The Kingdom and the Power (30 page)

The rising anti-Semitism in America in 1915 was also manifested in the dramatic and controversial murder case of a Jewish factory superintendent in Georgia named Leo M. Frank—a story which was given extensive coverage by
The Times
. Frank was accused of murdering a fourteen-year-old girl, a factory worker, in 1913 when she tried to obtain a balance due of $1.20 on her wages. But since the facts were in doubt, the governor of Georgia commuted Frank’s death sentence to life in prison, arousing such hostility from mobs that the governor’s own life was threatened and it was necessary for him to call out the militia for his protection. In July of 1915, Leo Frank was slashed by a fellow prisoner attempting to cut his throat, and when this failed to kill him, a mob broke into the prison a month later and captured Frank, driving him in an automobile for about one hundred miles to a spot near the factory girl’s home, and there they hanged him from a tree. His death provoked a great counterprotest by Jewish groups and many others, all of which was reported by
The Times
in the same calm way that the newspaper had reported the events leading up to the mob’s action, including a description of the anti-Jewish sentiment that was then rampant in Georgia. Ochs did not quibble with the facts or with his paper’s duty to publish them, but they nonetheless filled him with a sense of conflict and gloom.

He had believed in Frank’s innocence, although he gave his editors the feeling that he was not impressed with Frank’s character. Ochs once said that Leo Frank was the sort of man who would feel cheated if denied the opportunity of making a speech from the scaffold. Ochs, as always, tried to see things from many angles, and he said that he could understand why many Georgians would be incensed by the handling of Frank’s case—there was the great pouring in of money and publicity from outside the state; the decision of the governor, formerly a member of the Jewish firm that defended Frank, to commute the death sentence a day or two before leaving office; the fact that the legality of Frank’s sentence had previously been confirmed by every court up to the United States Supreme Court. Ochs had hoped, however, that the anti-Jewish feeling was not as intense as it was reported to be in Georgia, a place he claimed as a Southerner to understand. But his judgment was
abruptly shaken by the news of the lynching of Frank, and the fact that the leader of the mob was a brother of a man who was Ochs’s personal friend.

Ochs was absent from the office for several days. Then he was back again and seemed in high spirits; but in May of 1916, Garrett’s journal noted: “He ought to rest for a year. His nerves are very bad. Little problems upset him, yet he is unhappy if they are solved without his advice. Always he has insisted on touching everything with his own fingers, and now either the touch or the lack of it seems a kind of torment. I believe he begins to feel what all the rest of us feel, namely, that
The Times
is too big and unwieldy to respond to the touch of any man.…” Still, when Ochs was absent, Garrett was aware that something very vital seemed to be missing from the daily editorial conferences. “None of us values his mental processes highly, and yet, he has a way of seeing always the other side that stimulates discussion, statement and restatement, and leaves a better product altogether than is approached in his absence. Mr. Miller, when he presides, sees only one side of a thing, and smothers any effort to discuss the other. His mind is closed. It was a better mind than Mr. Ochs’s, and still is, within the limits of its movement. But Mr. Ochs, for his lack of reasoned conviction, is all the more seeing. He can see right and wrong on both sides. He has a tolerance for human nature in the opponent.”

In June of 1916, to Ochs’s great surprise and regret, Garet Garrett resigned from
The Times
. Ochs called Garrett into his office and asked if the decision was irrevocable. Garrett replied that he had given his decision all the thought that it deserved, adding that none better than Ochs should understand the desire to help in the making of a thing—Garrett was going to the
Tribune
, a paper in the making;
The Times
was made. Thanks to Ochs’s genius, Garrett said,
The Times
was so well and solidly made that there was almost nothing an individual could do to it. Garrett confessed his impatience to do things, and it was hard to get anything done on
The Times
—anything new.

“But you will not be as comfortable on the
Tribune
as here,” Ochs said.

“I don’t expect to be,” Garrett said. “The trouble is that I am too comfortable here. The comfort is killing.” Ochs seemed surprised and Garrett suddenly asked, “Why don’t you buy the
Post
, and round out your career with an achievement in the way of a highbrow paper?”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Ochs responded enthusiastically. “I’ve often thought of it. I could make a big success of the
Post
. Just the announcement that I had bought it would add a million dollars to its value. I know exactly what I should do with it. I’d use only the AP news, and bother no more about that end of it; but I’d spend a great deal of money on features of correspondence, articles on art and music and literature and politics. But tell me one thing—how would that help
The Times
?”

“It wouldn’t help
The Times
,” Garrett said, “but what of that?”

“It would divide my energies,” he replied, “and in that way it would hurt
The Times
.” Then, as if remembering what Garrett had said about
The Times
being made, Ochs added: “I’ve hardly begun here yet.” That, Garrett thought, was Ochs’s dream—that he had yet a great deal more to do to
The Times
; the fact was that Ochs was afraid to do anything more.

“You do not realize it,” Garrett said, “but you yourself are limited in your own expression by the traditions of this great institution that your industry and genius have created.”

Ochs refused to believe that. Instead he talked of the great future of
The Times
, and of how futile the
Tribune
’s competition would turn out to be.

Garet Garrett did well on the
Tribune
but, being more a writer than a journalist, he was happier after he had left the newspaper business and was writing books and also critical essays for the
Saturday Evening Post
, where he acquired a national reputation. He kept in touch with his friends on
The Times
, however, including Adolph Ochs, and in 1921, as Ochs celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary as publisher, Garrett wrote in a letter:

Ochs was momentarily cheered by Garrett’s letter, it arriving at a time when he seemed almost incapable of contentment. He had reached the nadir of his depression late in 1918, two years after Garrett’s resignation, and he had been only slightly better since then. If any single event was responsible for Ochs’s condition it was probably the overwhelmingly negative reaction of readers to an editorial written by Charles R. Miller near the end of World War I. The Germans at that point were clearly being defeated in Europe, and the jubilant Van Anda, who was directing his correspondents like a general, plotting on his map each night their positions for viewing the next battle and Allied victory, telephoned both Ochs and Miller at their homes on Sunday, September 15, 1918, and announced, “This is the beginning of the end”—Austria had just proposed a nonbinding discussion of peace. Miller, responding to Van Anda’s enthusiasm, wrote an editorial on the subject from his home and telephoned it into the office. Miller’s editorial advocated consideration of the Austrian proposal for a “nonbinding” discussion of peace, adding: “Reason and humanity demand that the Austrian invitation be accepted. The case for conference is presented with extraordinary eloquence and force, a convincing argument is made for an exchange of views that may remove old and recent misunderstandings.… We cannot imagine that the invitation will be declined.… When we consider the deluge of blood that has been poured out in this war, the incalculable waste of treasure, the ruin it has wrought, the grief that wrings millions of hearts because of it, we must conclude that only the madness or the soulless depravity of someone of the belligerent powers could obstruct or defeat the purpose of the conference.”

No
Times
man, not Miller nor Van Anda nor Ochs, could have anticipated the reaction that resulted from the editorial. Suddenly, several hundred telegrams, telephone calls, public statements, and letters from around the nation arrived at the
Times
building charging the paper with selling out to an enemy that should be forced to surrender unconditionally. The jingoists in America damned
The Times
for “running up the white flag,” and the
Herald
began a circulation campaign under the slogan: “Read an American Paper.” President Wilson was reportedly enraged by the editorial, and he demanded that his aides find out whether or not
it had been cabled to Europe. It had. Within days the bitter reactions were coming into
The Times
from London and Paris, Rome and Belgium. In New York, the Union League Club, composed of many influential and powerful New Yorkers, men whose good will Ochs had sought above all others, scheduled a meeting to consider a public denunciation of
The Times
. Fortunately for the paper, tempers cooled within a week or so, and no public diatribe was issued, but this whole episode was shattering to Ochs. He felt that the entire institution was going under; all his work, his years of dedication to upright thinking and fairness, now, suddenly, was being demolished by a single editorial that he had not even read in advance of publication. Normally, Charles Miller’s editorial would have been reread in galley form by either Miller or some other editorial editor, and perhaps also by Ochs. But since Miller had written it from his home in Great Neck, Long Island, and since Ochs was spending the weekend at his summer place in Lake George, New York, and since the other editorial editors who were on duty over the weekend thought there was nothing startling about Miller’s words, the editorial was published without further consideration.

The next day, and for days afterwards, Ochs sat at his desk, stunned. Letters were piled high in front of him, telegrams and editorials from rival publishers were shown him, he could not believe that the editorial had provoked this violent response. Many of the letters attacked Ochs personally, as a Jew who was unpatriotic, as an internationalist with commitments abroad. Miller was also bewildered, and he quickly consulted the opinions of his friends outside
The Times
; one of them, President Charles Eliot of Harvard, agreed with Miller’s editorial on the whole, though finding a few phrases ill-chosen. Ochs was urged by his editors to reveal somehow that he had not read the editorial beforehand, but he replied, “I could not do such a thing. I have always accepted public praise and public approval of the many great editorials Mr. Miller has written for
The Times
. When there is blame instead of praise I must share that, too.”

Ochs did, however, arrange a private meeting with President Wilson’s confidant, Colonel Edward M. House. He explained how the editorial was published, emphasizing how
The Times
had been consistently patriotic and pro-Ally throughout the war. House responded with understanding, and the issue was smoothed over, but at the same time Ochs was nauseated by his own manner in
apologizing for
The Times
when he truthfully felt that there was nothing to apologize for; and when he returned to New York, he again spoke to his wife about retirement.

Now his daughter, Iphigene, was married, and immediately after the war his son-in-law, Sulzberger, and his favorite nephew, Julius Ochs Adler—his sister Ada’s son, who had graduated from Princeton and had received many decorations for his courage as a combat officer in Europe—had joined
The Times
. Ochs had also brought into
The Times
as its “executive manager” an old friend named George McAneny, who had been president of the Board of Aldermen in New York. McAneny’s duties were never precisely defined to the satisfaction of many editors, including Van Anda; officially McAneny was to concentrate on the newspaper’s most costly item, its procurement of paper, which had been rationed during the war, but it soon became clear that McAneny was expanding his interests within
The Times
, was perhaps being used by Ochs to contain the others, and soon Van Anda had passed the word to his subordinates on the third floor that McAneny’s questions were to be ignored. Ochs was aware of this, and very displeased, but he did nothing about it. McAneny would somehow have to overcome it by himself, Ochs confided to another friend, explaining that McAneny’s primary role on the paper was to be that of a “kind of moral background,” an individual who would not ever take over the paper—that power would remain within Ochs’s family—but rather would be a corporate consultant and family adviser should something tragic occur.

In December of 1918, a year after Iphigene Ochs’s marriage, Arthur Hays Sulzberger reported for work at
The Times
, still wearing his boots, spurs, and the rest of what was then the uniform of a second lieutenant in field artillery. Ochs sent Sulzberger down to see McAneny, and for the next year or so McAneny helped to guide Sulzberger through the New York plant as well as
The Times’
paper mill in the Bush Terminal building in Brooklyn. By 1921, it was obvious that Sulzberger had the capacity to learn the newspaper business, and George McAneny, who was making no profound impression on Van Anda and saw no real future for himself on
The Times
, resigned and later became chairman of the New York Transit Commission.