, moved the family to Tennessee in
1864, an unusual migration to a Confederate state while the war still raged.
After Adolph took over the Chattanooga Times, brother
George became active in local and national Democratic politics. He was
appointed police commissioner, was twice elected mayor, then ran the library
and school system. During all those years, Chattanooga was strictly segregated
and was the scene of several notorious lynchings of black men.
In the last several years before his 1931 death, George,
who had changed his name to Ochs-Oakes, simultaneously served as an officer of
both The New York Times Company and the New York Chapter of the Sons of
Confederate Veterans.
Meanwhile, Julius Ochs had died in 1888, and Union army
vets who attended the funeral draped an American flag over his coffin.
But as Robert Rosen noted in his 2000 book, “The Jewish Confederates,” Bertha’s 1908 funeral was
different. “She was a charter member of the A.P. Stewart Chapter of the United
Daughters of the Confederacy and members of her chapter attended the funeral,”
Rosen wrote, adding: “Her coffin was, at her request, draped with the
Confederate flag.”
Adolph, the family star and breadwinner, is said to have
been especially close to his mother. In 1924, 16 years after her death, he
donated $1,000 so her name would be engraved on the founders’ roll of the Stone
Mountain Confederate Memorial in Georgia, which features enormous carvings of
Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on horseback.
According to Civil War Times magazine, Ochs enclosed a
letter with his donation in which he said of his mother: “Robert E. Lee was her idol.”
The magazine says Ochs helped to fund Confederate
cemeteries in Tennessee, Confederate Veterans’ reunions and the Chickamauga
& Chattanooga National Military Park. It also says his newspapers published
numerous editorials “and commemorative editions dedicated to Confederate
veterans’ activities.”
Ochs was a generous philanthropist in Chattanooga and in
1928 donated land and a reported $100,000 to build a new temple there. The
building still stands and the Julius and Bertha Ochs Memorial Temple serves
about 200 Jewish families.
Seven years later, Ochs died suddenly on a visit to
Chattanooga. For his funeral, the United Daughters of the Confederacy “sent a
pillow embroidered with the Confederate flag to be placed in his coffin,” Civil
War Times reported in 2012.
The same article, by Dr. David J. Jackowe, sparked an
uproar when it claimed that certain ceramic tile patterns in the Times Square
subway station were meant to echo the Confederate flag and were put there to
honor Adolph Ochs and his Southern sympathies. The station was built in the
basement of the Times’ first Midtown tower, which led the city, at Ochs’
request, to rename what had been Long Acre to Times Square. The station was
reportedly remodeled in 1998, but numerous examples of the pattern — a blue “X”
against a red and white background — remained.
After The
Post reported on the controversy in 2015, the MTA denied any
Confederate connection, with a spokesman saying, “It is a geometric pattern,
not a flag design.”
Yet in 2017, after violence broke out in Charlottesville,
Va., over the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, the MTA switched
signals. Now it promised to change
the subway tile design so that it is “absolutely crystal clear” that
it has nothing to do with the rebel flag.
New Yorkers can make up their own minds because the MTA,
per usual, never finished the job, as a Post photographer proved last week.
In a long, flowery tribute after his death, the
congressional record of the House said, “The story of Mr. Adolph S. Ochs . . .
was the story of The New York Times. They are inseparably woven.”
Arthur
O. Sulzberger Jr., Chairman and Publisher of the New York Times.Reuters
Indeed they are, largely because Ochs was determined to
keep the paper in his family well beyond his life. He and his wife, Effie
Miriam Wise, the daughter of a prominent Cincinnati rabbi regarded as the
founder of Reform Judaism, had one child, daughter Iphigene. But Ochs rarely
hired female reporters, and there was little chance Iphigene would become the
next publisher. The job went to her husband, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and then
to their son-in-law, Orvil Dryfoos.
Upon his death, Iphigene’s son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger,
became publisher. The men-only pattern continues to this day, with Arthur Ochs
Sulzberger Jr. following his father. His son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, now
holds the job. That makes five generations of white male heirs running the
Times, all chosen under the protection of an unusual trust that allows family
members to retain majority control of the board of directors.
A.G.
Sulzberger speaks onstage at the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 29th Annual
International Press Freedom Awards on Nov. 21, 2019, in NYC.
It’s hard to think of any other important American
company — a public one at that — with such a long line of family succession,
but it’s easy to imagine how the Times’ social-justice warriors would treat any
other firm that even tried.
Moreover, with the exception of the last two top editors,
all others were white men. Before Baquet, who is black, there was Jill
Abramson, who
was fired after three years. The paper’s last public editor, Liz Spayd,
said she was struck by the “blinding whiteness” of the staff when she first
entered the newsroom. The Times, like many other corporations of all kinds, has
been sued by black employees charging racial discrimination.
In any other company, and with so much wealth accumulated
by one family, that record would be fair game for the paper’s journalists,
especially given the Confederate connections. In that spirit, it’s time for the
Times to clean out its closet and live by the standards of purity it demands of
others. For a thorough, honest examination of its checkered past, the paper
should assign a team of its top investigative reporters to the project.
They would get total access to corporate leaders and
documents and be free to interview their colleagues. Their marching orders
would be to examine the Times in the same way they would examine any other
institution, which means they are free to use anonymous quotes. In effect, the
paper would be taking a big dose of its own medicine.
Whatever the results, they should be published on the
front page, under the motto that Adolph Ochs put there in 1897: “All the news
that’s fit to print.”
Then, hopefully humbled and cured of its supremacy
delusion, the Times could get back to being a real newspaper and report the
news instead of fomenting chaos and division.
Adolph
S. Ochs is shown as a baby, held by his mother, Bertha Levy Ochs, 1858.
