Last weekend Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and former writer for the Grey Lady, Michael Goodwin conducted a well researched, stunning expose’ documenting “…the many links between the family that owns the New York times and the Civil War Confederacy….”.
Here are just a few of his findings. “Bertha Levy Ochs, mother of Times patriarch Adolph S. Ochs supported the South and slavery.” In his own words, her son wrote, “Robert E. Lee was her idol.”
Berta’s brother Oscar and at least two cousins fought in the rebel army. Adolph Ochs’ “Southern sympathies” bled into editorials in the 20th Century NY Times. One opinion piece claimed the Democrat Party “may justly insist that the evils of negro suffrage were wantonly inflicted on them.”
In 1906 the Gray Lady glowingly profiled Confederate President Jefferson Davis on the 100th anniversary of his birth, labeling him “the great Southern leader.” In 1924 Mr. Ochs made a $1,000 contribution to the now controversial Stone Mountain Memorial in Georgia. It celebrates Davis, Lee, and Stonewall Jackson.
“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.”
In last week’s column, Mr. Goodwin cautiously wrote he was “aware of no evidence or claims that any members of Bertha (Ochs’) family-owned slaves or participated in the slave trade.”
This Sunday he penned, “That statement in no longer accurate.”
He found “compelling evidence” that an uncle she lived with did indeed own 5 slaves. Apparently Bertha was unmoved, “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….”.
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Goodwin has also unearthed powerful evidence an ancestor of the Sulzberger branch of the NY Times family was actually involved in the slave trade business. Abraham Seixas was born in New York City and moved to South Carolina “where accounts describe him as a slave merchant and/or auctioneer.”
A 1784 Charlestown newspaper, ran an especially, even by the standards of the day, dehumanizing Seixas ad, featuring a poem, shilling the sale of …“Some Negroes”…
Mr. Goodwin rightfully opines that any paper with such an activist, “tear down the statues, rewrite the textbooks, make America the world’s bad guy” agenda “better be purer than Caesar’s wife. He continued, “The Times clearly fails that test and owes its staff, stockholders, and readers a full account of the slaveholders and Confederates in its past.”
Let’s see if this type of scrutiny affects the holier than thou NY Times the same way it’s impacted other institutions.
Maybe “cancel” Times Square and rename it Fredrick Douglas Plaza?
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