The Kingdom and the Power

by Gay Talese

  This morning’s Times, for example, carried a military article by Hanson Baldwin that makes reference to General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest was a Confederate cavalry officer who, among other things, tried to defend Selma in 1865 against the invasion of 9,000 pillaging Union soldiers, including a regiment of Negroes. Though Forrest failed, he remains a revered name in the Deep South, a hero to thousands of young Southern boys, including James G. Clark, who in 1965 was Selma’s sheriff and its symbol of segregation.

  Turner Catledge’s maternal grandfather, James Turner, rode with Forrest’s cavalry. To ride with Forrest an aspirant had to have a horse, a saddle, a saber, and had to contribute two sides of bacon. These James Turner possessed and he eagerly joined, fighting with Forrest’s troops in Mississippi and Tennessee, battling Union soldiers whose ranks possibly included the paternal grandfather of Harrison Salisbury. If so, it was quite appropriate that these two ancestors of Timesmen should be on opposite sides of the Civil War—for The New York Times’ staff itself was divided, two Timesmen having quit the paper to join the Confederate Army. The publisher of The Times, however, behaving like a publisher of The Times, remained equivocal. He was not in favor of slavery, but he was not violently opposed to it, either. His name was Henry Jarvis Raymond, and he had much in common with Adolph Ochs, who would buy The Times thirty-five years later—Raymond, like Ochs, wanted to keep all doors open, not to be caught too far out on a limb. As Raymond wrote: “There are very few things in the world which it is worth while to get angry about, and they are just the things that anger will not improve.”

  Henry Jarvis Raymond, born on a farm in upstate New York in 1820, a graduate of the University of Vermont, was a politician. He had worked as a reporter and editor for Horace Greeley’s Tribune and other papers, but political life was more enticing, and in 1850 Raymond was a New York State Assemblyman, a Whig representative. But when he learned in 1851 that his former employer, Greeley, had made a $60,000 profit the year before, Raymond quickly reconsidered the virtues of journalism; and with another onetime employee of Greeley’s Tribune, George Jones, who had become a small but successful banker in Albany, Raymond began to enlist the financial support of people who shared his enthusiasm for a paper that would be politically conservative and temperate in taste. There was a market in New York for such a paper, Raymond thought, the other newspapers being either too socialistic or scandalous, and the city was also greatly expanding in prosperity and population. Though churches still towered over the rooftops of the city, and though New York itself was a town of half-a-million centered mostly in lower Manhattan, being semirural above Fourteenth Street and with animals and farms sprawled not far from what is now Times Square, the harbor was teeming with large sailing vessels unloading cargo and thousands of immigrants from Ireland and Germany, future consumers and cops and parents of Ochs. It was relatively easy for Henry Raymond and George Jones to raise $70,000 to start The Times, which began publishing in the fall of 1851, and the paper was almost immediately successful.

  Printed and produced by a few dozen staff members in a narrow brownstone in downtown Manhattan, The Times’ first edition, a four-page paper with small single-column headlines, reported the news with a detachment and calm that would characterize the paper through the next century. Its first edition featured news from Europe, most of it lifted from the more respectable London journals, as well as news from around the nation—such as a fugitive slave riot in Lancaster, Pennsylvania—and several short items of local interest, e.g.:

  At a late hour on Tuesday night, Policeman Coalter of the Fourth Patrol District, found an unknown female, aged 35 years, lying in Madison-st., laboring under the effects of delirium tremens, and apparently lifeless. A dray was procured, and the poor woman was conveyed to the station-house, where she seemed to somewhat revive, but was yet under the influence of strong drink, and was accordingly placed in a cell in the female department, where she was found a corpse in about two hours after. Yesterday morning the Coroner held an inquest on the remains, and the jury rendered a verdict of “Death by an apoplectic fit.”

  The Times’ circulation approached 10,000 within a fortnight, 26,000 within a year, and 40,000 by 1857. The coming of the Civil War, as it did with nearly all newspapers, accelerated the growth of The Times, which had reached a circulation of 75,000 by 1861. The war also intensified readers’ interest in late-breaking news to a point where it quickened the pace of news gathering and forced such papers as The Times to produce an edition not merely six days a week, but also on Sunday. The Times’ first Sunday edition appeared in the spring of 1861, ten years after the paper began, and ten days after the attack on Fort Sumter.

  In many ways, the coverage of the Civil War was a more difficult and dangerous assignment than any to be faced by latter-day war correspondents of The Times. In this era before the handout and headquarters briefing—and the credibility gap—correspondents often wrote only what they saw with their own eyes. Of course, these eyewitness accounts usually gave a very limited view of the war, but on occasion they were grandly revealing and it was not uncommon for Times readers to get important war news before even President Lincoln had received it officially.

  The defeat of the Confederates at Franklin, Tennessee, appeared in The Times four days before the War Department had received word of it. The Times also prematurely disclosed the news of Sherman’s march from Atlanta to the sea, an exclusive that might have produced disastrous results for the North had The Times’ circulation wagons in the South not been slower than Sherman’s army. One night when Generals Grant and Meade were conversing privately in a tent, they heard noises in the bushes which, upon inspection, turned out to be a Timesman lying on his stomach scribbling notes. Raymond himself covered the first battle of Bull Run, with some assistance from The Times’ Washington bureau, and saw enough of the battle to be convinced that the North would easily triumph and march into Richmond. After filing a dispatch that indicated this, Raymond returned to the battlefield to discover that the Union forces had been beaten back. Quickly, he rewrote his story and had it sent to Washington to be filed, but a Union censor intercepted it, and after this experience Henry Raymond retired from war reporting and returned to where he belonged, in New York.

  While Henry Raymond was a personal friend of Lincoln’s—he was a leader in the campaign that reelected Lincoln, and he remained active in politics throughout his editorship of The Times, which he sometimes neglected as a result—The Times’ coverage of the war was as objective as it could be, and some Times readers in the North accused it of being pro-South. The Times’ controversial correspondent in Charleston, a spiritual sire of Herbert Matthews and Harrison Salisbury, was constantly berated in letters as a “secessionist” and Rebel propagandist, but this suddenly stopped when, after he had been caught making notes while watching the bombardment of Fort Sumter, he was arrested by the South as a Federal spy. He spent a day or two in jail, and then was released and told to take the next train northward, forfeiting his watch and wallet to the jailkeeper.

  The Times building itself was threatened by a New York mob in the summer of 1863 during the draft riots, a time when angry young men protesting conscription burned houses, wrecked stores, and shot at policemen. Henry Raymond, among other publishers, denounced the protest and called for law and order, writing in The Times: “Were the conscription law to be abrogated tomorrow, the controlling inspiration of the mob would remain the same. It comes from sources independent of that law, or of any other—from malignant hate toward those in better circumstances, from a craving for plunder, from a love of commotion, from a barbarous spite against a different race, from a disposition to bolster up the failing fortunes of the southern rebels.”

  After Greeley’s Tribune building had had its windows smashed, and might have been greatly damaged had not the police fought back the mob, Raymond supplied his staff with rifles and gave them permission to fire upon invaders. Raymond also obtained from the War Department, largely because of his
friendship with Lincoln, two Gatling guns, which were mounted just inside The Times’ business office under the supervision of a Times stockholder named Leonard Jerome, a grandfather of Winston Churchill. A third Gatling gun was installed on the roof of the five-story Times building, which occupied the triangle between Park Row and Nassau and Beekman Streets, near Greeley’s building. But The Times was never approached.

  After the war, The Times’ popularity and prosperity went into temporary decline because Raymond was devoting too much time to politics—he had become a Republican Congressman, was chairman of the Republican National Committee—and also because his attitude, which opposed vindictive punishment of the South, offended the radical Republicans who had gained control of the party. But although some advertising was withdrawn and circulation fell for a while, Raymond’s Times continued as before, calm, uncontentious, undramatic—it announced Lee’s surrender with a single-column headline, as it did Lincoln’s assassination, and except for its campaign against Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, which occurred after Raymond’s death and before Ochs’s takeover. The Times did not involve itself with crusades.

  Turner Catledge’s grandfather, James Turner, returned after the war to the farm. It was a subsistence farm whose main purpose was to raise enough food to nourish the Turner family, a considerable undertaking since Turner and his wife would have fourteen children. The first-born was a daughter, Willie Anna Turner, Catledge’s mother. Of all the women that Catledge would meet in his lifetime, none could approach the efficiency of his mother—she did everything with precision, remembered everything, reared her brothers and sisters and ran the home as her own mother could not have done had she tried, which she didn’t, being pregnant most of the time, or recovering from pregnancy, or being too conditioned to life’s raw realities in the shambled South to expect any miracle of comfort or order under her own roof. And so the daughter, Willie Anna, a plain Bible-reading young woman, kindly but stern, took over the home and the children. She did not seem to resent this task, recognizing it as a necessity, but as she became older and learned to master other people’s affairs more and more, she discovered that they had become almost totally reliant on her, a burden she found overwhelming and annoying at times, but mainly she loved it and came to need it.

  When her brothers and sisters were old enough to marry and have children of their own, Willie Anna helped in the rearing of their children, which they happily let her do. Willie Anna knew best, she did things right. Even after she had met and married Lee Catledge, a tall, slim, almost frail man with a long face, dark eyes, a drooping black moustache, a man four years younger than herself, she did not alter her routine very much. She had only two children of her own, her son and an older daughter, and she had time on her hands, energy to burn, and she seemed to enjoy most of all the large family reunions at the main farmhouse of her father, supervising the dinner while the old man sat back encircled by as many as forty grandchildren. He was a commanding figure, proud and vain, and what most impressed young Turner Catledge about his grandfather was how, with a minimum of effort, he got maximum results—with the slightest gesture, a soft word here, there, he could get other people to jump to his needs. He was Big Daddy, the grand progenitor, the boss—one of many bosses that Turner Catledge would observe during his career as a political reporter and editor, but his grandfather was the first and he left a lasting impression.

  James Turner had done very well for himself and his family after the war. The immediate postwar years had been bad, with practically no money and a complete barter system, but as the South’s economy revived toward the turn of the century, Turner’s interests began to extend, with the help of his children, beyond the farm to the opening of small stores around Neshoba County. First there was a little hardware store and then a grocery store, both beginning as extensions of the farm; then a drugstore—and finally, a Ford agency. There were the seeds of Snopes in James Turner, and they produced degrees of vengeance and virtue in his offspring, but with his prodding most of them pushed forward, and if his prize daughter Willie Anna had her way, as he suspected she would, the next generation of Turners would do even better. Willie Anna’s greatest hopes, of course, were with her son, Turner Catledge.

  From his earliest years, the boy felt the pressure of his mother espousing the dignity of hard work, denouncing laziness and drinking, ballplaying and profanity. When the Sunday newspapers and comics arrived, Willie Anna would tuck them under her bed and not let the children see them until Monday, and she would not tolerate even the whistling of a secular tune in her home on Sunday. Lee Catledge, her husband, a brooding and sensitive man, never had much to say. He was an educated man, having been taught in a church school, and had been a teacher himself for a while, as well as a dabbler in local politics; but now he was working in one of Turner’s many stores. His forebears had also been farmers, having come to America as Scotch-Irish immigrants and settling first in the Carolinas, later in Alabama, and then, before the war, in Mississippi. Lee Catledge’s father had served in the Confederate Army but had not seen action, although five of his father’s brothers had, and three had been killed. What was left of the family carried on at farming, but Lee Catledge, after his marriage to Willie Anna, became absorbed into the Turner clan, his gentility later providing a welcome and contrasting sense of soft sell behind the counter.

  The destiny of young Turner Catledge, too, was to be fulfilled somehow in Turner trade, although nobody knew precisely where he should begin in 1922 after his graduation from Mississippi State College. There were really no good jobs in the Turner stores close to home, all being held by uncles, cousins, in-laws, and so it was decided that he should begin his business career in a wholesale hardware establishment in which the Turner family had a small interest in Memphis. In a way he was happy to be going to Memphis and to be escaping the claustrophobic feeling of the family. But when he thought more about it, he became angry and resentful. He felt that he was actually being forced outside the family circle because there was no place for him at home, and this shocked and disillusioned him. It was as if he had been deceived all these years by the warm-hearted family, his exemplary mother, and now, suddenly, as in some strange tribal rite, he was being sent away to test his skill at survival. He was frightened by the prospect, disbelieving; Memphis seemed so far away, as remote as Hong Kong—although it was actually a border city between Mississippi and Tennessee; still, Catledge had never contemplated living that far north, and he did not really fancy the hardware business either.

  He did not precisely know what he wanted to do for a living. At college he had majored in science, had been bright in botany and zoology classes; he was possibly the only member of his family who knew the meaning of entomology. He was good in English, and was an excellent touch-typist, partly as a result of all the practice he had gotten from his part-time clerical job in the dean’s office. He had held several jobs while attending college, his mother having made sure he would have no idle moments, and one of the summer jobs that he had held, and had most enjoyed, was an all-inclusive yet nondescript position on a little weekly handset newspaper named the Neshoba Democrat. He had done a bit of everything on that paper. He had solicited advertising, collected money over the counter for subscriptions, had gathered and written local-news items, helped out in the plant, learned to set type, and learned about the printers themselves, some of whom were Klansmen. It had been a marvelous job because it had never seemed like a job, with new and unexpected happenings every week. It was edited by a persuasive country editor called Peanuts Rand, who had liked Catledge very much, had admired his enthusiasm for hard work, his willingness to do any trivial task without sulking. And so while the Turner family was planning Catledge’s career in hardware, Rand was thinking of keeping him in the newspaper business. Rand had just bought another country weekly in the northwestern corner of the state near the Tennessee and Arkansas borders along the Mississippi River, in a town called Tunica. Rand could use such an energetic handyman as Catledge
up in Tunica, and when he proposed the job to the young man, Catledge accepted it immediately. He was now resigned to leaving home, and the last family favor that he would ask would be a ride to the railroad station—and the forlorn feeling of that day remained with him for a lifetime: being driven to the station on a quiet morning over bumpy dusty roads in the Model T Ford of Uncle Joe, his mother’s brother, and then standing along the platform with Uncle Joe waiting for the whistle sound, and then being given a little pocket checkbook, a going-away present. “If you need any money,” Uncle Joe said, “just write a check on me.” It was meant in kindness, but it added to the gloom, the reality of the departure, and during the train ride up to Tunica Catledge felt the emptiness of a life left behind.

  In Tunica, Mississippi, 1922, Catledge got along with people, liked what he was doing, liked the characters he met and wrote about. On the Tunica Times he did what he had done the year before on the Neshoba Democrat and would do a year later on the Tupelo Journal—he did a bit of everything, wrote news and ran errands, solicited advertising and set type, made mistakes and learned, made friends and kept them. To the country people of the town, Catledge seemed to be an engaging young man, earnest and modest. He gave the impression of efficiency without ever seeming to possess great ambition. Ambition, with its repugnant qualities of drive, grim determination, stepping out of line, stepping over older men to get to the top—any hint of this ambition that his mother had nurtured, that his father had lacked, would have been more a hindrance than a help to Catledge, particularly in the rural South. Here there was an observance of order; here one knew one’s place and had respect for elders and preserved the past. A climber like Catledge, wishing to succeed quickly in the South in the early Nineteen-twenties, knew by heritage that it was unwise to seem superior, college-educated, or otherwise different from the plain homogeneous undereducated country people who were the majority. In the North, Catledge’s contemporary opposites, the future tycoons from tenements, did not need such delicacy. In the North the rules were different, directness was appreciated, pushing was permitted, pushing was often essential if one were to compete in the overcrowded cities with their towering obstacles and tensions. And it might therefore have been assumed that the young men who had learned to live and survive in urban jungles would be more likely to achieve great power in New York than those quiet ambitious Southerners like Catledge who were moving slowly up through the placid back roads of the Deep South. But this assumption was not necessarily correct. For those who began in the South and got ahead and got along with country people, those who developed the flair for flattery and cajolery, affability and mock innocence that was standard in the South and was seen as “charm” in the North, those who understood the small-town Southerners’ inbred inferiority and prickly pride, his suspicion of strangers and demands of loyalty, his poverty and resultant violence that was almost Sicilian in character—the young climber who took this rustic route northward during the Twenties and Thirties probably traveled a tougher course, faced more subtle challenges, made more personal adjustments, cultivated more disarming devices and weapons for success in New York than did his urban counterpart. If one could get along with country people in the South, one could get along with almost anybody. And, having mastered the art of apparent innocence, the Southerner ascended the executive ladders of New York with relative ease and without arousing great envy in others; on the contrary, his colleagues were disarmed by him, pleased by his triumph, amazed that such an unassuming individual of such “charm” could have gotten so far.