As a boy, James M. Cox (March 31, 1870–July 15, 1957)
plowed the fields from dawn to dusk dreaming of one day
working for a newspaper. The sixth and last child of Eliza
and Gilbert Cox, he was born at home in Jacksonburg,
Ohio. His childhood reading included the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette. Cox moved to Middletown to live with his
sister and brother-in-law (Annie and John Q. Baker) until he
completed the state two-year teacher-training program. He
taught in one-room schoolhouses for a few years and supervised a night school in Middletown where one of his students was a former slave. On Saturdays, he delivered Baker’s
newspaper, The Weekly Sentinel. When Baker began publishing daily, Cox joined the staff as the sole reporter and
the local correspondent for the Cincinnati Enquirer. The
Enquirer hired him full-time after he telegraphed them
news of a fatal train wreck. Cox impressed his colleagues
with his accurate, fair reporting but he was fired when he
displeased a railroad-tycoon pal of the publisher.
Cox, who had a strong sense of public service, combined
journalism and politics in his career. He left Cincinnati to
serve as private secretary from 1894 to 1897 for Democrat
Paul Sorg, the representative from the 3rd Congressional
District of Ohio. In 1898 he purchased the Dayton Evening
News and renamed it the Daily News. He replaced boilerplate (romantic cliffhangers from a national distributor)
with hard news. Ironically, Cox and his staff ignored one
of the century’s most intriguing stories—the Wright Brothers’ flying machines in nearby fields—because it seemed
too preposterous to be true. Other newspaper acquisitions
followed: in 1903, the Springfi eld Daily News; in 1923,
the Miami (Florida) News; in 1939, the Atlanta Journal;
in 1949, the Dayton Journal and Herald; and in 1950, the
Atlanta Constitution. In politics, Cox represented Ohio as a
Democrat in the U. S. House of Representatives from 1909
until 1913. He served as Ohio governor from 1913 to 1915,
and again from 1917 to 1921. In 1920, the Democratic Party
nominated him to run for president with his running mate
Franklin D. Roosevelt. They were defeated that year by
another influential newspaper publisher from Ohio, Warren
G. Harding.
The Cox newspaper chain entered the broadcasting field
with AM radio stations in Dayton in 1934 and in Atlanta
five years later. Cox launched the first television station in
the South and the first FM station both in Atlanta in 1948.
The Cox company kept acquiring newspapers and started a
pioneer cable TV operation in the 1960s. Eight years later,
the corporation acquired Manheim Auctions, an automobile sales branch that grossed over $1 billion in 1997.
Cox Communications, Inc., merged into Cox Enterprises,
Inc. in 1985. In the early twenty-first century, descendants
of James Cox helped to manage the Cox empire from its
Atlanta headquarters. True to its print roots, Cox Newspapers included seventeen daily and twenty-five non-dailies.
The corporation also provided telephone services, direct mail-order, and customized newsletter outlets as well as
interactive Internet services. Digital Domain, an enterprise
Cox shared with partners, won the Oscar for special effects
in the movie, Titanic, in 1998. Cox, like other media giants,
had diversified its portfolio to remain viable in a rapidly
changing technological world.
Further Reading
Cebula, James E. James M. Cox: Journalist and Politician. New
York: Garland, 1985.
Glover, Charles E., Journey Through the Years: The Story of Cox
Enterprises, Inc. Atlanta: Longstreet, 1998.
Grant, Philip A. “Congressional Campaigns of James M. Cox,
1908 and 1910.” Ohio History 81 (Winter 1972): 4–14.
Hooper, Osman Castle, History of Ohio Journalism, 1793–1933.
Columbus, OH: Spahr and Glenn, 1933.
Hynds, Ernest C. American Newspapers in the 1980s. New York:
Hastings, 1980.
Kobre, Sidney, Development of American Journalism. Dubuque,
IA: Brown, 1969.
Mott, Frank Luther. American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 250 Years, 1690–1940.
New York: Macmillan, 1941.
Squires, James D. Read All About It: The Corporate Takeover of
America’s Newspapers. New York: Random House, 1993.
Paulette Kilmer