Haskell Coffin George Jones, founding publisher of The New York Times, was born Aug. 16, 1811.
“I don’t think the devil will ever make a higher bid for me than that.”
On a summer afternoon in 1871, George Jones, the publisher who helped found The New York Times 20 years earlier, was — to his unpleasant surprise — standing face to face with Richard B. Connolly, the honorable controller of the City of New York. Connolly had just offered Jones $5 million if The Times stopped exposing the corrupt practices of the Tweed Ring, for which Connolly, better known as “Slippery Dick,” was the bagman. (An equivalent amount today would be around $100 million.)
“Why, with that sum, you can go to Europe and live like a prince,” Connolly replied to Jones’s objection.
“Yes,” Jones retorted, “but I should know that I was a rascal. I cannot consider your offer or any offer not to publish the facts in my possession.”
Robert T. Isherwood George Jones Bell.
In the first big fight for The Times’s life, the newspaper found its voice and its champion in George Jones, born 200 years ago Tuesday in East Poultney, Vt.
To commemorate his bicentenary, a George Jones Lecture, focused on Jones’s Welsh heritage, was presented Friday by the Poultney Historical Society. Since Aug. 12 happened to mark the anniversary of his death, the George Jones Bell in the New York Times Tower of the United Baptist Church of Poultney was tolled. (The bell and tower were so designated in 1937 after a restoration financed by two of Jones’s grandsons.)
The Jones lecture “allowed the town to honor him as an individual, a Welshman and as a journalist,” said Robert T. Isherwood, an enthusiastic organizer of the bicentennial event.
In fact, embarrassing as this is to acknowledge, it was Mr. Isherwood who brought the anniversary to The Times’s attention. We customarily date the beginnings of the modern institution to its purchase in 1896 by Adolph S. Ochs. If we think of the pre-Ochs era at all, it’s almost always Henry Jarvis Raymond, the founding editor, who comes to mind.
Robert T. Isherwood The United Baptist Church of Poultney, Vt.
Jones deserves his due. If not on his 200th birthday, when else?
He and Raymond befriended one another when they worked for Horace Greeley at The New York Tribune. They talked of running a newspaper together. In 1851, conscious of the profits Greeley was making, they formed Raymond, Jones & Company to publish what was then called The New-York Daily Times. Raymond was the editor, Jones the publisher and financial manager. One of the partners was E. B. Morgan, a founding director of Wells, Fargo.
William M. Tweed.
Raymond died unexpectedly in 1869. The editorial direction fell to Jones. A year later, The Times — then a Republican newspaper — opened fire on William M. Tweed, who effectively controlled city government through his leadership of the Democratic Party’s executive committee, Tammany Hall. Tweed and his associates were enriching themselves through the construction of a courthouse for which fantastically inflated bills were being paid by the city.
When the newspaper salvos began, Tammany Hall floated rumors that The Times would soon be purchased, and silenced, by a company Tweed controlled. Jones answered these rumors publicly in a signed editorial on March 28, 1871:
I have, from the first number of The Times, taken too active a part in its management, and feel far too deep a solicitude for its good name, to dishonor it by making it the advocate of mendacity and corruption. I pledge myself to persevere in the present contest under all and any circumstances that may arise, through good report and evil report, in success or in failure; and even though the ‘Ring’ and its friends offered me for my interest in the property as many millions of dollars as they annually plunder from the City funds, it would not change my purpose.
All the same, Jones was vulnerable. He didn’t control the majority of stock. Raymond’s large block of shares was ripe for acquisition by proxies of the Ring. Learning of this, Jones contacted his wealthy old friend Morgan, who moved quickly to buy the shares from the Raymond estate. That done, Jones and his ally controlled 82 percent of the stock. They were ready for the next round.
The Times had been given hand-copied entries from Connolly’s ledgers that laid out, penny for penny, the sums that were nominally going to fit out and furnish the courthouse, but were actually bound for the pockets of Boss Tweed and crew. When the Ring learned of this, Connolly was dispatched on one desperate last mission, to bribe Jones outright with $5 million.
The most important front page of Jones’s career: July 22, 1871.
Jones turned him down. On July 22, 1871, The Times began publishing transcribed entries from the controller’s books under the headline: “The Secret Accounts. Proofs of Undoubted Frauds Brought to Light. Warrants Signed by Hall and Connolly Under False Pretenses.” Tweed told friends he wished he were younger so that he could kill Jones with his own bare hands.
The New York Times The Times building, 41 Park Row.
Though the downfall of the Tweed Ring was the pinnacle of Jones’s career, it was not the only milestone. On his watch, The Times broke with the Republican Party in 1884. Three years later, it began work on a new headquarters opposite City Hall Park. Jones envisioned the building, 41 Park Row, as his monument. Indeed, it is a designated landmark.
But the debt assumed by The Times to construct 41 Park Row was among the reasons the company was in such perilous straits before Ochs came along. In his “History of The New York Times, 1851-1921,” Elmer Davis wrote that Jones’s monument was not a building. Rather, he said, it is “to be found in a better informed public opinion, a higher standard of public morality.”
Or maybe it was simply in the way he said no.
Happy birthday, Mr. Jones.