Read more Chattanooga History Columns
- Gaston: Paul John Kruesi was Edison's right-hand man
- Robbins: The old Richardson's house and the Civil War
- Gaston: James Williams was a man of the world
- Raney: Mason Evans, the 'Wild Man of the Chilhowee'
- Gaston: The legacy of Adolph Ochs endures
- Martin: Ed Johnson said, 'I have a changed heart,' the day before his lynching in Chattanooga on 1906
- Thomas: The inventiveness of Judge Michael M. Allison
- Moore: Chattanooga's first Chinese community
- Summers, Robbins: Chattanooga's Tuskegee Airman - Joseph C. White
- McCallie: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 says so!
- Gaston: John McCline's Civil War - from slave to D.C. parade
- Raney: Exploring Chattanooga businesses in the Green Book
- Elliott: Remembering the Freedmen's Bureau in Chattanooga
- Gaston: Nancy Ward was a beloved, respected Tennessean
- Martin: Prohibition - the noble experiment
- Elliott: 'A shameful, disgraceful deed': The destruction of the Sewanee cornerstone
- Gaston: Robert Cravens was ironmaster, Chattanooga area's first commuter
- Robbins: Dr. T.H. McCallie's Christmas 1863
- Robbins: Journalist writes of a trip to Missionary Ridge in 1896
- Summers, Robbins: Mine 21 disaster - gone but not forgotten
- Elliott: Collegedale incorporates to avoid Sunday 'blue laws'
- Gaston: 'Marse Henry' Watterson's journalism fame began in Chattanooga
- Robbins: Orchard Knob battle recalled in 1895
- Elliott: Chattanoogans joined in an 'orgy of joy and gladness' on Armistice Day, 1918
- Thomas: Noted service, speakers are marks of Rotary Club of Chattanooga since 1914
- Summers and Robbins: Remembering noted Tennessee author North Callahan
- Raney: 'I auto cry, I auto laugh, I auto sign my autograph'
- Gaston: Sequoyah's alphabet enriched Cherokees
- Robbins: A look at Sam Divine's life during the Civil War
- Robbins: Memories of a Confederate nurse
- Robbins: More notes from Bradford Torrey's 1895 visit to Chickamauga Battlefield
- Robbins: Journalist in 1895 details visit to Chickamauga Battlefield
- Elliott: Telephone exchange firebombing was distraction for grocery store robbery
- Gaston: Worcester brought Christ's message to Cherokee at Brainerd Mission
- Robbins: 1896 travel diary: 'A Week on Walden's Ridge'
- Gaston: Elizabeth Strayhorn, WAC Commandant at Fort Oglethorpe
- Robbins: The history of the Friends of Moccasin Bend National Park
- Moore: Do you own a Sears Roebuck home?
- Summers and Robbins: Camp Nathan Bedford Forrest in World War II
- Gaston: Hiram Sanborn Chamberlain remembered
- Elliott: Daisy the center of tile, ceramic manufacturing in Hamilton County
- Gaston: FDR inaugurates the Chickamauga Dam
- Summers, Robbins: Interned WWII Germans had it easy at Camp Crossville
- Elliott: A war correspondent on Lookout Mountain
- Gaston: Chickamaugas finally bury hatchet in Tennessee Valley
- Gaston: Chickamaugas in Chattanooga
- Robbins: The history of the Riverbend festival
- Raney: Sadie Watson, the first woman elected in Hamilton County government
- Moore: Remembering Chattanooga's Hawkinsville community
- Elliott: Welsh coal miners transformed Soddy after the Civil War
- Gaston: Chattanooga's best-kept secret
- Elliott: Cabell Breckinridge loses his horse
- Raney: Martin Fleming is the people's judge
- Gaston: The amazing career of Francis Lynde
- Martin: Hamilton County's Name Sake: Alexander Hamilton
- Summers, Robbins: The crosses at Sewanee
- Bledsoe: The fiery truce at Kennesaw Mountain
- Moore: Talented architect's life cut short by tragedy
- Rydell: Chattanooga's place in soccer history
- Robbins: Tennessee Coal, member of the First Dow Jones Industrial Average
- Raney: In the barber chair
- Lanier: Becoming the Boyce Station Neighborhood Association
- McCallie: John P. Franklin: Living history among us
- Barr: Chattanooga's first railroad: The Underground Railroad
- Summers, Robbins: Charles Bartlett was a Pulitzer Prize winner, Kennedy confidant
- Rainey: 'We have seen it'
- Elliott: Feinting and fighting at Running Water Creek and Johnson's Crook
- Gaston: The Spring Frog Cabin at Audubon Acres
- Raney: Wauhatchie Pike was moonshine motorway
- Robbins: Oakmont was home of venerable Williams clan
- Summers and Robbins: Rebirth of the Mountain Goat Line
- Elliott: Bad investments led to Soddy Bank failure in 1930
- Summers and Robbins: Pearl Harbor attack left football behind
- Gaston: Jolly’s Island namesake had long ties with Sam Houston
- Return Jonathan Meigs, Indian Agent
- Moore: Did you know about St. Elmo's other two cemeteries?
- Summers: Orme - Marion County's almost lost community
- Davis: Spooky revival at Sharp Mountain in 1873
- Robbins: The story of Longholm
- Raney: Women labored to help the U.S. win World War I
- Even in the city, the 'wheel' changed everything
- Murray: Confederate dilemma after Chickamauga
- J.B. Collins — Newsman extraordinaire
- Robbins: The Story of the Lyndhurst Mansion
- Chattanooga artist and wife lost on the Lusitania
- Chattanooga History Column: Battelle, Alabama and the Battelle Institute
- John Ross, a founder of Chattanooga
- Hamilton County casualties in World War I
- Chattanooga Power Couple
- 'Somewhere in France'
- The Ray Moss family
- Battery B from Chattanooga
- Ulysses S. Grant, Clark B. Lagow, and the Chattanooga Bender
- Songbirds Museum Timeline
- Hamilton County World War 1 roster
- The Soddy Girl and the Memphis Belle
- Blues icon Bessie Smith was the Empress of Soul
- Women's Army Corps at Chickamauga
- Emma Bell Miles' life at the top of the 'W'
- The Tivoli Wurlitzer is one of Chattanooga's priceless assets
- Chattanooga in struggle for freedom during Civil War
- October 1918, Chattanooga paralyzed by Spanish flu epidemic
- Eli Lilly and the Ditch of Death
- One hundred years ago, Chattanooga goes to war
- The legacy of Anna Safley Houston
- Harriet Whiteside was ahead of her time
- Southern Adventist University
- Chattanooga native's writings aided Civil Rights movement
- Zion College, Chattanooga's only African American College
- The North Shore's hidden past
- Mayme Martin -- Businesswoman and community leader
- Thomas Sim's epic struggle for freedom
- Top of Cameron Hill was price of rerouting interstate
- Cameron Hill has rich history
- Temperance movement included Harriman university
- The sweetest music this side of Heaven
- Conquistadors at Chattanooga
- Chattanooga and the 'General'
- Chattanooga's first Thanksgiving, 1863
- Chattanooga's greatest flood caught city unaware
- Opening the Cracker Line
- European trip in 1900 enlightens Sophia Scholze Long
- Sophia Scholze Long spoke out when others were silent
- Little South Pittsburg and its big silent movie stars
- Lot attendant recalls hottest job in Chattanooga
- Chattanooga's Forest Hills is final resting place for known, unknown
- Burritt College -- Pioneer of the Cumberlands
- Chattanooga's nicknames trace city's evolution
- The 25th annual meeting of the Tennessee Press Association
- Clemons Brothers Furniture Store
- The Short Life of the USS Chattanooga
- Ellen Jarnagin McCallie lived a truly remarkable life
- Dr. Jonathan Bachman was a revered city father
- Second guessing the Confederate failure on Missionary Ridge
- Nancy Kefauver, ambassador for the arts
- William Gibbs McAdoo kept his Southern roots
- Chattanooga's Secretary of the Treasury
- Howard Baker remembered as a statesman/photographer who snapped history
- Tivoli's last picture show
- The history of one of Chattanooga's oldest businesses
- Chattanooga's roller derby skaters
- Myths of Coca-Cola in Chattanooga
- Chattanooga's neighborhood grocery stores
- The tale of the Scottsboro Boys
- The people's history of Chattanooga
- Howard School is Chattanooga's reminder of Reconstruction
- Elevator operator, painter, mystery man: meet Rice Carothers
- Raulston Schoolfield made enemies amid his rise to power
- Website lets users peer into Chattanooga's past
- The flood of 1917
- Chattanooga's 'wickedest woman' buried at Forest Hills
- History of Cummings Highway
Second of two parts. Read part one here.
During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson asked his trusted Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo to be also director general of the railroads, where he oversaw movement of supplies to the American Expeditionary Force. Meanwhile McAdoo organized the Liberty Loan Drives, which raised $21 billion for the merchant marine.
By Armistice Day 1918, McAdoo, a former Chattanoogan, was exhausted physically and financially. He announced his resignation the next day and returned shortly afterward to New York City to found McAdoo, Cotton & Franklin, among whose law clients were the founders of United Artists. He then moved to California to concentrate on his political career.
McAdoo ran twice for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, losing to Alfred E. Smith allies, James M. Cox in 1920 and John W. Davis in 1924. When Smith was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932, McAdoo swung the convention tide to Franklin D. Roosevelt with California's 44 votes. He had hoped to be on the ticket with FDR, but William Randolph Hearst opposed his inclusion. In 1933, he was elected U.S. senator for California, supporting injury compensation, unemployment insurance and compensation, the eight-hour workday and the minimum wage. Defeated by attorney Sherman Downey in the 1938 Democratic primary, he retired from public life and became president of American Shipping Lines, reflecting his life-long interest in public transportation.
McAdoo's first wife, Sarah, whom he married in Chattanooga in 1885, died in 1912. They had four children. He married Woodrow Wilson's daughter Eleanor at the White House in 1914. They had two children. After "20 years of happiness," her health was such that she could not tolerate the Washington climate. He offered to resign, but Eleanor did not think that wise. The court in Los Angeles granted an uncontested decree for divorce in 1935. Two months later McAdoo, 71, married Deborah Isabel Cross, 26, a U.S. Health Service nurse.
McAdoo never slowed down. When he was considering a run for the presidency in 1920, the New York World headlined "McAdoo Most in Public Eye of All Democratic Possibilities, Declared to Be Best Politician in Wilson's Cabinet: He Has Not Seriously Antagonized Business or Labor." He is an "aggressive personality, tall, angular, positive, keen of eye, voluble like of speech and extremely pronounced in his opinions . His 56 years of life have been characterized by many ups and downs [he] can swing a golf club, ride horseback, 'two-step' and 'hesitate' for three or four hours a night, make a dinner interesting and sit through the opera without being bored, all in the same day, sandwiching a political speech or public address in between."
McAdoo kept his Southern roots (Georgia and Tennessee). While living in Washington, D.C., and New York City, he helped found and lead the Southern Society. When a memorial to Confederate leaders was proposed for Stone Mountain, Ga., he was an outspoken supporter. The former citizen visited Chattanooga in 1923 and was met by a crowd of 3,000 at Union Station. He spoke of spending "so many happy days," dancing with many charming girls, marrying his first wife, and being admitted to the bar here. Two days later, he traveled to Georgia, where he won the presidential primary of that state's Democratic Party, pointing out that he was a "Simonpure 'blown in the bottle' Prohibitionist and refusing to disapprove of the KKK."
In 1932 the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce honored him at a Read House banquet on the 50th anniversary of his coming to the city to start a career "that led him to a foremost place in American and business life." One of his old friends, George Fort Milton, publisher of the Chattanooga News, introduced McAdoo. Also at the speaker's table were Mrs. W.E. Brock, Col R.B. Cooke, Mrs. Milton B. Ochs, Mark Senter, and McAdoo's daughter, Ellen Wilson McAdoo. Justice Alexander Chambliss and Frank Spurlock attended. After dinner, McAdoo visited old friend and office mate John T. Lupton at his Riverview home. The former Chattanoogan said he might some day come back to live. His stately home at 829 Vine St., Fort Wood, built in 1888 and since restored, belongs to Barbara and Steve Derthick.
McAdoo, 77, died of a heart attack in February 1941 in Washington, D.C., after attending the third inauguration of President Franklin Roosevelt. He was buried in Arlington Cemetery, as was the custom with cabinet secretaries serving in the war cabinet of Woodrow Wilson.
Frank (Mickey) Robbins is an investment adviser with Patten and Patten. For more visit Chattahistoricalassoc.org.