The Kingdom and the Power (26 page)

“I hope not,” Truman said. “I don’t believe in it. What’s that word about four feet long? Miscegenation?” Truman, still walking, swinging his cane, then turned to the reporter and asked, “Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro?” When the reporter responded that he would want his daughter to marry the man she loved, Truman said, “You haven’t answered my question,” adding, “Well, she won’t love someone who isn’t her color. You’ll edit the man she goes out with. I did. And mine married the right man.”

All of this was published the next morning in
The Times
, on an inside page under a small headline, the story not failing to mention
in the second paragraph that Truman had long been “an advocate of integration in other respects,” and also mentioning that the “right man” that Margaret Truman had married was Clifton Daniel of
The New York Times
.

When Catledge is asked his views on miscegenation, as he sometimes is during his travels out of town, he replies that this subject is not really his main concern at the moment:
his
concern, he says in a mockingly confidential manner, is that his daughter wants to marry a certain
white
man that he does not like. (She did marry the man, and now is divorced.) But Turner Catledge, who is quick at anticipating a question before it is asked, usually sidesteps such flippancy, regarding all aspects of the Civil Rights movement as too important to be discussed seriously with those who badger him most about it. Even at
The Times
, Catledge manages to keep his private thoughts largely to himself, sometimes parrying a sharp question with humor, at other times remaining aloof—as he was this afternoon, sitting in the conference room listening to the cultivated voices of two younger Southerners, Daniel and Sitton, newbreed city slickers, discussing the latest malefaction in Mississippi; listening until the day’s conference had ended and Daniel had said to the departing editors: “Thank you, gentlemen.”

Catledge has not lived in Mississippi in almost forty years. Now he is a New Yorker, indulging in the sweet urban life that the most successful of Southerners adapt to so quickly, patronizing the better restaurants, knowing all the head waiters by name, living in a large luxury apartment on the East Side where it is the New York landlords who uphold segregation, having honed it down to a fine and polished art. Catledge’s second marriage, to a wealthy and attractive New Orleans widow whom he met nine years ago at an editors’ convention in San Francisco, is a happy one. He is now earning about $100,000 a year, has a wide and interesting circle of friends. He is not a big celebrity, nor did he ever wish to become one, preferring to function within the corporate code, but his name is nevertheless known in nearly every newsroom in America, and he is regarded with respect and a certain awe by the most powerful politicians in New York and Washington. He has fulfilled,
at sixty-five, and long before attaining that age, the most fanciful dreams of his youth, and he has felt at home in a very tough town that a young transplanted Mississippi friend of his, Willie Morris, calls the Big Cave.

But emotionally, Catledge remains a Southerner. He still speaks with a Southern accent that gets thicker with each drink. He can become sentimental to the point of mawkishness, even dewy-eyed, when reminiscing late at night about his days in the South, memories of the farm, the friends he had, black and white, down in the red-clay hill country of central Mississippi in Neshoba County, named after an Indian tribe, but now better known as the place where, on a lonely country road in 1964, three young Civil Rights workers—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney—were slain one by one in a Ku Klux Klan conspiracy that, according to the FBI, involved Neshoba County’s chief deputy sheriff.

There is little resemblance between the South that Catledge knew as a boy and the South that he now reads about in his newspaper—but this is, as he would not care to admit, partly the fault of journalism. Journalists concentrate on isolated incidents, current confrontations, printable news that fits—they leave historical perspective to others, and they leave the pleasanter side of any place to the memory of those who predate disorder and press coverage, people like Catledge whose South no longer exists except when resurrected by an old familiar word that jumps up at him from his newspaper,
Neshoba
, or when there is printed a fact or a name that is otherwise linked to the Mississippi of his mind.

This morning’s
Times
, for example, carried a military article by Hanson Baldwin that makes reference to General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest was a Confederate cavalry officer who, among other things, tried to defend Selma in 1865 against the invasion of 9,000 pillaging Union soldiers, including a regiment of Negroes. Though Forrest failed, he remains a revered name in the Deep South, a hero to thousands of young Southern boys, including James G. Clark, who in 1965 was Selma’s sheriff and its symbol of segregation.

Turner Catledge’s maternal grandfather, James Turner, rode with Forrest’s cavalry. To ride with Forrest an aspirant had to have a horse, a saddle, a saber, and had to contribute two sides of bacon. These James Turner possessed and he eagerly joined, fighting with Forrest’s troops in Mississippi and Tennessee, battling Union soldiers whose ranks possibly included the paternal grandfather of
Harrison Salisbury. If so, it was quite appropriate that these two ancestors of
Times
men should be on opposite sides of the Civil War—for
The New York Times
’ staff itself was divided, two
Times
men having quit the paper to join the Confederate Army. The publisher of
The Times
, however, behaving like a publisher of
The Times
, remained equivocal. He was not in favor of slavery, but he was not violently opposed to it, either. His name was Henry Jarvis Raymond, and he had much in common with Adolph Ochs, who would buy
The Times
thirty-five years later—Raymond, like Ochs, wanted to keep all doors open, not to be caught too far out on a limb. As Raymond wrote: “There are very few things in the world which it is worth while to get angry about, and they are just the things that anger will not improve.”

Henry Jarvis Raymond, born on a farm in upstate New York in 1820, a graduate of the University of Vermont, was a politician. He had worked as a reporter and editor for Horace Greeley’s
Tribune
and other papers, but political life was more enticing, and in 1850 Raymond was a New York State Assemblyman, a Whig representative. But when he learned in 1851 that his former employer, Greeley, had made a $60,000 profit the year before, Raymond quickly reconsidered the virtues of journalism; and with another onetime employee of Greeley’s
Tribune
, George Jones, who had become a small but successful banker in Albany, Raymond began to enlist the financial support of people who shared his enthusiasm for a paper that would be politically conservative and temperate in taste. There was a market in New York for such a paper, Raymond thought, the other newspapers being either too socialistic or scandalous, and the city was also greatly expanding in prosperity and population. Though churches still towered over the rooftops of the city, and though New York itself was a town of half-a-million centered mostly in lower Manhattan, being semirural above Fourteenth Street and with animals and farms sprawled not far from what is now Times Square, the harbor was teeming with large sailing vessels unloading cargo and thousands of immigrants from Ireland and Germany, future consumers and cops and parents of Ochs. It was relatively easy for Henry Raymond and George Jones to raise $70,000 to start
The Times
, which began publishing in the fall of 1851, and the paper was almost immediately successful.

Printed and produced by a few dozen staff members in a narrow brownstone in downtown Manhattan,
The Times
’ first edition, a four-page paper with small single-column headlines, reported the
news with a detachment and calm that would characterize the paper through the next century. Its first edition featured news from Europe, most of it lifted from the more respectable London journals, as well as news from around the nation—such as a fugitive slave riot in Lancaster, Pennsylvania—and several short items of local interest, e.g.:

The Times
’ circulation approached 10,000 within a fortnight, 26,000 within a year, and 40,000 by 1857. The coming of the Civil War, as it did with nearly all newspapers, accelerated the growth of
The Times
, which had reached a circulation of 75,000 by 1861. The war also intensified readers’ interest in late-breaking news to a point where it quickened the pace of news gathering and forced such papers as
The Times
to produce an edition not merely six days a week, but also on Sunday.
The Times
’ first Sunday edition appeared in the spring of 1861, ten years after the paper began, and ten days after the attack on Fort Sumter.

In many ways, the coverage of the Civil War was a more difficult and dangerous assignment than any to be faced by latter-day war correspondents of
The Times
. In this era before the handout and headquarters briefing—and the credibility gap—correspondents often wrote only what they saw with their own eyes. Of course, these eyewitness accounts usually gave a very limited view of the war, but on occasion they were grandly revealing and it was not uncommon for
Times
readers to get important war news before even President Lincoln had received it officially.

The defeat of the Confederates at Franklin, Tennessee, appeared in
The Times
four days before the War Department had received word of it.
The Times
also prematurely disclosed the news of Sherman’s march from Atlanta to the sea, an exclusive that might have produced disastrous results for the North had
The Times
’
circulation wagons in the South not been slower than Sherman’s army. One night when Generals Grant and Meade were conversing privately in a tent, they heard noises in the bushes which, upon inspection, turned out to be a
Times
man lying on his stomach scribbling notes. Raymond himself covered the first battle of Bull Run, with some assistance from
The Times
’ Washington bureau, and saw enough of the battle to be convinced that the North would easily triumph and march into Richmond. After filing a dispatch that indicated this, Raymond returned to the battlefield to discover that the Union forces had been beaten back. Quickly, he rewrote his story and had it sent to Washington to be filed, but a Union censor intercepted it, and after this experience Henry Raymond retired from war reporting and returned to where he belonged, in New York.

While Henry Raymond was a personal friend of Lincoln’s—he was a leader in the campaign that reelected Lincoln, and he remained active in politics throughout his editorship of
The Times
, which he sometimes neglected as a result—
The Times
’ coverage of the war was as objective as it could be, and some
Times
readers in the North accused it of being pro-South.
The Times
’ controversial correspondent in Charleston, a spiritual sire of Herbert Matthews and Harrison Salisbury, was constantly berated in letters as a “secessionist” and Rebel propagandist, but this suddenly stopped when, after he had been caught making notes while watching the bombardment of Fort Sumter, he was arrested by the South as a Federal spy. He spent a day or two in jail, and then was released and told to take the next train northward, forfeiting his watch and wallet to the jailkeeper.

The
Times
building itself was threatened by a New York mob in the summer of 1863 during the draft riots, a time when angry young men protesting conscription burned houses, wrecked stores, and shot at policemen. Henry Raymond, among other publishers, denounced the protest and called for law and order, writing in
The Times
: “Were the conscription law to be abrogated tomorrow, the controlling inspiration of the mob would remain the same. It comes from sources independent of that law, or of any other—from malignant hate toward those in better circumstances, from a craving for plunder, from a love of commotion, from a barbarous spite against a different race, from a disposition to bolster up the failing fortunes of the southern rebels.”

After Greeley’s
Tribune
building had had its windows smashed,
and might have been greatly damaged had not the police fought back the mob, Raymond supplied his staff with rifles and gave them permission to fire upon invaders. Raymond also obtained from the War Department, largely because of his friendship with Lincoln, two Gatling guns, which were mounted just inside
The Times
’ business office under the supervision of a
Times
stockholder named Leonard Jerome, a grandfather of Winston Churchill. A third Gatling gun was installed on the roof of the five-story
Times
building, which occupied the triangle between Park Row and Nassau and Beekman Streets, near Greeley’s building. But
The Times
was never approached.

After the war,
The Times
’ popularity and prosperity went into temporary decline because Raymond was devoting too much time to politics—he had become a Republican Congressman, was chairman of the Republican National Committee—and also because his attitude, which opposed vindictive punishment of the South, offended the radical Republicans who had gained control of the party. But although some advertising was withdrawn and circulation fell for a while, Raymond’s
Times
continued as before, calm, uncontentious, undramatic—it announced Lee’s surrender with a single-column headline, as it did Lincoln’s assassination, and except for its campaign against Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, which occurred after Raymond’s death and before Ochs’s takeover.
The Times
did not involve itself with crusades.