The New York Times has never applied to its own history the standards it uses to demonize others. If it did, reporters there would learn that the Ochs-Sulzberger family that has owned and run the paper for 125 years has a “complicated legacy” of its own.
That legacy includes Confederates in the closet — men and at least one woman who supported the South and slavery during the Civil War. In fact, Times patriarch Adolph S. Ochs contributed money to the very Stone Mountain project and other Confederate memorials the Times now finds so objectionable.
Ochs’ parents, Julius and Bertha Levy, were German Jewish immigrants who met in the American South, yet had very different views on slavery.
While living with an uncle in Natchez, Miss., Bertha developed a fondness for it, a fact noted in family histories.
In “The Trust,” a 1999 authorized biography of the Ochs-Sulzberger families, authors Susan Tifft and Alex Jones write that Julius had witnessed slave auctions and described them as a “villainous relic of barbarism,” but Bertha “embraced a contemptuous antebellum view of blacks, and for the rest of her life was dogmatically conservative, even reactionary.” She was, they said, determined to preserve “the South’s peculiar institution.”
One of her descendants referred to her as “that Confederate lady.”
I am aware of no evidence or claims that any members of Bertha’s family owned slaves or participated in the slave trade.
During the Civil War, Bertha had at least one brother who joined the rebel army, and she herself was suspected of being a spy. On one occasion, she was caught smuggling medical supplies from Ohio into rebel-held Kentucky.
Oh the horror
Confederates...
Here’s your smelling salts....
Look at their WWII shenanigans for real evil