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Introduction

Americans concerned about poverty and inequality frequently point to the early twentieth century as a time when new forms of social legislation managed to curb corporate power. But the relationship between business interests and the development of public social policy in that era was far too complex to be captured so neatly. Businessmen of various stripes actually supported the implementation and expansion of a wide range of public social programs throughout the period. In fact, between the end of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression, commercial and industrial elites helped drive social spending in American cities to unprecedented heights.

With a few important exceptions, business interests in the early twentieth century tended to resist the rise of what we now call the social welfare state—an economic safety net woven from programs like unemployment compensation and public pensions for the elderly whose initial consolidation is perhaps most often associated with the 1930s and the New Deal. Yet to varying degrees in the early twentieth century and with particular fervor in the 1920s, business leaders in urban America championed a very different brand of social policy. Rather than state or national programs, they tended to favor local ones. Opposed to most forms of social insurance, they embraced public schooling, the promotion of public health, and the construction of decentralized cities featuring parks, playgrounds, libraries, museums, and single-family homes. Often through a windfall of public spending, these businessmen hoped to remake American cities and in many cases the citizens who inhabited them. Disdainful of most attempts to reduce poverty and economic insecurity through government action, they turned to government-sponsored social policy for altogether different reasons: to foster social and political stability as well as economic growth. Largely resistant to a social welfare state, they sought to build what might be called a civic welfare state, a network of programs that in the minds of elite businessmen promised to further both the goals of urban reform and urban boosterism, to prepare citizens for work and democracy while helping to lure new firms to their hometowns.

Commercial and industrial elites were far from the only political activists in the early twentieth century who supported such programs. But by the end of World War I, urban business leaders had become exceptionally adept at promoting the public social policies that they favored. Prodded in part by these businessmen’s political activism, urban budgets skyrocketed in the 1920s. In some cities spending grew by 50 percent adjusted for inflation; elsewhere budgets doubled or even tripled. Across urban America expenditures rose at rates that far outpaced population growth and in many cases spending before the war. The 1920s were hardly a moment of government retrenchment or a time when government growth was limited to Prohibition, early federal forays into economic planning, and the development of a smattering of other programs. On the contrary, business interests helped make the 1920s a moment of aggressive government expansion in urban America.¹

This book tells the story of how urban business leaders attempted to implement their vision for American social policy in three cities—Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—that experienced the tumult of the early twentieth century in importantly different ways. It pays close attention to a wide range of political actors, including local unions, middle-class women’s organizations, immigrant groups, African American activists, and the Ku Klux Klan. But its main protagonists are successful men of industry and commerce, including a subset of wealthy lawyers and other high-end professionals, who accumulated enough political and economic clout to capture local political office or to steer major local business organizations such as their city’s chamber of commerce at a time when white men dominated local government and urban America’s largest commercial bodies. It shows how these white business leaders moved from a position of limited political influence when it came to shaping urban social policy in the years preceding World War I to a perch of relative dominance thereafter. It describes how their social policy agenda expanded in the wake of the war and how the configuration of urban political institutions and the unequal distribution of power and economic resources tended to push other political activists to the sidelines in the decade following the armistice.

And yet even as businessmen’s political fortunes reached new heights, there was nowhere in urban America where the so-called ruling class could simply rule. Whether in cities that were strongholds of crooked political machines like Philadelphia, in places with relatively free and fair elections like Detroit, or in communities where disfranchisement had sharply limited the electorate like Atlanta, urban business leaders consistently faced resistance. Everywhere they had to forge alliances. Repeatedly they were forced to compromise. This, then, is a book about wealth, social politics, power, and American democracy in the early twentieth century in its various, often unequal, at times corrupt, and in some instances deeply circumscribed forms.

Like other political actors in the early 1900s, businessmen had an incredible number of alternatives to choose from when considering which social policies to pursue. In the decades following the Civil War, the rapid expansion of factory-based manufacturing had thrown not only American but also European cities into an almost chronic state of crisis. Overcrowding was commonplace. So were poverty and squalor. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, socially concerned activists on both sides of the Atlantic crafted a stunning array of policy proposals in hopes of ameliorating the social repercussions of industrial capitalism. They focused on everything from the distribution of wages, workplace safety, benefits for the unemployed, and pensions for the elderly to the allocation of housing and the fundamental layout of cities themselves. In addition to the new ideas that sprang from this transatlantic exchange, American businessmen could draw on the United States’ already generations-old tradition of using government as a tool for addressing urban social problems, whether through public schooling, the construction of sprawling urban parks like Central Park in New York City and Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, or through legal prohibitions on the consumption of alcohol and other types of behavior that various reformers had attempted to regulate since the earliest days of the republic.²

Faced with such a diverse array of options, both old and new, businessmen in the early twentieth century tended to gravitate toward certain kinds of public social programs and to reject proposals for others. They proved particularly resistant to policies that threatened to interfere with employers’ ability to determine workers’ wages, hours, working conditions, and fringe benefits, at least in the case of the relatively small but growing group of employers who offered them at the time.³ It was precisely these kinds of government programs that would eventually constitute the nexus of policies that scholars generally refer to as the social welfare state: unemployment compensation, old-age pensions, and other forms of government-sponsored social insurance; laws regulating workers’ schedules and pay; and, finally, public assistance to the poor, including payments to single and widowed mothers—early precursors of programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children and today’s Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, the policy commonly referred to as “welfare.” To borrow from a widely used definition, social welfare state programs generally serve one of two goals. They either stipulate how employers have to treat, compensate, or otherwise provide for their employees, or they lessen the degree to which certain categories of the economically vulnerable, such as the elderly or unemployed, have to depend on the labor market in order to survive.⁴

Business interests did not unanimously oppose the implementation of all facets of a social welfare state defined along these lines. For instance, in the years leading up to World War I, employers in many cases supported the creation of the nation’s first workmen’s compensation laws, which many of them saw as a vast improvement over settling disputes related to workplace injuries in the courts. In addition, as the final chapter of this book details, by the early 1920s prominent businessmen in cities across the country had come to embrace the task of aiding the jobless during especially severe economic downturns through a combination of public and private initiatives. Toward the end of the 1920s, a handful of corporate executives began to flirt with the notion of offering public pensions to the elderly, and in the 1930s a few high-profile businessmen would even participate in designing New Deal legislation that created facets of the social welfare state that we know today. But the significance of such exceptions should not be overdrawn. Most businessmen in the early twentieth century were far more likely to oppose than to support calls for public social policies that limited employers’ control over their own firms or that lessened the degree to which working-class Americans had to rely on the labor market in order to get by.⁵

Nonetheless, at various points in the early twentieth century and especially in the 1920s, elite businessmen in cities across the country called for heavy government spending on a host of public social programs. In justifying their support for these policies—whether to the public, to politicians, or to one another—these businessmen tended to offer two interrelated arguments on these programs’ behalf. The concept of the civic welfare state is meant to connote both of these arguments at once.

First, urban business leaders frequently touted the ability of certain public social policies to mold local residents into good citizens, a concept that in businessmen’s minds entailed being a good worker but also more: being lawabiding, being prepared for “responsible” democratic participation, and even being physically healthy. When calling for greater spending on public education, business elites commonly praised schools’ potential for preparing the young for both work and democracy. In urging the promotion of residential decentralization through the construction of streets, sewers, water mains, and other basic infrastructure, they frequently contended that dispersing settlement would help cure the crime, vice, and health problems that many of them associated with residential congestion and poor housing conditions. Residential decentralization also promised to encourage homeownership, which many urban business leaders believed had the power to curb working-class radicalism as members of the nation’s burgeoning urban proletariat invested in private property, the fundamental building block of the capitalist system. A significant cohort of elite businessmen ascribed to the notion that playgrounds were essential for molding good citizens. Not only would playgrounds keep children safe by providing them with alternatives to playing in the street, but when the nation’s first playgrounds were established in the early twentieth century, they were often staffed by public employees who were charged with organizing games and other supervised activities that businessmen and others who supported the playground movement believed would teach children teamwork, dedication, and other values that they considered central to good citizenship.

Local business leaders also lauded parks, libraries, and museums for providing urban Americans with wholesome and even edifying recreational outlets in cities that were replete with potentially debasing temptations. In many cases, they embedded their calls for such initiatives within a broader push for constructing what city planners at the time called the “City Beautiful,” an urban form rooted in the construction of grand boulevards, manicured parks, and elaborate public buildings that supporters believed would uplift the urban masses through the power of architecture and urban design.

Next, in addition to this focus on citizenship, local business elites frequently contended that implementing or expanding a certain array of public social programs was necessary for building a city of national or even international standing. They sometimes spoke of achieving this ideal as a good in itself, but much more often they did so as part of an effort to attract new firms to their hometowns. These businessmen realized that their counterparts across the country considered robust social spending in certain areas to be highly desirable. If they wanted to expand their local economies, business leaders felt that they had to remake their cities to reflect what business interests elsewhere had increasingly come to view as integral features of a good city inhabited by good citizens. Thus, the phrase “civic welfare” is meant to connote both business leaders’ belief in the power of a certain array of social programs to foster particular visions of citizenship as well as their conviction that pursuing those very same policies would improve the economic wellbeing of cities themselves.

To be sure, some of the businessmen who appear in the pages that follow supported social spending just to make a quick buck. Constructing a park, a school, or a museum might drive up the value of property near real estate that a businessman owned. Building the infrastructure to promote residential decentralization might also bring water and sewer services closer to a factory that a particular company—searching for cheaper overhead or a way to expand—had built on the outskirts of town. But reducing the social politics of urban business leaders simply to the immediate economic self-interest of individual businessmen would be misleading. It is one thing for an entrepreneur to advocate constructing a school up the road from land that he owns to boost property values. It is quite another for a diverse assortment of businessmen—including at times fierce economic competitors—to more or less collectively champion a multimillion-dollar renovation of an urban school district or another similarly wide-ranging social initiative, which is precisely what business leaders in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta did repeatedly in the early twentieth century. Simple economic self-interest certainly explains businessmen’s motivations to a degree. But understanding the full scope of urban business leaders’ political activism demands taking their broader political, economic, and ideological concerns seriously as well—a collection of interrelated interests that the concept of the civic welfare state is intended to underscore.

For some businessmen, the struggle to build a civic welfare state and improve the nation’s citizenry was inseparable from another quest: implementing and enforcing regulations on various kinds of personal behavior, like drinking alcohol. But the famous debates that swirled around such proposals in the early twentieth century tended to divide wealthy businessmen more than many other social policy issues. Moguls like John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Henry Ford strongly backed Prohibition, for example, but it was also wealthy businessmen like Pierre DuPont, Henry Joy of Packard, and Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors who led the charge for repeal. Other attempts to regulate personal behavior could breed similar divisions. In urban America, this was in part because the battles that surrounded such efforts could put the two goals at the heart of business leaders’ attempt to build a civic welfare state into direct conflict. Campaigns aimed at shaping the comportment of local citizens by enforcing existing laws or passing new ones frequently entailed widely publicized exposés depicting cities as dens of crime, vice, and political corruption—revelations that threatened to undermine business interests’ simultaneous push to attract new enterprises to their city. For instance, when a group of especially religious business elites spearheaded an attempt to end prostitution in Atlanta on the eve of World War I, it was the local chamber of commerce that took the lead in limiting the crackdown. With police raids and investigations producing embarrassing headlines day after day, the leaders of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce feared that bad press would damage the city’s reputation and become a drag on the local economy.⁶

Some businessmen persisted in their fight against drinking, gambling, prostitution, and other vices as the early twentieth century progressed. But whether because of the divisions that those efforts tended to breed or due to most businessmen’s personal beliefs, urban business elites’ social policy agenda tended to focus elsewhere by the 1920s, especially on schooling, recreation, public health, urban decentralization, and city planning more generally. These were the issues at the center of Jazz Age businessmen’s campaign for a civic welfare state.

By the end of World War I, urban business leaders’ support for many of the public programs that they would advocate in the 1920s was nothing new. But during the war and its aftermath, the chronic urban crisis that they and other political activists had already been fretting over in the opening decades of the century seemed to take a sudden turn for the worse. Cities grew even more crowded, as migrants poured into urban America searching for work in one of the many industries that boomed during the war. In 1919—the first year following the peace—a wave of race riots, strikes, bombings, and bomb threats swept across urban America. In that year, business leaders in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta called for social spending as arguably never before. But even after the nation had returned to a state of relative calm, elite businessmen in those three cities remained committed to keeping spending levels high. As the 1920s wore on, their reasons for doing so became increasingly tied to the local circumstances that they faced. In Atlanta, the social politics of the city’s white business elite grew ever more linked to local boosterism. In Philadelphia, leading business interests redoubled their push for public spending because their immediate postwar effort had met with disappointment and because the city was slated to host a major international fair that elite businessmen hoped would help reverse the city’s already recognizable economic decline. In Detroit, the success of the auto industry continued to breed rapid urban growth and with it a host of social challenges that local business leaders believed only government could solve.

At the same time, business interests in all three cities proved far more successful at implementing their policy agenda in the 1920s than they had been in the years leading up to the war. In some cities, like Detroit, this was because business leaders had managed to restructure local government in ways that overwhelmingly favored the wealthy. Elsewhere, businessmen’s heightened desire for government growth prodded them to forge new alliances and to reorient their political priorities. In Philadelphia, frustration with political gridlock encouraged local business leaders to overcome their own internal divisions and motivated prominent businessmen who had formerly opposed Philadelphia’s corrupt political machine to increasingly make peace with its tactics. In Atlanta, the city’s white business leaders—who tended to view African Americans as political subjects, not citizens—generally sought to exclude African Americans from the benefits of the civic welfare state that they hoped to build. And yet on multiple occasions, members of Atlanta’s white business elite were forced to make concessions to a small group of African Americans, who despite being disfranchised in most regards still retained the right to vote in special elections, including the bond referenda that white business leaders needed to win in order to finance the government expansion that they so desired.

In the end, these two overarching developments—elite businessmen’s heightened commitment to social spending and their enhanced political efficacy—had major consequences for urban policy. Public spending surged in all three cities as local officials funneled money toward social initiatives that urban business leaders favored. Detroit’s budget was 340 percent larger in 1929 adjusted for inflation than it had been just before the United States entered the war. All of this growth took place after the armistice.⁷ Atlanta’s budget grew by 134 percent in the same period and Philadelphia’s by 75 percent. In all three cities spending expanded far faster than the local population. Detroit spent 58 percent more per person at the end of the 1920s than it had just before the United States declared war, again adjusted for inflation. Philadelphia spent 51 percent more per person and Atlanta 60 percent.⁸

These figures are all the more impressive because they exclude the costs that governments paid to finance their debts. If those sums were included, the growth of government spending would appear even higher. Cities across the country borrowed with abandon in the 1920s. Detroit’s municipal debt grew by over 700 percent. Philadelphia’s and Atlanta’s each rose by over 200 percent. In all three cities, businessmen called loudly and frequently for debt spending. Indeed, buying now and paying later was elite businessmen’s favorite method for financing the major projects that they advocated.⁹

Even so, commercial and industrial leaders in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta rarely objected to the other main fiscal trend that allowed government spending to grow so rapidly in the 1920s, at least not in a sustained and collective way. The decade’s famous prosperity encouraged the extensive development of real estate. The assessed value of property in Detroit grew by over 80 percent between 1919 and 1929 even when inflation is taken into account. Philadelphia’s rose by roughly 75 percent and Atlanta’s by over 50 percent. Tax rates remained relatively stable in all three cities. Still, as the value of taxable real estate grew, so did the amount of revenue flowing into municipal coffers. By increasing the money available for government services and by enabling cities to finance new debt, these funds allowed local officials to answer businessmen’s plea that they spend as never before.

In other cities, public spending followed a similar trajectory. Los Angeles’s budget grew by nearly 300 percent between 1916 and 1929 adjusted for inflation with virtually all of this growth following the war. New York’s budget nearly doubled. Chicago’s rose by 85 percent and Birmingham’s by 250 percent. Whether in these cities or elsewhere, increased social spending drove a significant portion of this growth. Overall in the nation’s largest cities—those with populations over three hundred thousand—spending per person on schooling rose 73 percent between 1916 and 1929 adjusted for inflation; on recreational programs spending grew 72 percent; on libraries, 47 percent; on hospitals, 44 percent; on sewer systems, 30 percent; and on other facets of public health, 45 percent.

In fact, the pace of government growth was far higher in the 1920s than it had been earlier in the century in many American cities. Spending per person actually decreased by 5 percent between 1904 and 1916 in cities with populations over three hundred thousand adjusted for inflation. By contrast, in a similar twelve-year increment, between 1916 and 1928, spending per person rose 55 percent, again with all of this growth following World War I. Historians tend to treat the first two decades of the twentieth century as more significant than the 1920s in terms of government development. The prewar years were clearly a moment of great policy innovation in urban America, but it was the 1920s that saw the most local government growth.¹⁰

Table 1. Rate of Growth in Urban Government Spending Per Capita Before and After World War I

Note: Of the twenty-one cities with populations over 300,000 in 1920, sixteen experienced a higher rate of growth in government spending per capita adjusted for inflation between 1916 and 1928 than between 1904 and 1916. The specific cities listed above are those that had populations over 300,000 in 1920 as well the three largest southern cities after New Orleans (the only southern city with a population greater than 300,000 in 1920). Cities are listed in order of population size.

Source: Financial Statistics of Cities Having a Population of over 30,000

It will take more than this one study to unearth the politics that drove these trends in the wide variety of cities that experienced them. In taking the first steps toward that end, this book aims to strike a balance. Instead of digging deeply into the experience of just one city, as so many urban histories do, or touching superficially on a large number, it strives to offer an account that is detailed enough to reflect the unique political environments of individual cities while also shedding light on how various trends played out across urban America’s diverse political terrain.

Indeed, by the early twentieth century, American cities were so complex that a historian has to make difficult choices about which facets of that complexity to examine most closely. Following the lead of some of the most influential recent scholarship on American politics, this book especially scrutinizes how local laws and political institutions—from city charters and local political parties to the rules governing municipal spending—shaped urban politics. At the same time, however, the pages that follow seek to remedy shortcomings in that very same body of scholarship. The researchers who first highlighted the importance of such a “state-centered” approach to studying American politics did so in part by critiquing earlier writing on the history of American social policy—specifically on the social welfare state as defined above—that had vastly overstated the role of business interests in propelling that history.¹¹ Despite their contributions on that front, authors working in this vein have tended to underplay the degree to which businessmen encouraged the development of other facets of American social policy in the early twentieth century, such as public schooling, public recreation, city planning, and the other urban programs that are the main focus here. Thus, whenever possible, this book attempts to underscore how local laws and political institutions—combined with the contingencies of history, shifts in businessmen’s political priorities and strategies, and variations in the respective interests and tactics of other political groups—allowed business interests to propel the development of American social policy to an unrivaled degree in certain places and at certain times.¹²

Hence the choice of Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta: by the 1920s, these cities typified some of the main political regimes that were prevalent in urban America at the time—the machine-dominated city (Philadelphia); the politically reformed, largely machine-free city (Detroit); and finally the city of widespread disfranchisement (Atlanta). Taken together, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta also offer the opportunity to examine a broad assortment of political actors, from professional politicians to grassroots groups. Finally, these three cities featured sharply different economies and economic histories. By the 1920s, Philadelphia was a long-established manufacturing hub that was home to an eclectic collection of factories of widely varying sizes in predominantly older industries. Detroit, by contrast, exemplified the new mass-production economy that had emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century and, unlike 1920s Philadelphia, was a boomtown that featured a single dominant industry. Finally, Atlanta was still primarily a commercial depot—a town with only a fledgling manufacturing sector but with great regional strength in banking, insurance, and the distribution of agricultural commodities—and a city whose economic development still largely lay in the future. Trying to identify a set of places that can fully capture the complexity of urban America in the early twentieth century is a fool’s errand. Still, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta reflect a great deal of that complexity and do so more efficiently than most.

A note on terminology before proceeding: readers attuned to how historians have written about American politics in the early twentieth century might notice the absence thus far of the terms “progressive” and “progressivism,” concepts that appear frequently in accounts of the era. I avoid using those terms for a number of reasons, most of all because they have been notoriously difficult for historians to define. This is not to say they are bereft of utility. But historians’ lengthy search for the essence of progressivism and for the true identity of the progressives has suggested that both concepts are best suited for painting with broad brushstrokes, not for the pointillism that a nuanced political history demands. They help evoke a complex era in U.S. history when the nation “swam in a sudden abundance” of policy choices, but their usefulness quickly fades when one attempts to differentiate between what the various political actors who waded in those waters—often with wildly different interests, intentions, and visions of reform—respectively chose and why.¹³ Nor is it particularly useful to characterize the businessmen who appear in the pages that follow as “corporate liberals”—another term that historians have employed from time to time—because the broad contours of their social politics did not foreshadow (let alone help to constitute) the social politics that would make New Deal liberalism distinct, as the concept “corporate liberalism” tends to imply when used in the context of social policy.¹⁴

Rather, as the Great Depression was approaching and the New Deal lay just around the bend, business leaders in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta had chosen a reformist path that they hoped would lead in a very different direction—a social politics that they believed would bolster their political and economic standing rather than set limits on corporate power as New Deal liberalism in part would do. That said, businessmen’s political activism prior to the 1930s did help encourage the coming of the New Deal. But as this book’s final pages detail, this was largely by accident, not by design.

The early twentieth century was an exceptionally rich political moment, a reformist age that encompassed the 1920s as much as the decades that surrounded them. Historians used to depict the 1920s as an “intermission” that brought the reformism of the early twentieth century to a temporary pause. The pages that follow confirm that this was not the case. Instead, the 1920s in part saw an exceptionally business-friendly strain of reformism flourish in American cities. Appreciating this fact is important not merely in terms of righting the historical record, however. A similar approach to urban issues would live on long after the business leaders who appear in this book would depart the historical stage. Indeed, one of this book’s contentions is that drawing attention to the social politics that capitalists embraced in the early twentieth century can help underscore shortcomings in urban social policy today.¹⁵

But before grappling with the present, it is necessary to get a better handle on the past. We begin in the opening years of the last century, a moment when elite businessmen in cities as diverse as Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta were already attempting to shape urban social policy but more often than not were failing to do so.