The Name of the Wind New York Times Review

Information technology's far worse than I thought. In addition to the many links between the family that owns the New York Times and the Civil War's Confederacy, new evidence shows that members of the extended family unit were slaveholders.

Last Sunday, I recounted that Bertha Levy Ochs, the female parent of Times patriarch Adolph S. Ochs, supported the South and slavery. She was caught smuggling medicine to Confederates in a infant railroad vehicle and her blood brother Oscar joined the rebel ground forces.

I have since learned that, according to a family history, Oscar Levy fought alongside two Mississippi cousins, significant at least three members of Bertha'south family unit fought for secession.

Adolph Ochs' ain "Southern sympathies" were reflected in the content of the Chattanooga Times, the commencement paper he owned, and and then the New York Times. The latter published an editorial in 1900 saying the Autonomous Party, which Ochs supported, "may justly insist that the evils of negro suffrage were wantonly inflicted on them."

Six years afterwards, the Times published a glowing profile of Confederate President Jefferson Davis on the 100th anniversary of his nascence, calling him "the swell Southern leader."

Ochs reportedly made contributions to rebel memorials, including $1,000 to the enormous Rock Mount Memorial in Georgia that celebrates Davis, Robert Due east. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. He made the donation in 1924 and so his female parent, who died 16 years earlier, could be on the founders' whorl, adding in a letter of the alphabet that "Robert E. Lee was her idol."

In the years before his death in 1931, Ochs' brother George was simultaneously an officer of the New York Times Visitor and a leader of the New York Chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

John Mayer, whose niece married Adolph Ochs

All that would exist bad enough given that the aforementioned family however owns the Times and allows it to become a leader in the move to demonize America'southward founding and rewrite history to put slavery at its core. As role of that revisionism, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln are suddenly beyond redemption, their great deeds canceled by their flaws.

Just shouldn't such breathtaking cocky-righteousness include the responsibleness to pb by case? Shouldn't the Times first clean out the Confederates in its ain closet?

That was the question last week. It is at present more urgent considering of the new information.

A week ago, I was "aware of no evidence or claims that any members of Bertha's family owned slaves or participated in the slave merchandise."

That statement is no longer accurate. I have plant compelling prove that the uncle Bertha Levy Ochs lived with for several years in Natchez, Miss., before the Civil War owned at least five slaves.

He was her father'south brother and his proper noun was John Mayer considering he dropped the surname Levy, according to a family tree compiled past the Ochs-Sulzberger clan some 70 years ago.

Mayer was a store possessor and prominent leader of the small Jewish community in Natchez and, during the war, organized a abode guard unit, according to family letters and historians.

Neither the 1860 demography nor its separate "slave schedule" lists the names of Mayer's slaves. They are identified as two males, ages lxx and 26, and 3 females, ages 65, 45 and 23.

That makes it probable that Mayer had slaves when niece Bertha lived with him for several years before she married Julius Ochs in 1853. Mayer and his wife had 14 children and were flush enough that it would accept been unusual if they didn't own slaves, according to Robert Rosen, author of "The Jewish Confederates."

Slave registry data

Bertha, who came from Federal republic of germany every bit a teenager, might have been horrified past 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 affiliate and requested that a Amalgamated flag exist draped beyond her bury, which it was.

Separately, in that location is also compelling evidence that the brother of a Revolutionary State of war-era antecedent of the Sulzberger branch of the family unit was involved in the slave merchandise.

His name was Abraham Mendes Seixas, and he was born in New York Metropolis in 1750. He was an officeholder in the Continental Ground forces during the war, and then stayed in South Carolina, where accounts draw him as a slave merchant and/or auctioneer.

"The Final Victims," a 2004 book about the slave merchandise by James McMillin, reprints a poem published in a Charleston newspaper in 1784 advertising an upcoming sale.

Information technology reads in function:

"Abraham Seixas . . . He has for sale, Some Negroes, male person

"Volition suit total well grooms,

"He has as well Some of their wives

"Can clean, dingy rooms.

"For planting, likewise, He has a few

"To sell, all for cash, . . . or bring them to the lash."

A few lines after, Seixas adds, "The young ones, true, if that volition do."

The discovery of these pulp histories gives me no pleasure. The Ochs-Sulzberger family is a corking American family that has served our nation in war and peace since its founding. Ochs himself turned the struggling New York Times into the gold standard of journalism and the paper under his heirs often took corking risks to defend the First Subpoena.

I volition forever be grateful to the lessons I learned during my xvi years at that place. Merely information technology was a different paper then, ane where standards of fairness were enforced and reporters' biases were left on the cutting-room floor.

Now the standards are on the cut-room floor, with every story dominated by reporters' opinions. The result is a daily railroad train wreck that bears little resemblance to the traditions of what used to be a swell paper, trusted because information technology was impartial.

Even worse, the Times has moved beyond overt partisanship to declare itself the decider of all things relating to race. Its 1619 Project insists that slavery was the key to the nation's founding, and that the war for independence was primarily about perpetuating white supremacy.

This narrative is deeply misguided, according to a long list of top historians. Yet the paper is non deterred, and has ramped up its demonization of any who disagree with that or its reckless support for the Marxist-inspired Black Lives Matter agenda.

Handcuff the cops, tear down the statues, rewrite the textbooks, make America the world's bad guy — that's what today'southward Times is selling.

Anyone with such an activist agenda had ameliorate exist purer than Caesar's wife. The Times clearly fails that test and owes its staff, stockholders and readers a full account of the slave holders and Confederates in its past.

My promise is that later on taking a dose of their own medicine, the owner and editors will focus their efforts where they belong: on making the New York Times a great newspaper once again.

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Source: https://nypost.com/2020/07/18/the-family-that-owns-the-new-york-times-were-slaveholders-goodwin/

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