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CHAPTER 2

Detroit

Businessmen at Large

At the end of World War I, roughly one in three residents of Detroit was a first-generation immigrant. More than a third were children of at least one foreign-born parent. About forty thousand African Americans lived in the city. The vast majority of Detroit’s population was working class, and over half was Catholic.¹

Yet when the city held its first elections under its new charter, the results would have better suited a place that was Detroit’s demographic inverse. The contest took place in November 1918, just as the last shots were being fired in Europe. Of the nine candidates who won Detroit’s first at-large elections for city council, none were foreign born. Just one had been born to immigrant parents, and only two were Catholic. All of the winners were white, and all were men. The city’s leading union, the Detroit Federation of Labor (DFL), ran a slate of candidates in the race for city council, but every one of them lost. Henry Leland’s business-dominated Detroit Citizens League, by contrast, supported all nine candidates who won out of the sixty-six who entered the race. Nearly all of the winners were businessmen. Five of the incoming councilmen were corporate executives, two were realtors, and one was a banker. The remaining councilman, Fred Castator, had previously served as deputy assistant labor commissioner for the state of Michigan. Though Castator was supposedly the Citizens League’s labor-friendly pick, the DFL had denounced Castator going into the election while the Michigan Manufacturers Association had supported him. The DFL eventually claimed Castator as an ally, but in 1918 he was a businessmen’s candidate. The composition of the city council had changed markedly since the eve of charter reform, when the council had included saloonkeepers, a druggist, a plumber, a barber, and several other members of the city’s petite bourgeoisie. In 1917, elections for the city’s new at-large school board brought similar changes to that body, except that a woman, Laura Osborn—leader of the prewar movement to reform the board—succeeded in winning a seat.²

Business leaders managed to implement large swaths of their vision of a civic welfare state in 1920s Detroit because the city’s new political structure gave candidates with access to wealth an advantage that proved difficult for other political actors to surmount. Except for a brief interval between 1924 and 1926, candidates backed by the Detroit Citizens League held a supermajority on Detroit’s city council throughout the 1920s. Out of the seventeen councilmen who served between 1919 and 1929, ten were identifiable as corporate executives or businessmen in real estate, insurance, and banking.

Viewed from another angle, businessmen’s dominance of Detroit’s city council appears even more pronounced. In the eleven-year period between 1919 and 1929, the members of the nine-member council collectively served ninety-nine years in office. Businessmen served sixty-five out of those ninety-nine years. The remaining councilmen who served in the 1920s included three professional civil servants, a doctor, a dentist, former deputy assistant labor commissioner Castator, and finally Robert Ewald, a union man who managed to fight his way onto the city council early in the decade. In time, however, Ewald grew palatable enough to business interests to earn repeated Citizens League endorsements, suggesting that even the most worker-friendly councilman in 1920s Detroit walked a line between capital and labor.³

Candidates backed by the Detroit Citizens League also held a supermajority on the city’s school board at all times during the decade, and all but three of the board members who served during the 1920s were listed in the city’s social register. The superintendent of schools during the period was a former director of the Detroit Board of Commerce and was the board of commerce’s choice to head the schools. Finally, Detroit’s mayors, when they were not business executives themselves, forged close ties to the city’s commercial and industrial elite.⁴

Of course, businessmen’s political power could be neither constant nor absolute in a mass democracy like Detroit’s. A number of dynamics compromised business leaders’ influence during the decade, including a crisis in municipal finances, a grassroots insurgency led by the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan, and the sporadic political mobilization of organized labor. Indeed, there was a moment in the middle of the 1920s when it was unclear who would rule Detroit. Only a series of unforeseeable developments—including a working-class mayor who moved to broaden his base after nearly losing an election—enabled local business leaders to regain clout.

Yet despite slips in businessmen’s political influence, it is difficult to identify another political force in 1920s Detroit that truly rivaled the city’s business elite. The political fortunes of the Ku Klux Klan declined as quickly as they had arisen. Open-shop campaigns tended to sap organized labor’s political strength and narrow local unions’ political priorities. Insofar as they organized based on ethnicity, local immigrants rarely overcame the steep odds that they faced when trying to shape public policy in the city. Detroit’s largest immigrant group, Poles, constituted just 5 percent of the city’s population in 1920, a meager proportion in a political system based on citywide voting. The most prominent organization in Detroit’s quickly growing African American community, the Detroit Urban League, depended in large part on the support of wealthy white benefactors and tended to shy away from challenging the city’s white business leaders in the public sphere. Meanwhile, female activists, galvanized by the city’s vast network of women’s associations, fought most of their battles in the 1920s on the state and federal levels rather than in the local arena.

Lacking strong political organizations that could channel their demands, most Detroiters’ principal opportunity for shaping public policy came intermittently and indirectly at election time. Other than selecting among candidates, the electorate’s primary intervention in the policymaking process arose in a number of citywide referenda on major public improvement projects that entailed high levels of debt spending. Albeit often in elections with low turnout, voters approved the vast majority of the ballot initiatives enabling increased government expenditures that were put before them in the 1920s, suggesting that there was a basic consensus among Detroiters that the city needed more and better public services. Yet these referenda were worded in the most general terms and allowed voters to register only all-or-nothing, yea-or-nay votes on policies that were largely of elite design. At best, voters’ participation in bond referenda constituted oblique assertions of political power and highly abstract expressions of policy preferences. Most residents of 1920s Detroit barely had a voice in the city’s policymaking process due to the scarcity of effective and engaged political pressure groups. Members of Detroit’s commercial and industrial elite, on the other hand, had far less trouble making themselves heard as they sought to use local government to create the city and the citizenry that they desired.

Behind the Wheel, 1919–1922

In the first elections under Detroit’s new charter, voters not only elected every single candidate on the Citizens League’s slate for city council. They also chose one of the most well-known corporate executives in the city to serve as mayor. James Couzens had made his fortune as the general manager of the Ford Motor Company, where he worked until 1915. Over the years, Couzens had gained a reputation for being a maverick who was willing to take worker-friendly stances even if they put him at odds with his corporate brethren. While at Ford, Couzens helped dream up the five-dollar day, a policy that most employers in the city opposed. During a nationwide unemployment epidemic at the start of World War I, Couzens publicly chastised his fellow industrialists for not doing more to aid the jobless. In the 1918 mayoral campaign, Couzens ran on a platform calling for municipal ownership of the city’s street railway system. To show solidarity with Detroiters struggling in the face of high fares, Couzens boarded a streetcar and refused to pay. Other local citizens followed suit, sparking a wave of confrontations across the city. A number of local executives who opposed municipal ownership of Detroit’s street railways accused Couzens of opportunistic rabble-rousing. Henry Leland and the Detroit Citizens League chose to back another candidate for mayor.⁵

Still, despite such instances of friction, Couzens and the rest of Detroit’s commercial and industrial elite agreed in a number of realms. Couzens relied heavily on his corporate colleagues for input and advice throughout his term. At times Couzens denounced members of the business-dominated city council when they did not follow his lead, but he and local legislators moved in tandem on most major issues, a pattern that led to accusations in the local press that the city council was merely a rubber stamp for Couzens’s agenda. In fact, Couzens and the city council’s tendency to agree was indicative of a relatively robust consensus among elite Detroiters about what the city needed most.⁶

Detroit’s population had skyrocketed during the war as the city’s booming economy had drawn ever more people to the city. Between 1910 and 1920, the number of Detroiters grew from 465,766 to 993,768. By 1930, the city would boast 1,568,662 residents. Detroit’s geography was expanding at a similarly rapid pace. Between 1910 and 1920, annexations of nearby territories increased the size of the city from 41 square miles to 78, a number that would continue to grow until the city encompassed 138 square miles in 1930. Most of this new land was undeveloped. The throngs of newcomers who arrived in Detroit during the war and its immediate aftermath continued to crowd into the city’s densely populated core, an increasingly congested island in a sea of open land. Because of a shortage of classrooms, more than fifteen thousand grade-schoolers were able to attend only half-day sessions in 1919. By one account, over half the city’s school-aged children were not in school at all. Reports of crime and juvenile delinquency had increased during the war, a trend that elite Detroiters associated with the population boom and the concomitant shortage of housing, schools, recreational outlets, and other city services. As the Red Scare and militant strikes swept across the country in the wake of the armistice, the anxieties of Detroit’s business leaders peaked. Connecting postwar radicalism with the foreign born, businessmen’s long-standing worries about immigrant assimilation intensified.⁷

Once in office, Couzens and his elite colleagues on the city council and school board moved quickly to address these issues. In his first year as mayor, Couzens convened what he called a “reconstruction meeting” that brought together “250 bankers, manufacturers,” and public officials to find ways to resurrect what an advertisement for the forum called Detroit: “a civic giant flat on its back.”⁸ The city’s commissioner of public works called for $20 to $25 million in new debt spending to improve the city’s sewer system and millions more to build and improve roads, alleys, and sidewalks. Alex Dow, an executive at Detroit Edison and the city’s water commissioner, demanded millions more for new water mains. Frank W. Blair, the president of the Union Trust Company, proclaimed that the city had to spend nearly a quarter billion dollars to meet its needs. James Vernor, a local manufacturer and president of the city council, declared, “The Council is ready to go the limit as far as construction work is concerned.” The president of the Detroit Board of Commerce—Allan A. Templeton, a successful auto parts supplier—pledged his organization’s support.⁹ Soon thereafter, an editorial in the board of commerce’s weekly publication called for a cascade of spending: “Instead of a slow and deliberate program of public improvements, it is necessary to do a great number of things all at once.” “Immense bond issues must be sold.”¹⁰

And indeed they were. In August 1920, voters approved the Department of Public Works and the Water Commissioner’s request for a windfall of bonds, $37 million in all. By the time Couzens left office at the end of 1922, the city had built 100 miles of sewer mains and another 200 miles of lateral sewers at a cost of over $30 million. It laid 170 miles of road and spent more than $18 million to improve the city’s water system.¹¹ While most of this new construction did not follow a formal city plan—Detroit would not officially adopt one until 1925—promoting residential decentralization formed a guiding principle. As Couzens attested, it is “the consensus of opinion that there is more immorality being caused by people huddled together in small rooms, who are robbed of normal home life … than from any other cause.”¹²