The New York Times’s Confederate Connections

Michael Goodwin (New York Post) has an excellent article looking at the history of the New York Times, and its Confederate connections that it now finds so offensive in others.

… 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.

Adolph Ochs bought the struggling Times in 1897 and was the man who made it into what it is today. He was from Chattanooga, Tennessee. His father, Julius, had served in an Ohio regiment during the war and his sympathies were decidedly Unionist. His wife, Bertha, was a different story. She was a passionate Confederate supporter, who was busted (or threatened, accounts differ) for smuggling quinine to the Rebels. According to the story, she hid the contraband in baby Adolph’s carriage. At her funeral, at her express request, her coffin was draped with a Confederate flag. They must have had some interesting dinner conversations.

There is much more. Goodwin concludes:

In any other company …. 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.

As they say, read the whole thing.