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Adolph Ochs

1858–1935 · 77 years Tier II

A Cincinnati printer's devil who bought a bankrupt paper at 38

Portrait of Adolph Ochs — unknown artists — 1918 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Ochs was born in Cincinnati in 1858 to German Jewish immigrants who disagreed about the Civil War without ever separating over it — his father backed the Union, his mother the Confederacy. The family settled in Knoxville, where at 11 he was already an office boy at the Chronicle, and by 19 he had scraped together 250 dollars in borrowed money to buy a controlling stake in the failing Chattanooga Times. He never finished the schooling he squeezed in at night while clerking in a Providence grocery, and he apprenticed briefly as a pharmacist before going back to newspapers for good. Nothing about the Chattanooga years pointed toward New York.

In 1896, at 38 and warned by a reporter that the money-losing New York Times could be had cheap, he borrowed the funds to buy it for 75,000 dollars. He hired Carr Van Anda as managing editor in 1904, cut the price from three cents to one, and put All the News That's Fit to Print on the masthead as a direct jab at the sensational papers of Pulitzer and Hearst. Readership went from 9,000 to 780,000 within two decades. He moved the paper to a new tower on Longacre Square in 1904 and lit it up with fireworks on New Year's Eve, and the city renamed the square around it Times Square. He also owned the Chattanooga Times and, for a decade, the Philadelphia Public Ledger.

He borrowed the entire 75,000 dollars for the purchase and had no cushion if it failed. Profitability took years, and only the climb from 9,000 to 780,000 readers by the 1920s made the ambition look safe in hindsight. The starker tension sat in his identity. Ochs fought antisemitism his whole career, sat on the board of the Anti-Defamation League, and pressured newspapers nationwide to stop caricaturing Jews. At the same time he opposed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, a position that put him at odds with a growing share of the American Jewish community he otherwise spent his career defending. He never explained the two positions as a pair, in print or otherwise.

He died on April 8, 1935, visiting the city where he had started, and is buried at Temple Israel Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, not in Chattanooga or New York. The paper passed to his only child, Iphigene, and her husband Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and has stayed inside the same family for five generations since — through Dryfoos, the elder and younger Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, and now A. G. Sulzberger. The motto he put on the masthead in 1896 is still there, and so is the building-turned-brand of Times Square, though the paper itself moved out of it decades ago. The Chattanooga Times, the paper that made him, is no longer connected to the family at all.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Adolph Ochs's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Chattanooga Times company
Bought a controlling stake at 19 with 250 dollars borrowed from family 1878
The New York Times Company company
Bought for 75,000 dollars, all of it borrowed 1896
New York Times Tower building
On Longacre Square, renamed Times Square around it 1904
Philadelphia Public Ledger company
Owned until he sold it in 1912 1902
Mizpah Congregation Temple building
Built in Chattanooga in memory of his parents 1928

Life in brief

with age at each point

1869 aged ~11 Starts as an office boy at the Knoxville Chronicle at 11
1877 aged ~19 Borrows 250 dollars and buys a controlling stake in the Chattanooga Times He was 19.
1884 aged ~26 Marries Effie Wise, daughter of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise
1896 aged ~38 Buys the money-losing New York Times for 75,000 dollars
1904 aged ~46 Hires Carr Van Anda and moves the paper to Longacre Square The square was soon renamed Times Square.
August 18, 1921 aged 63 The Times marks 25 years under his ownership with 1,885 employees Up from a handful in 1896.
1928 aged ~70 Builds the Mizpah Congregation Temple in Chattanooga
April 8, 1935 aged 77 Dies in Chattanooga on a visit