Arthur Hays Sulzberger

Arthur Hays Sulzberger (September 12, 1891 – December 11, 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.

Life

Sulzberger was the son of Cyrus L. Sulzberger, a cotton-goods merchant, and Rachel Peixotto Hays, from old and noteworthy Jewish families, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, respectively.^[1] His great-grandfather, Benjamin Seixas,^[2] brother of the famous rabbi and American revolutionary Gershom Mendes Seixas of Congregation Shearith Israel, was one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange. His grandfather, Dr. D.L.M. Peixotto,^[3] was a prominent physician and director of Columbia University's Medical College.

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. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950.^[4] 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 stated,^[5] "...I certainly do not advocate that the mind should be so open that the 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."

Political commitments

Sulzberger, a practicing Jew, 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]

See also

• Operation Mockingbird

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.

External links

• NAA
• Biography from Columbia University
• Columbia Encyclopedia article
• Arthur Hays Sulzberger papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.