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r Chapter 8 “Desperate Times” and “Desperate Remedies”: The Bust of the 1890s In December, 1892, Adolph S. Ochs treated Chattanooga to a grand celebration. The occasion was the dedication of the impressive new home of the Chattanooga Times. As citizens paraded through the imposing edifice and gawked at its extravagance, accolades poured in from across the nation praising the paper and its young publisher. For Ochs, the festivities marked a new milestone in his career; and the building, whose gilded dome dominated the local skyline, symbolized his wealth, power, and prestige.1 Yet as Ochs basked in the praise of his peers, he was also deeply troubled, for behind this gleaming new facade, his empire seemed to be crumbling. He had gambled heavily on local real estate and lost, and as land values dropped, his liabilities mounted. Less than a year later he would be pleading with his creditors for relief. “Grant me the indulgence I ask of you,” Ochs implored of one such banker, lamenting that “these are desperate times and we must resort to desperate remedies.”2 Adolph Ochs was not alone in his dilemma, for thousands of his fellow citizens shared his plight. In the early 1890s Chattanooga experienced an economic collapse that seemed to threaten the very survival of the city. Shops and businesses across the city closed their doors, and thousands of residents were suddenly thrown out of work. Faced with such a crisis, Chattanoogans struggled to assist the newly poor while attempting to mend their battered community through civic activism and political reform. Voters, aware that the city could no longer afford the luxuries of patronage and corruption, rejected the city’s political traditions and elected Chattanooga’s first true reform government. Led by Mugwump Democrats, the city’s administration became a model of public efficiency and, working in cooperation with community leaders, helped bring about an eventual economic recovery. Chattanooga was hardly alone in facing economic hardship in the early 1890s. Communities across the nation, and even around the world, reeled from 124 “Desperate Times” a series of economic crises. Chief among these was the Panic of 1893, a nationwide economic collapse brought about by reckless railroad expansion, agricultural stagnation, and a decline in global confidence in the dollar. The nationwide depression hit southern cities especially hard. The number of business failures in the region remained substantially higher than the national average throughout the crisis. In 1893, for example, the failure rate for southern businesses was a full one-third higher than that for the country at large. Cities from Atlanta to New Orleans reeled from the economic devastation, and Chattanooga was no exception.3 As the national economy ground to a halt, local manufacturers and businesses closed their doors. Within weeks, the bustling city was transformed into a virtual ghost town of idle factories and vacant stores. Foremost among Chattanooga’s economic casualties was the city’s iron and steel industry. The economic downturn and the resulting curtailment of railroad expansion dealt a serious blow to already troubled local firms. The rapid transition from iron to steel also may have played a role, as railroads, bridge builders, and industries adopted the stronger, malleable, and increasingly affordable alloy. By 1882, for example, a steel rail cost just three dollars more than its iron counterpart. As a result, production of iron rails dropped from more than 440 tons in 1880 to barely 13 tons in 1885.4 Other factors, however, also played a role in the collapse of the city’s onceheralded furnaces. High among these were continued problems with raw materials . Access to some raw materials, particularly coal, continued to be difficult. The area’s deep erosion valleys had left coal beds “high up on the side hills.” Local deposits, in the words of one analyst, were also “at considerable distance” from necessary coke plants and were often found in “relatively thin” seams that were “badly folded and faulted.” “The coal is there,” he concluded, “but it is not easily recoverable.”5 The quality of the raw materials was even more of an issue. While the region possessed some deposits of “clean” coal, they were often embedded in areas of “rashy” coal, which contained high concentrations of sulfur, shale, or other materials. North Georgia coal, though cleaner and closer, suffered from low volatility and had to be mixed with other, more volatile coal to be useful. Likewise , the region’s iron ore deposits were also of less-than-ideal quality. The iron...

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