Arthur Hays and Iphigene (Ochs) Sulzberger: The Throne and the Power Behind It eBook: Daniel Alef: Books
(Biographical profile of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, powerful ...)
Biographical profile of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, powerful publisher of The New York Times. During his reign as owner of The New York Times, Adolph Ochs brought the paper from obscurity to national prominence. When he died in 1935 there were two heirs apparent to his publishing empire, his only child, daughter Iphigene, and his nephew Julius Ochs Adler. Adolph Ochs left the power to decide in Iphigene’s hands, and she selected her husband, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, for the coveted spot. Award-winning author and syndicated columnist who has written and published over 300 biographical profiles of America's tycoons tells the story of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher who raised The New York Times to its present status at the apex of journalism. And Sulzberger's story is intertwined with that of Iphigene who held the real power behind the throne.
Arthur Hays Sulzberger was the publisher of The New York Times from 1935 to 1961. During that time, daily circulation rose from 465,000 to 713,000 and Sunday circulation from 745,000 to 1.4 million; the staff more than doubled, reaching 5,200; advertising linage grew from 19 million to 62 million column inches per year; and gross income increased almost sevenfold, reaching 117 million dollars.
Background
Arthur Hays Sulzberger was born on September 12, 1891 in New York, United States. Sulzberger was the son of Cyrus Lindauer Sulzberger, a cotton-goods merchant, and Rachel Peixotto Hays, from old and noteworthy Jewish families, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, respectively.
Education
Sulzberger graduated from the Horace Mann School in 1909 and graduated from Columbia College in 1913, and married Iphigene Bertha Ochs in 1917. In 1918 he began working at the Times, and became publisher when his father-in-law, Adolph Ochs, the previous Times publisher, died in 1935. In 1929, he founded Columbia's original Jewish Advisory Board and served on the board of what became Columbia-Barnard Hillel for many years. He served as a University trustee from 1944 to 1959 and is honored with a floor at the journalism school. He also served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1939 to 1957. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950. In 1954, Sulzberger received The Hundred Year Association of New York's Gold Medal Award "in recognition of outstanding contributions to the City of New York."
Career
From 1917 to 1919 he served in the U.S. Army as an artillery lieutenant. In 1917 he married Iphigene B. Ochs, the only daughter of Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the New York Times.
In 1919 Sulzberger joined the New York Timesas assistant to the general manager. He was given wide-ranging training and responsibility, and when his father-in-law died in 1935, Sulzberger was named publisher and president of the New York Times Company.
Under his leadership the New York Times circulation rose by 40 percent for its daily edition, and its Sunday readership nearly doubled. Sulzberger expanded the services, facilities, and staff of the paper. He extended its news coverage and analysis, photos, and features, introducing facsimile transmission in the 1920s and 1930s. Under his supervision, the paper began to publish Los Angeles and Paris editions with remote-control typesetting machines. He also built up the New York Times-owned radio station, WQXR, noted for its news and music.
As president of the New York Times Company until 1957 and its chairman from 1957 until his death, Sulzberger also took an active part in the operations of the Chattanooga Times, the Interstate Broadcasting Company, and the Spruce Falls Power and Paper Company of Canada, the largest newsprint producer in the world. From 1943 to 1952 he served as director of Associated Press, and from 1944 to 1954 as trustee of Columbia University.
Sulzberger trained his son-in-law, Orvil Eugene Dryfoos, to succeed him, and Dryfoos became publisher and president in 1961. He was succeeded by Sulzberger’s son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger.
Sulzberger, a practicing Reform Jew, who stood against Zionism and a Jewish state of Israel on principle has been accused by Laurel Leff of deliberately burying accounts of Nazi atrocities against Jews in the back pages of the Times. She alleges that Sulzberger went out of his way to play down the special victimhood of Jews and withheld support for specific rescue programs for European Jews.[6]
Sulzberger was an enthusiastic supporter of the American Council for Judaism, founded in June 1942 to oppose Zionism, giving it prominent coverage in his newspaper. In a 1946 speech, Sulzberger claimed that Zionism was to blame for some of the Jewish deaths in the Holocaust, and that the refugee crisis during the war had been “a manageable, social and economic problem” until “the clamor for statehood introduced an insoluable political element” into the issue. “It is my judgment that thousands dead might now be alive” if “the Zionists” had put “less emphasis on statehood”.
Connections
On November 17, 1917, he married Iphigene Bertha Ochs, the daughter of Adolph Ochs and Effie Wise (the daughter of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise). They had four children: Marian Sulzberger Dryfoos (born 1918), married to Orvil Dryfoos; Ruth Sulzberger Holmberg (1921-2017), publisher of the Chattanooga Times, married and divorced from Ben Hale Gordon; Judith Sulzberger Cohen (1923-2011), physician, married and divorced from Dick Cohen; and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (1926-2012).