Our Own Hall of Fame
JAMES M. COX
PROPHET IN HIS OWN DAY
Ohio Publisher Embodied Man’s Quest for Peace
DAYTON DAILY NEWS, Feb. 12, 1961
BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH
Daily News Staff Writer
Eighth of a Series
The spirit of a former Ohio governor hovers over the clean-lined building by New York’s East River where men try to draw clear lines of understanding with their fellow men around the globe.
For the creation of an organization like the United Nations long was the dream—and the vigorous battle—of Daytonian James M. Cox, three-time Buckeye governor and one of the nation’s leading newspaper publishers.
In 1920, he staked his bid for the presidency of the United States on his belief in the League of Nations. Cox lost the election to Warren G. Harding, but his faith in a community of nations was unshaken.
In a statement after his defeat he said: “It was a privilege to make the contest for the right in the face of overwhelming odds. There is a distinct difference between defeat and surrender.”
INDEPENDENTLY of Woodrow Wilson, James M. Cox had said that if the League of Nations was defeated, the second great World War would come at the cost of many lives and much wealth. He lived to see that happen. But he lived to see the birth of the United Nations, too.
Gov. Cox’s life spanned 87 years from the dawn of the age of steam in 1870 to the atomic era in 1957. America moved and so did the Ohio farm boy who, at 10, was earning 40 cents a week sweeping out the school house and $1 a month as sexton of the Jacksonburg UB church.
PRINTER’S DEVIL at 15, school teacher at 17, newspaperman at 22, private secretary to a U. S. congressman at 24, publisher at 28. Those were the early years.
When he came to Dayton to buy the faltering Evening News in 1898 for $26,000 (the congressman loaned him the $6,000, Cox floated stock for the rest), it had a circulation of 2,600 and four editorial staffers.
At his death, he presided over thriving newspaper, radio and television properties, extending from Dayton and Springfield to Atlanta and Miami.
A DOZEN years after he had served in Washington as a secretary, Cox was back as congressman from Ohio’s Third district. No faltering freshman, he made his voice heard.
(Once he compared a bill to decrease subsistence appropriations for veterans in military homes with another to increase funds to feed monkeys in the Washington zoo and won the veterans a $250,000 hike.)
AFTER TWO terms in Congress, Cox swept to victory as governor of Ohio, took his own “brain trust” to Columbus and in one session of the Legislature made over a state that had been static for 60 years.
Under Gov. Cox Ohio’s school system was modernized, a new highway system inaugurated, the judicial system overhauled, the prison system reformed and a workmen’s compensation act--revolutionary for its day--passed.
He was returned for two more terms in 1916 and 1918 before running, at 50, against Harding for the presidency. His vice presidential running mate: Franklin D. Roosevelt.
LATER YEARS saw Miami join Gov. Cox’s newspaper enterprises and then—when he was 69—one of the South’s leading papers, the Atlanta Journal was added, and later the Atlanta Constitution.
Asked why, at his age, he had taken on his biggest newspaper responsibility Gov. Cox answered: “Running water never grows stagnant.”
Over the years, Democratic administrations sought him out for Washington posts. But Gov. Cox declined, saying he would fight the battle against isolationism where it was hardest—in the Middle West and the South. He did, and he helped win it.
The day after his death in 1957, he was eulogized in Congress as the prophet who lost the presidency in 1920. “But the real story of Gov. Cox,” a long time associate wrote, “was of the editor and printer’s devil who stayed the course.”
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