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.

On 2022-05-10 10:46 AM, Ubiquitous wrote:
> 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."
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
I think the lyrics of a Supertramp song perfectly describe the
likelihood of any such inquiry happening: