In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

r Chapter 4 “An Honest, Fearless Press”: Adolph S. Ochs and the Rise of the Chattanooga Times At a 1923 dinner held in honor of Adolph S. Ochs, one of the speakers, with considerable hyperbole, compared Ochs’s arrival in Chattanooga many years earlier with that of Moses in the promised land. “I have no doubt,” the orator proclaimed, “that as Mr. Ochs looked out over that valley he saw in it his vision covered with a city of happy people.”1 In reality, Ochs’s first impressions of the town were probably much more modest. Chattanooga in 1877 was far from being the proverbial Zion, and as he looked across the valley, he no doubt saw more mud and soot than milk and honey. Still, whether or not he realized it, Ochs’s destiny was tied to that of the land before him, and when he left it nearly twenty years later, Chattanooga was a vastly different place. Much of the change and growth of the city in the 1880s and 1890s could be attributed to the work of Adolph Ochs. As a publisher, Ochs became a tireless promoter of Chattanooga and its interests, and as a political leader, he was largely responsible for the creation of a modern, efficient city government. Yet all of this was unknown at the time of his arrival in Chattanooga in the spring of 1877 at age nineteen, a hundred miles from his family, with little more than a trunk of clothes, a piccolo, and the promise of work.2 The path that brought Ochs to Chattanooga had been difficult and characteristic of the age in which he grew up. Adolph Simon Ochs was born in Cincinnati in March 1858, the oldest child of Julius and Bertha Ochs. A native of Bavaria, Julius Ochs had come to America in 1845 to escape a tedious bookbinding apprenticeship. Never one meant for the trades, Julius was an intellectual , an aesthete, and a consummate Bohemian. He spoke seven languages, was a gifted musician, a Judaic scholar, and a fine amateur actor.3 Yet despite his many talents, he could not make a decent living in America. He soon drifted through a series of unsuccessful careers and by the early 1850s was working as a 50 “An Honest, Fearless Press” peddler and musician in the Deep South. There, during a brief stay in Natchez, Mississippi, he met Bertha Levy.4 In many ways, Bertha Levy was the ideal mate for her husband. Like Julius, she was a strong-willed, free-thinking Bavarian Jew. In 1848, at the age of sixteen , she went to America, fleeing persecution for her support of the unsuccessful 1848 German revolution. She met Ochs in 1851, and four years later they married. By all accounts theirs was a loving, productive, but sometimes contentious union. Together they enjoyed thirty-three years of marriage and raised six children. They also shared many common interests, including a deep love of their Jewish faith. Yet in spite of their similarities, they disagreed completely on the greatest issue of their day—slavery.5 Julius, always the freethinker, abhorred slavery. Bertha, perhaps because of her time in Natchez, was a staunch defender of the institution.6 When war came in 1861, Julius joined the Union army to help destroy slavery and preserve the Union. Bertha, by this time living in Cincinnati, remained an outspoken supporter of the South. Often suspected of being a southern spy, Bertha’s loyalties caused considerable problems for the young family. When Bertha was caught attempting to smuggle quinine to Rebels across the Ohio River in her son George’s baby carriage, her husband began to fear for her safety. A short time later, the family left Ohio and in 1864 settled in Knoxville, Tennessee.7 In Knoxville, Julius once again struck out in business and failed. Thus by the early seventies the family faced financial ruin. To help out through hard times, the oldest son, Adolph, took a job as a newsboy with the Knoxville Chronicle. In 1872 Adolph began working for the paper full time, first as an office boy, then as a printer’s apprentice. Ochs excelled at printing and composition and completed his four-year apprenticeship in half the normal time. By 1875 Ochs was the fastest and most accurate typesetter on the Chronicle and his skills were in high demand. Soon afterward, Adolph left Knoxville to take a job with a larger and more prestigious paper, the Louisville Courier-Journal...

Share