Arthur Hays Sulzberger
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Arthur Hays Sulzberger (1891 - 1968) 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.
Sulzberger graduated from the Horace Mann School in 1909 and 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. 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."
In 1956, Sulzberger received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College.
He was succeeded as publisher first by a son-in-law, Orvil E. Dryfoos, in 1961, and then two years later by his son, Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger.
Sulzberger broadened the Times’s use of background reporting, pictures, and feature articles, and expanded its sections. He supervised the development of facsimile transmission for photographs and built the Times radio station, WQXR, into a leading vehicle for news and music. Under Sulzberger the Times began to publish editions in Paris and Los Angeles with remote-control typesetting machines.
He once famously stated, "I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."
Sulzberger is also credited with the quote: "We journalists tell the public which way the cat is jumping. The public will take care of the cat."
[edit] Political commitments
Sulzberger has been accussed by Laurel Leff of deliberately "burying" in the back pages of news of the Nazi atrocities against Jews that culminated in the Holocaust by the New York times, a newspaper owned by a Jewish family. Leff blames the newspaper’s owner and publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Took the position that Jewishness is solely a matter of belief, that it does not and ought not to have any ethnic or national component, no ethnic peoplehood.. He opposed the creation of a Jewish State. His political commitments were to America and to universalism. He did not want the Times to be or even appear to be too Jewish. According to Leff, he went out of his way to insure that the Times would not portray the Jews as the particular victims of Nazism, gave very little print to the news of genocide targeting Jews as it emerged from Europe and did not support the rescue of European Jews. [1]
[edit] References
- The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times, Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1999.
- The Kingdom and the Power, Gay Talese, New York: Ivy Books, 1992.
- The Story of The New York Times, Meyer Berger, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951 (Reprinted, 1970).
- Iphigene, I. O. Sulzberger, 1981.
