New Man in Chattanooga

The best-known Southern newspapers are shaped in the image of their editors--the Arkansas Gazette of Harry Ashmore, the Atlanta Constitution of Ralph McGill, the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times of Mississippi's Hodding Carter. But to many Southern intellectuals, the finest paper in the region is built not around a man, but on a moderate, conscientious approach to racial integration and the self-declared aim "to give the news impartially, without fear or favor." The paper: the Chattanooga Daily Times.

Last week the Daily Times got a new managing editor: studious, gregarious John Nicholas Popham, 47, for the past eleven years the New York Times's chief Southern correspondent. Johnny Pop-ham's appointment completed the replacement of the paper's aging top brass that was started 16 months ago when Ben Hale Golden, 47, became publisher.

Near Relations. Popham's service with the New York Times was no coincidence. Both papers are owned by the estate of the late (1935) Adolph Ochs; both are run by his descendants and their relatives. In fact, the Chattanooga Daily Times can claim to be the parent of its massive stablemate: Ochs was publisher and owner of the Daily Times when he bought the New York Times in 1896 for $75,000. The Daily Times editor, Martin Ochs, 34, is his grandnephew; Publisher Golden is the son-in-law of Times Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who in turn, is a son-in-law of the patriarch.

The two papers have a startling family resemblance--same front-page makeup and type, same earnest approach to the news. Dwarfed by the New York Times (circ. 570,717 v. 52,137), and heavily dependent on its news service, Chattanooga's Daily Times is nonetheless no poor Confederate-grey copy of its imposing relative. The two stand together on most major issues, e.g., presidential candidates (Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956). But on occasion the Daily Times has tartly differed with the colossus of the North. When Daily Times Washington Correspondent Charles Bartlett, a Pulitzer prizewinner, blasted the Eisenhower Administration for leaking major stories to favored papers, the Times was high on his list.

Johnny Popham will run a paper that publishes more national and international news than any other in the South. But the Daily Times draws its loudest praises--and heartiest damns--for its outspoken, Southern-liberal editorials on the region's big story: racial integration. Over the years the Daily Times has taken the most forthright stand of any major Southern daily in favor of gradual, peaceful integration under the law of the land. Often scorned as "that nigger-lovin' sheet," the Daily Times has paid a price for speaking its mind: during the past eight years, circulation has dropped by some 6,000.

Social Revolution. Son of a Marine major who won two Medals of Honor, the Daily Times's new managing editor was born in Virginia, educated at Fordham, and joined the New York Times in 1936. During World War II, he made nine Pacific landings (e.g., Tarawa, Saipan, Okinawa) as a Marine combat correspondent.

Reporter Popham was assigned to the South in 1947 by the Times, has worn out four Dodges and two Buicks traveling 50,000 miles a year on his beat, likes to roll up his sleeves and sit for long, relaxed hours on courthouse benches, just talking to the people caught up in social revolution. He has long held that the Southern newspaper must help people--black and white alike--adjust to the shattering changes of an integration program that is both necessary and inevitable. "There is now a move to extend to the Southern moderate a sort of umbrella that involves the basic premise of just standing firm for law and order against mob rule. I'm glad to see this as a first step, but I am one who feels that we must read history well enough to know that it can be only the first step for what our task really is."

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