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Epilogue
- The University of Tennessee Press
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r Epilogue The departure of the U.S. Army in 1898 marked the end of an era in Chattanooga ’s history. Having survived the bust of the 1890s, the city was once again a thriving, prosperous community. Chattanooga, however, would have to enter the coming century with a new set of leaders. The city’s northern Republican elite, who had largely built the town, now found themselves out of power locally , and many moved on to other challenges elsewhere. Henry Clay Evans, for example, went to Washington, where he served as William McKinley’s commissioner of pensions.1 His longtime ally, Newell Sanders, also emerged as a national political figure and was appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1911.2 Still others, such as John T. Wilder, decided to retire from public life altogether . Wilder, now aging and increasingly infirm, spent the last years of his life in Florida, living on the riches he had acquired the South. In 1904, after the death of his first wife, he committed his final act of sectional reconciliation and married Dora E. Lee, a distant relative of Gen. Robert E. Lee.3 Chattanooga’s Mugwump leaders also faded from the local spotlight. George Ochs, after serving two terms as Chattanooga’s mayor, retired from politics and began a career in his brother’s burgeoning publishing empire.4 After winning praise for publishing a special edition of the Times at the 1900 Paris Exposition, George became publisher of the family-owned Philadelphia Ledger but continued to chafe under his older brother’s shadow. During World War I, he earned a measure of independence, and family enmity, by changing his last name to Oakes—ostensibly to protest German aggression. He died in 1931, having never reentered politics after his time as Chattanooga’s mayor.5 Adolph Ochs moved to New York shortly after his acquisition of that city’s Times and installed his family in a spacious townhouse on West Seventy-fifth Street.6 As publisher of the nation’s leading daily, Ochs rose to national prominence and played host to many leading figures of the early twentieth century. Yet despite his success, Ochs remained a Chattanoogan at heart and, for the remainder of his life, referred to the city as “home.” He died there, in the city he loved and helped build, during a final visit in April 1935. A local funeral service 142 Epilogue was held in his honor, in a temple Ochs had built as a memorial to his parents. A few days later, the once-humble printer was laid to rest in a tomb near his New Jersey estate, a crypt built of Tennessee marble and surrounded by dogwoods , hemlocks, and other trees native to southern Appalachia.7 John MacGowan was a welcome visitor to Ochs’s New York townhouse and remained the publisher’s “helpmate, advisor, and counselor.” Writing to an ailing and depressed colonel in 1897, Ochs invited him for a New York visit and even offered to send him to England. “If I am in any measure able to make the latter years of your life comfortable,” he confessed, “it is largely because I have had the benefit of your intelligent, loyal, and self sacrificing efforts for so many years.”8 Ever loyal, Ochs allowed MacGowan to retain his position of editor of the Chattanooga Times for the remainder of his life. In his later years, MacGowan’s duties at the newspaper waned, but the colonel’s combativeness persisted and George Ochs found him “impossible to manage.”9 MacGowan’s battles may not have been limited to the pages of the Times. He may have also fought a more personal internal war. In 1895, Ochs bartered a “personal and confidential ” agreement to provide “treatment” for MacGowan at the Keely Institute , a private sanitarium specializing in alcohol and drug abuse.10 Although Ochs was quick to acknowledge MacGowan’s role in his success, the colonel’s contributions have been largely lost to history. As mentor to Ochs, MacGowan helped shaped one of the world’s foremost journalism dynasties. Likewise, he also played a significant role in helping Ochs promote Chattanooga and even remained in the city to report on the 1878 yellow fever outbreak . Today, however, his legacy is largely forgotten. No tributes to him stand in the city he helped build, and he is scarcely mentioned in histories of Ochs and the New York Times. MacGowan, however, is not alone in being largely forgotten. Michael J. O...