The following essay discusses James Middleton Cox and his son, James McMahon Cox.

James Middleton Cox, a twenty-eight-year-old former schoolteacher, began the company that is today Cox Enterprises when he purchased the Dayton (Ohio) Evening News for twenty-six thousand dollars in 1898. Cox Enterprises has grown to become the thirteenth-largest media company in the United States, based on estimated revenue reports from Ad Age in 1991. The company has properties ranging from twenty-five newspapers, to twenty-one radio and television stations, to twenty-three cable television systems. Other Cox properties include automobile auctions, paper manufacturers, and cattle ranches.

The youngest of Gilbert and Eliza Cox's seven children, James Middleton Cox was born and raised on a farm in Butler County, some twenty miles south of Dayton, Ohio. As a youth he worked as a janitor in the public school and later as a sexton in the United Brethren church, which his family...