The Kingdom and the Power (29 page)

Three weeks after Ochs began,
The Times
printed its first illustrated Sunday magazine, a handsome supplement with halftone photographs that was immediately popular with readers. It featured such events as the opening of the opera season, the horse show, the good life in New York as well as occasional looks at royalty abroad, such as Queen Victoria’s jubilee in June of 1897, to which Ochs devoted sixteen pages and a fifty-photograph layout of the spectacle.

And so Adolph Ochs, an inwardly spunky man, an outwardly formal man who called everybody “Mister”—he even addressed his clerks in this manner and insisted that
The Times
do likewise in its second reference to people in the news, a policy followed to this day in
The Times
except in the cases of criminals and athletes—Mister Ochs began to succeed in New York and his paper began to find an audience among the rising middle class in a city of three million. But then the Spanish-American War began, and Ochs faced a new problem.

In the months leading up to the war, Ochs’s
Times
had opposed American involvement in Cuba and had urged caution on President McKinley. Now, however, with the sinking of the battleship
Maine, The Times
was suddenly out of concert with an incensed public and it was also being overwhelmed by the dramatic style in which other newspapers, principally Pulitzer’s
World
and Hearst’s
Journal
, were covering the war. Ochs did not yet have enough money to compete with Pulitzer and Hearst, who were dispatching boatloads of reporters, photographers, feature writers, and artists to obtain eye-witness accounts and sketches of the heroes and villains.
The Times’
coverage was limited to Associated Press dispatches and the mail correspondence of two
Times
men, and Ochs knew that if he wished to increase his circulation, indeed if he wished to maintain it, he had to think of something fast.

It was then that he decided to cut the price of
The Times
from three cents to one cent. His editors were appalled, warning that
The Times
was putting itself in the same class as the flamboyant penny journals. But Ochs insisted that
The Times
would maintain its dignity, adding that there were undoubtedly many respectable readers in the one-cent field who would switch to
The Times
, or read
The Times
in addition to other newspapers, if its price were lowered. Ochs perhaps also sensed the financial difficulties that Pulitzer and Hearst were having because of their extravagant and competitive coverage of the Spanish-American War. There had been rumors that both Pulitzer and Hearst were hopeful of reaching an agreement whereby both could go up to two cents. But when Ochs cut his price, Pulitzer and Hearst were forced to abandon any such plan. Had they gone up to two cents in spite of Ochs, he might have followed them, but perhaps he would not have gone up until he had cut deeply into the penny market. So Pulitzer and Hearst had to hold on, and they were forced to do so for twenty years, until the coverage of World War I proved so expensive that all three publishers were obliged to charge two cents. But by that time, Ochs’s paper was preeminent.

In a single year, from September of 1898 to September of 1899, Ochs’s one-cent edition had increased its daily average circulation from 25,726 to 76,260, and the advertising kept pace. Ochs’s circulation was more than 100,000 in 1901, more than 200,000 in 1912, more than 300,000 in 1915. Ochs’s staff, under its managing editor, Carr Van Anda—whom Ochs had hired away from the
Sun
in 1904—excelled in covering World War I as it had excelled in its coverage
of aviation and polar exploration, finance and politics, prior to the war.
The Times
was the first American paper to publicize and patronize Guglielmo Marconi, and because of his wireless service,
The Times
obtained exclusive American rights to stories of naval battles off Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904.

Although
The Times
, along with most other papers, had ignored the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, Carr Van Anda from then on pursued stories about aviation with unremitting aggressiveness. When the
World
put up a $10,000 prize for an Albany-to-New York flight, Van Anda, confident that Glenn Curtiss would win it, hired a special train for
Times
reporters and instructed them to follow Curtiss’ flight down along the Hudson River, which
The Times’
reporters did, and thus they reported Curtiss’ flight more thoroughly than did the staff from the
World. The Times
itself sponsored many flights within the United States as well as becoming the patron of several explorers, the most notable being Commodore Robert E. Peary, discoverer of the North Pole in April of 1909, and Roald Amundsen, discoverer of the South Pole in December of 1911.
The Times’
edition of April 16, 1912, its front page completely devoted to its exclusive coverage of the sinking
Titanic
, was a high point in the personal career of Van Anda and it also added to the growing prestige of Ochs. His paper was now expanding so rapidly that in 1913 he had to vacate the Times Tower building, a thin 22-story trapezoid on Forty-second Street into which he had moved from Park Row in 1904, and to transfer most of his operation into a new building on Forty-third Street, which has since been enlarged and remains the paper’s headquarters today.

Ochs had borrowed $2.5 million in completing his Tower, which was inspired by Giotto’s campanile in Florence, and Ochs was a long way from repaying the loan when, in 1913, a victim of his growth, he had to buy new machinery and occupy the larger quarters; and his situation was further complicated by the fact that the Equitable Life Assurance Society, one of his creditors, was suddenly under investigation by a legislative committee.
The Times
covered this investigation thoroughly, many of its stories being written by a reporter named Percy Bullock. One day Bullock was visited at his desk by a little man wearing a Panama hat, and while Bullock paused long enough to answer the man’s questions about the investigation, a newly hired editor, Frederick T. Birchall, irritated by the delay that Bullock’s conversation was causing in the writing
of the story, jumped up and quickly walked down the aisle to Bullock’s desk and snapped, “Mr. Bullock, you may entertain your friend some other time. I want that insurance piece right away.” Bullock, rising, said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Birchall.” Then, nodding toward the man with the Panama hat, Bullock added, “Let me introduce you to Mr. Ochs.” Birchall shook hands, but continued impatiently to Bullock, “Finish that story, laddie, get along with it.” Ochs apologized to Birchall, explaining that he did not realize that the deadline was so close, and then Ochs quietly left the newsroom.

Ochs remained concerned, however, about his involvement with the insurance company and what the Hearst or Pulitzer papers might write should they discover that
The Times
was in debt to Equitable. Finally Ochs approached Marcellus Hartley Dodge, a member of the industrial family that had lent Ochs $100,000 in 1896, and Dodge now arranged for a loan of $300,000 that helped Ochs repay Equitable. As collateral, however, Ochs offered his majority of
Times
stock. This was kept for eleven years in Dodge’s vault. In 1916, when Dodge needed money, Ochs repaid the loan. This transaction was kept secret until years after Ochs’s death.

In the spring of 1916, Ochs was fifty-eight and he had been publisher of
The Times
for twenty years. The anniversary was marked by a small ceremony in his office in which he received an ornate leather album, hand-lettered and illuminated, medieval style, that contained tributes from the staff. Some of those who congratulated him on that day had worked on
The Times
even before he had bought it—Charles R. Miller, for example, the editor of the editorial page, a very large and stodgy man with a white Vandyke beard, and Edward August Dithmar, an old bulbous man who had joined
The Times
in 1877, two years after Miller, and liked to boast that he had read every issue of
The Times
from its very beginning in 1851. There were also Louis Wiley, Ochs’s business manager, a small energetic flatterer who always told Ochs what Ochs wished to hear; Ben C. Franck, Och’s corporation secretary, confidant, and cousin, who had been brought up from Chattanooga to help keep a family eye on the business; Henry Loewenthal, Ochs’s financial editor, who had given Ochs the idea of publishing regularly a column of names, “Arrival of Buyers,” which helped to establish
The Times
with retailers and advertisers of the garment industry; Frederick Craig Mortimer, a severely crippled man, a scholar and littérateur who each day selected a poem for
The Times’
editorial page and also wrote an anonymous essay, “Topics of The Times,”
which was continued for decades after his death by various contributors (including
Times
copyboys wishing to display their writing talent and earn $25 per column); but in the Nineteen-sixties, slowly and unobtrusively, John Oakes published fewer and fewer “Topics,” and today Frederick Craig Mortimer’s innovation has almost entirely disappeared from
The New York Times
.

The celebrants in Ochs’s office in 1916 also included, of course, the managing editor, Carr Van Anda. Van Anda, like Charles R. Miller and a few other top aides, was a stockholder. Ochs was proud of Van Anda and recognized his genius, but Ochs was sometimes also fearful and resentful of Van Anda’s power and fame, a fact that Ochs once confessed to a younger
Times
man whom he especially liked, not realizing that this person was then keeping a memoir of Ochs’s private thoughts. For example, on July 7, 1915, at a large luncheon marking Miller’s fortieth year on
The Times
, the memoir noted how Ochs, after standing to praise Miller, felt obliged to compliment Van Anda, who was also seated at the dais, calling Van Anda “the greatest news editor in the world”—the writer of the memoir adding: “And I knew all the time that Mr. Ochs is dissatisfied with the greatest news editor in the world and is planning to limit his authority in the organization by playing up another man against him, if another equal to the work and equal at the same time to the superhuman task of combating Van Anda can be found. I was intended perhaps to go in that direction, but I have gone more into the editorial region than into the news field.…”

The writer of this journal was named Garet Garrett. He was a brilliant, highly opinionated editor with a sense of humor and detachment, blue eyes, sharp features, and an elegant style in dress. At thirty-seven, Garrett was probably the youngest member of
The Times’
editorial council, and Ochs was impressed by his quick mind, which often challenged the thinking of older
Times
editors, and Ochs also liked the fact that Garrett was not so blindly pro-British as the others. Ochs was very sensitive in 1915 to rumors that
The Times
was partially controlled by British interests, that Lord Northcliffe of
The Times
of London could almost dictate Ochs’s friendly policy toward England and its opposition to Germany. Actually, Ochs was neutral in 1915, as was most of the nation; he regarded the war as a European affair and did not want the United States to be drawn into it. When a
Times
reporter had interviewed Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1908 and had quoted the German leader as being contemptuous of Britain and predicting that Germany would
someday go to war against Britain, Adolph Ochs, after consulting with President Theodore Roosevelt, decided not to publish the interview; it would undoubtedly inflame American opinion, and Ochs and Roosevelt both agreed that the impulsive Kaiser did not really mean all that he had said in the interview. Ochs did not want passion in his news columns. He wanted
The Times
to publish with objectivity both the British and German sides of the news. But some of his editors were emotionally incapable of this complete objectivity in 1915, and because Ochs was not always aware of this and because he was also reluctant at times to overrule such men as Van Anda, the treatment of the news was subtly slanted in Britain’s favor. “
The Times
prints a very great deal of pro-German stuff and yet, the cumulative typographical effect of the paper is extremely anti-German,” Garet Garrett wrote in his journal on June 29, 1915. “You can’t prove it on any one day. It is the continuing effect that comes from having day after day unconsciously accepted the
Times
appraisal of news values—that is, reading that which is more displayed with greater interest and attention than that which is less displayed.” One evening Garrett visited the newsroom and asked Van Anda’s assistant, Frederick T. Birchall, a British citizen, if he realized what editorial power lay in the control of news display. “Yes, I know,” Birchall said. “Let me control the headlines and I shall not care who controls the editorials.”

Another subject that troubled Ochs at this time was the anti-Semitism that he personally began to feel through the hate mail that was reaching him in such volume that he finally decided to post a guard in the corridor leading to his office and also to install two plainclothesmen in the main lobby of the
Times
building.
The Times
was now being referred to in letters as a “Jewish newspaper,” and one day in 1915 Ochs warned his city editor, Arthur Greaves, not to give too much space to the American Jewish Committee’s call for a campaign to aid Jews in the war zones of Europe. “I don’t approve of it,” Ochs said. “They work to preserve the characteristics and traditions of the Jew, making him a man apart from other men, and then complain that he is treated differently from other men. I’m interested in the Jewish religion—I want to see that preserved—but that’s as far as I want to go. There’s Brandeis,” Ochs continued. “He’s become a professional Jew. A few years ago hardly anybody knew he was a Jew. He had never taken part in any Jewish movement. When President Wilson was forming a
cabinet and somebody told him he ought to have one Jew on it, and suggested Brandeis for Attorney General, Wilson said, ‘But he isn’t a Jew.’ And when Brandeis heard that, he apparently resolved to become Jewish.”