Fighting Jimmy

"There is nothing worse," contended Ohio's James Middleton Cox, "than an invertebrate publisher." Stocky, round-faced Jim Cox was one of the higher vertebrates in a generation of publishers that included such well-spined warriors as William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer and Colonel Robert McCormick. As a journalist, he practiced his preachment that newspapers "should tell the truth as only intellectual honesty can discern the truth." As a politician, Democrat Cox was also notable for intellectual honesty. And he almost achieved the classic American cycle: born on a log-cabin farm, he got to be a Congressman and Ohio's governor; he was his party's presidential candidate in 1920, ran a good race in a bad season for Democrats.

Yet when he died last week at 87, James Cox did not land on many front pages. His was "not a familiar name to the modern generation," explained Fellow Publisher John S. Knight in a warmly felt eulogy, "[but] he was one of the truly great men of the first half of this century."

Loser for the League. First and last, "Fighting Jimmy" Cox was a newspaperman. At 28, he was already an influential publisher who took pride in the fact that his Dayton Daily News had racked up more than $1,000,000 in libel suits by its hard-hitting reporting. All the suits were later dropped. After buying the Miami Daily News in 1923, he covered Badman Al Capone's local activities so thoroughly that a gangster syndicate offered Cox $5,000,000 for the paper. The offer was turned down.

At 69, Publisher Cox took on what he called "my largest enterprise," by paying $3,500,000 for the Atlanta evening Journal and its rival, the Georgian, on which Hearst had lost $10 million in 27 years. Merging the two papers, Cox successfully battled "the dangerous and disgraceful regime" of Governor Eugene Talmadge. He was 79 when he bought Atlanta's other daily, the morning Constitution. Asked, like Lewis Carroll's Father William, how he did so much at his age, Cox replied: "Running water never grows stagnant."

A onetime political reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, Newsman Cox was overwhelmingly elected to Congress from Ohio's Third District in 1908 and 1910, fought hard for such causes as tariff reduction and antitrust laws, later became Ohio's only three-term governor. In the 1920 presidential campaign he promised ailing Woodrow Wilson: "We are going to be a million percent with you and your administration. That means the League of Nations." But in Warren Gamaliel Harding, able Orator Cox and his running mate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a young man he later came to differ with in political philosophy), faced an Ohio publisher whose easygoing ways eminently suited the times. Cox carried only eleven Southern states. Jim Cox vowed never again to seek public office--and in 1945 turned down the offer of an Ohio Senate seat. "I was still in public life," he explained. "I had my newspapers."

Newsman Cox was born March 31, 1870, in an Ohio hamlet named Jacksonburg ("there must," he cracked, "have been Democrats in the vicinity"). He lived up to his Algeresque origins by delivering newspapers, quit school at 16 to become a teacher, soon took a job as cub-of-all-work on the old Middletown Signal. He always had "a passionate interest in newspapers." Turning passion into profit, he put the Dayton Daily News into the black in less than five years after he bought the paper (for $26,000) in 1898, bought the Dayton Journal-Herald (current circ. 93,290), the Springfield, Ohio morning Sun (17,874) and Daily News (30,044) while expanding into Georgia and Florida (where the Miami Daily News is the only Cox paper that is not solidly in the black.)

End at Trailsend. Publisher Cox allowed his papers to keep their own personalities, gave free rein to his local publishers--who sometimes showed more concern for the cash register than the crusading journalism for which James Cox stood. (All Cox dailies are Democratic except the pro-Ike Dayton Journal-Herald and Springfield Sun.) Overall management of the seven-paper group and a string of allied TV and radio stations fell increasingly to James Cox Jr., the twice-married publisher's son. But the governor still showed up at his Dayton office, held frequent long-distance powwows with Atlanta Constitution Editor Ralph McGill, even found time to indulge his second passion, golf.* A fortnight ago, Fighting Jimmy suffered a stroke in the $3,000,000 Dayton newspaper building he had dedicated last month, died five days later at the home outside Dayton that he called Trailsend.

* In common with the New York Times's Chief Washington Correspondent James B. ("Scotty") Reston, who used to be Cox's caddy in Dayton.

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