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CHAPTER 1

At Cross Purposes

Businessmen’s Political Activism Before the Armistice

Urban business leaders advocated social spending in a number of areas in the early years of the twentieth century. They lobbied for the expansion and improvement of local school systems. They joined and often led campaigns to construct municipal playgrounds and to improve local health conditions. At their most ambitious, they called for an extensively remodeled city, the “City Beautiful,” an urban form designed to include elaborate and interconnected systems of parks and parkways as well as grandiose civic centers featuring ornate city halls, museums, and public libraries. In many cases, business elites hoped to erect these structures on some of urban America’s most valuable real estate, stretches of land already occupied by factories, stores, and homes.

Yet whether their plans were bold or modest, pricey or inexpensive, businessmen frequently stumbled in their attempt to implement them in the years preceding World War I. In Detroit, local business leaders’ political influence was remarkably limited at the time, a trend that encouraged their involvement in another effort: the so-called municipal reform movement, or the attempt to revamp the basic structure of city government through reforms like expanding the reach of the civil service or abolishing ward-based elections in favor of citywide contests. Municipal reformers generally hoped that such measures would weaken local political machines or dilute the strength of the working-class vote.¹

Business leaders in Atlanta and Philadelphia were also involved in the municipal reform movement. In fact, in both cities businessmen’s support for municipal reform was a root cause of their troubles when it came to shaping local social policy before the war. In Atlanta, business leaders struggled to pull off a nearly impossible about-face—a pivot from denouncing local officials as incompetent and even corrupt when advocating municipal reform to pleading that voters give those same officials more money to spend when championing social spending. In Philadelphia, a handful of especially wealthy businessmen were the principal beneficiaries and even sponsors of the entrenched political machine that other leading businessmen in the city who were bent on municipal reform hoped to dislodge. On multiple occasions, public projects that Philadelphia’s commercial and industrial elite almost unanimously favored stalled because of local business leaders’ infighting over boss rule.

The tensions that riddled campaigns for municipal reform in cities like Philadelphia and Atlanta compounded the commonplace obstacles that might hinder any call for expensive public projects: the process of gaining eminent domain; legal controversies surrounding government jurisdiction; the architectural and structural problems inherent in planning large-scale public works, not to mention the main challenge that business leaders in Detroit faced—enlisting the support of local officials and the public in the first place. Commercial and industrial elites in different cities confronted varying combinations of these and other dynamics. But the effects were often similar. When it came to shaping local social policy in the years leading up to World War I, urban business leaders notched a record that was far more mixed than the one they would achieve after the armistice.

Struggling to Steer the New Motor City

In the opening years of the twentieth century, the rise of the automobile industry remade Detroit. In 1904, the city was home to an unremarkable smattering of manufacturing enterprises that employed just over sixty thousand workers. By the time the United States entered World War I, the auto industry alone employed twice that many, roughly 40 percent of the total number of factory workers in the city. The rest of Detroit’s industrial workforce toiled in one of the city’s many other manufacturing firms—building furnaces, producing chemicals, rolling cigars, or processing meat. Detroit was not a one-industry town, but auto manufacturing alone made the city an industrial powerhouse in a stunningly brief interval. In 1900—on the eve of the auto industry’s first major growth spurt—Detroit ranked sixteenth among American cities in terms of industrial output. By 1914, it ranked fourth.²

The rise of auto manufacturing produced a new group of tycoons. These men eventually displaced the merchants and manufacturers who had made their fortunes in pre-automotive Detroit as the vanguard of the city’s business elite. And yet this process was more amicable than one might expect. Detroiters who traced their wealth back to the city’s old nineteenth-century economy—rooted in the production of railcars and stoves, in lumber, and in mining—were among the first investors in the city’s fledgling car shops. Many of them profited from the car boom and quickly gleaned the importance of building strong social, political, and economic ties to the city’s newest moguls. Soon, recently flush automobile executives and the city’s old business leaders were comfortably hobnobbing together at Detroit’s toniest social clubs and serving alongside one another on various corporate boards. By 1916, the names of a number of the city’s new automobile magnates appeared alongside those of Detroit’s most established families in Dau’s Blue Book, essentially a who’s who of the local upper crust. Despite the almost revolutionary transformation of Detroit’s economy, the city’s new and established barons were coalescing into a relatively coherent business class.³

There was one important exception to this trend: Henry Ford. Members of Detroit’s pre-automotive elite had invested in Ford’s early companies, but Ford’s first venture flopped, and investors pushed him out of his second when he refused to embrace their vision for the firm. Even after Ford had become an unparalleled success, he remained at odds with many of his corporate colleagues. His competitors were furious when he announced the five-dollar day in 1914, fearing wage inflation throughout the city. They ridiculed his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I. When Ford endorsed the reelection campaign of Democratic president Woodrow Wilson in 1916, members of Detroit’s solidly Republican business elite jeered. Perhaps taking the hint—or maybe out of spite—Henry Ford’s involvement in local politics grew increasingly sporadic.⁴

Other car executives, by contrast, grew all the more involved in local affairs. In the run-up to World War I, leaders of the automobile industry took charge of the local business community’s most prominent civic organizations. Between 1911 and America’s entry into the war, the presidents of the Detroit Board of Commerce were all in car manufacturing. Representatives of the auto industry also dominated the organization’s directorate. Meanwhile, auto executives like Hugh Chalmers of Chalmers Motor Company, F. F. Beall of Packard, and A. L. McMeans of Dodge took the helm of the Detroit Employers’ Association, the corporate elite’s organizational base for waging war on local unions.⁵

It was also one of the city’s most successful carmakers, Henry Leland, who established the civic organization that spearheaded the municipal reform movement in Detroit, including the attempt to reconfigure the city’s basic political structure by revising Detroit’s city charter. Born in 1843 in Vermont, Leland came of age as the industrial revolution was spreading through New England. In his early professional years, he gained a hands-on education as a toolmaker and machinist working in factories throughout the Northeast. In 1890, Leland established a new enterprise in Detroit, where he quickly earned a reputation as an exceptional engineer. When Henry Ford’s second company began to struggle in 1902, investors called on Leland to save the firm. Soon, the newly renamed Cadillac Automobile Company gained international fame for producing the first cars with fully interchangeable parts.⁶

In addition to being a master engineer, Leland was a devout Presbyterian, an ardent prohibitionist, and a staunch opponent of organized labor. He was a significant contributor to the Michigan Anti-Saloon League and helped to establish the city’s antiunion Employers’ Association. An unapologetic elitist, Leland believed that the “better class” of Americans—meaning primarily wealthy, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men—was most fit to govern.⁷

Unfortunately for Leland, Detroit was becoming less Anglo-Saxon, less Protestant, and more working class with each passing day. Jobs created by the auto boom drew hundreds of thousands of migrants to the city. Most of them were desperately poor. Many of them were Catholic and Jewish peasants from southern and eastern Europe. Between 1900 and 1920, Detroit’s population grew from 285,000 to just under one million, and the number of immigrants in the city roughly tripled. By 1920, nearly 300,000 Detroiters had been born in another country.⁸

Initially, these immigrants settled in enclaves throughout older sections of the city. At the time, Detroit elected most of its public officials from neighborhood wards. As the city’s largely immigrant proletariat grew, so did its influence on local affairs. A man like Leland, who believed in rule by the “better class,” had few sympathies for a political system that gave workers, let alone immigrants, so much sway in local elections. What offended Leland most, however, was the influence that the so-called Voteswappers League had on local politics. The Voteswappers were a band of small-scale political bosses who controlled a number of the neighborhood-based boards that oversaw elections in Detroit and thus were able to manipulate vote counts in favor of their political allies. Worse still for the teetotaling Leland, many of the Voteswappers doubled as saloonkeepers and their primary financial sponsor was the Royal Ark, Detroit’s main association of liquor dealers.⁹

Figure 1. Henry Leland, president of the Detroit Citizens League and the Cadillac Motor Company, photographed circa 1920. National Automotive History Collection, Detroit Public Library.

In 1912, Leland founded a new political organization that eventually became known as the Detroit Citizens League. Elite businessmen dominated the group’s board and quickly adopted charter reform as a leading goal. The Detroit Board of Commerce soon joined the charter fight, while wealthy executives like John and Horace Dodge, Edsel Ford, and S. S. Kresge (whose name would eventually put the K in Kmart) all donated large sums to fund the Citizens League’s effort.¹⁰

Detroit’s commercial and industrial elite supported charter reform for a variety of reasons. Some shared Leland’s distaste for the Voteswappers and their connection to the saloon. Others were weary of the scandals that intermittently rocked the city. Clouds of suspicion hovered over the city’s sanitation and street-repair services and over the police department’s relationship with local saloonkeepers. At one point, three-quarters of Detroit’s city council had been arrested on charges that they had accepted bribes from a regional railroad company. The courts eventually acquitted the lawmakers, but the controversy lasted for over a year.¹¹

Business leaders also hoped to streamline a political system that was undeniably cumbersome. Under the existing charter, Detroit was governed by a mayor and a city council that had thirty-six members elected by ward. Government appropriations demanded approval from the city’s enormous board of estimates, composed of forty-one officials. Every city department was run by a committee consisting of three members each. It was a system plagued by inefficiencies. Like municipal reformers across the country, businessmen in Detroit wanted city officials to run the government like a private corporation, with efficiency as a primary goal.¹²

But most of all, business elites joined the fight for charter reform because they wanted more political power. Indeed, despite their wealth, leaders of Detroit’s business community had a difficult time influencing local politics in the early years of the century. Their failure to shape the local social policymaking process especially attests to this pattern.

Among the commercial and industrial elite’s most ambitious social policy proposals in the years preceding World War I was the construction of a new multistructure cultural center just a few miles from Detroit’s downtown. Its design was rooted in a movement in architectural and urban planning that had sprung from multiple sources and was just beginning to make its way across the country. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, village improvement associations had begun tinkering with coordinated planning and beautification in small towns in various parts of the nation. In urban America, Frederick Law Olmsted and others had made a splash in the years surrounding the Civil War by designing bucolic common spaces, like New York’s Central Park, that they believed could counteract everything from rising class tensions to the hustle-bustle of city life. In Europe, another urban vision was taking shape, one exemplified most clearly by Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s reconstruction of large swaths of Paris to fit Napoléon III’s dreams for France’s Second Empire. In the early 1890s, the American city planner Daniel Burnham drew heavily on Haussmann’s ideas in constructing his famous White City at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, a fair marking the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Burnham’s work inspired a growing collection of planners who hoped to use beautification and urban design to address a variety of forces—from rising inequality to haphazard urban development—that they believed were tearing American cities apart. These planners found additional inspiration in the work of Charles Mulford Robinson, especially from his 1901 Improvement of Towns and Cities, a manifesto that argued for the transformative potential of architecture, urban planning, municipal art, and parks. The fledgling City Beautiful movement got an additional boost just after the turn of the century when federal officials decided to redesign portions of Washington, D.C., by elaborating on Pierre L’Enfant’s original plan for the city. The main product of that effort was an expanded and reconceived National Mall lined with neoclassical structures and embellished with a large reflecting pool and the monuments that would eventually become the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. A few blocks away, the Pennsylvania Railroad agreed to construct a new building of its own, Union Station, in a similar spirit.¹³

Soon cities across the country were crafting their own City Beautiful plans, with various groups vying to tailor the movement to suit their respective interests. Elite women’s associations frequently dove into the fray, and so did local commercial groups. City Beautiful projects tended to increase local property values, yet they also promised more from businessmen’s perspective. As the lawyer, banker, and wealthy real estate developer Henry Morgenthau contended, proper city planning could ameliorate “disease, moral depravity, discontent, and socialism.” Moreover, City Beautiful plans frequently included proposals to construct new parks, museums, and libraries—initiatives that promised to nurture a variety of traits in the local citizenry that business elites found desirable. In cities as diverse as Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, the City Beautiful movement was propelled in large part by businessmen’s civic ambitions.¹⁴

In Detroit, business leaders’ City Beautiful aspirations hinged on the completion of two buildings—a new home for the Detroit Public Library and another for the city’s art museum—that were designed to sit across the street from one another and anchor the proposed cultural center. William C. Weber, a Detroit businessman who had made his fortune in timber and real estate, helped lead the campaign for the new buildings. As Weber argued, the cultural center promised to offer everyday Detroiters “high pleasures” as well as “higher ideals,” to teach “Detroit residents who could not afford to travel to Europe or New York” that there was “something better” than working-class “nickelodeons,” vaudeville theater, and other forms of mass entertainment.¹⁵

Yet implementing Weber’s vision proved difficult. As was often true in the early twentieth century, Andrew Carnegie donated the seed money for Detroit’s new library building, but in the Motor City’s case only after years of delay. George W. Radford, a Detroit attorney who served “large moneyed interests,” initiated discussions with Carnegie’s representatives in 1901. Carnegie quickly agreed to give Detroit $750,000—half for a new central library and the rest for a handful of branch libraries—with the stipulation that Detroit’s government purchase the necessary land and allocate $75,000 a year for maintenance. But the deal soon faced resistance from local papers, organized labor, and eventually members of the city council. Opponents decried Carnegie’s brutal treatment of workers in his steel mills, particularly during the infamous Homestead Strike of 1892, and argued that accepting funds from the steel titan amounted to taking “blood money.”¹⁶

With political opposition growing, supporters of the library project shifted tacks. They began lobbying for an appropriation from the city itself, all the while hoping to take advantage of Carnegie’s offer at a later date. In 1902, Detroiters were asked to approve a $500,000 bond issue to fund construction. The bond issue passed, but the library project immediately hit another roadblock. Members of the city’s board of estimates—who met to review the city’s budget just once a year and had a reputation for knee-jerk parsimony—agreed to appropriate only $150,000 of the approved funds. The library commission refused to accept the lower amount out of principle and thus received nothing. In 1904, leaders of the Detroit Board of Commerce floated another proposal for the library only to have the city council reject it. Years later, despite ongoing pressure from local business leaders, city officials had yet to accept Carnegie’s donation or to provide significant funding on their own. Finally, in 1910, with organized labor and other detractors no longer actively opposing the project, the city agreed to appropriate enough money for Detroit to accept the Carnegie funds. The secretary of the Detroit Board of Commerce, Charles B. Sawyer, traveled to Pittsburgh (Carnegie’s hometown) and helped finalize the deal.¹⁷

Even with Carnegie’s money in hand, however, progress on the library remained glacially slow. Some of the delays were inevitable. It took time, for instance, to select an architectural plan. Still, public officials did not start construction until 1915—five full years after the city had finally accepted Carnegie’s gift. Then, just months after the city had broken ground, building ceased when local officials failed to appropriate enough money to keep work going. For well over a year, the unfinished building stood as “a gaunt, naked skeleton of steel against the sky” and as a testament to business elites’ political inefficacy. Thereafter, World War I brought further delays.¹⁸

Business leaders’ attempt to build a new home for the city’s art museum was just as fraught. At the time, the museum was a private entity, but the wealthy businessmen who dominated its board wanted taxpayers to foot the bill for the new building. The Detroit Museum of Art was founded in the 1880s under the leadership of wealthy newspaper publisher James Scripps, a Scripps employee named William H. Brearley, and Thomas W. Palmer, a lumber magnate who also served as U.S. senator. By the early 1890s, the museum’s board had convinced city officials to appropriate several thousand dollars to the museum each year. Even so, the city charter capped the amount of funding that public officials could give: $20,000 annually for operating costs. City officials could appropriate additional funds to the museum “from time to time” for special construction projects, but the city council was prohibited from spending more than $50,000 in bond revenue on the museum. Led by cultural center booster William Weber and Dexter M. Ferry Jr. (a wealthy corporate executive and heir to his father’s seed distribution company), the museum’s trustees wanted to build a monumental structure that would cost far more.¹⁹

But their attempt to win public funding for the project would backfire. The city’s corporation counsel objected to the plan, contending that the city did not have the right under state law to offer additional funds to the museum. In a 1915 test case designed to settle the matter, the Michigan Supreme Court agreed. Moreover, much to the surprise of the museum’s trustees, the court outlawed all municipal appropriations to the museum and other private institutions like it. According to the court, even the funding practices outlined under the existing city charter were unconstitutional. For local officials to finance construction of a new building, the museum would have to become a municipally owned entity.²⁰

Business leaders also hoped to increase the number of parks and playgrounds in the city, but their efforts fell short on this front as well. In 1913, leaders of the Detroit Board of Commerce hired Rowland Haynes, field secretary of the Playground and Recreation Association of America (PRAA), to survey the city and make recommendations for improving its recreational facilities. PRAA officials were leading proponents of the theory that playgrounds—when supervised by municipal employees who could oversee and coordinate children’s play—were singularly promising tools for addressing a host of urban problems. It might seem like an oddly utopian notion in retrospect, but a number of the most influential urban reformers in the early twentieth century agreed. Housing reformer Lawrence Veiller, social activist Jane Addams, and U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt were all strong supporters of the movement, while the muckraker Jacob Riis spoke of playgrounds as one of the most important “counterinfluences to the saloon, street gang, and similar evils.”²¹

Figure 2. This photograph appeared in the November 1913 issue of the Detroit Board of Commerce’s magazine, the Detroiter, amid the board of commerce’s prewar campaign for supervised playgrounds. Courtesy of Baker Old Class Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

As for the Detroit Board of Commerce, its members seemed especially sold on the sections of Rowland Haynes’s report that argued that play, when supervised by trained adults, could prevent juvenile delinquency and promote good citizenship, particularly among idle boys. As a representative of the Detroit Board of Commerce argued in the organization’s monthly magazine, children were like “an unfinished product,” and wholesome recreation was a crucial input in their development. “The caliber of our future citizens depends largely upon the boys of today,” the author warned. Without playgrounds, the “animal spirits” of local boys were turning toward other “natural outlets,” such as “neighborhood gangs, petty thieving,” and similar “depredations.”²²

Haynes’s report also emphasized the need for a centralized body charged with coordinating recreational initiatives in the city. The board of commerce convinced local officials to establish one in 1914. A leader of the board of commerce’s recreation campaign even headed the new commission. But the bulk of businessmen’s vision for the city’s recreation system remained unfulfilled. In the spring of 1915, the board of estimates declined to appropriate funding for social centers in the city, an initiative that the board of commerce had backed. Moreover, it granted only $15,000 in bonds for purchasing land for new playgrounds even though the board of commerce had wanted much more.²³

Thus, whether they were lobbying for playgrounds or attempting to build a new library and museum, business leaders in Detroit were reminded that they lacked the political influence that they desired. Charter reform promised to give it to them. Above all, Henry Leland and his corporate brethren sought to implement a charter that would abolish Detroit’s ward-based city council and replace it with a much smaller, nine-member body that the electorate would choose as a whole. As Leland and his allies well knew, citywide elections strongly favored wealthy or well-funded candidates who could afford to wage extensive advertising campaigns. The city’s largest union, the Detroit Federation of Labor, immediately recognized the proposal as a power grab and opposed it, arguing that workers would lose their voice in city hall without their ward representatives. But other Detroiters viewed the matter differently. Tired of inefficiencies and the potential for corruption in Detroit’s existing political system, multiple Polish newspapers endorsed Leland and the Citizens League’s proposed charter, as did newspapers in the city’s Jewish and Italian communities. A local African American newspaper came out in favor of the business-backed charter as well, contending that citywide elections would allow African Americans to vote as a bloc instead of having their votes split among different wards. Placing the charter question on the ballot required gathering thirteen thousand signatures on a petition. The Citizens League and its allies managed to collect eighteen thousand in short order in part because major employers like Ford, Packard, and Cadillac allowed representatives of the Citizens League to solicit signatures from employees in their plants. A significant number of these workers no doubt signed because their bosses made clear that they were expected to do so. Still, evidence suggests that Detroiters from all walks of life supported the Citizens League’s proposals. When the electorate voted on the new charter in June 1918, every single precinct in the city approved it. Political conditions in the city were so poor that many Detroiters were hungry for change. By funneling their wealth toward charter reform, elite businessmen succeeded in determining what that change would look like.²⁴

In addition to reconfiguring the city council, the new charter replaced the three-member commissions that had previously administered local affairs with streamlined departments whose heads were appointed by the mayor. It transformed the city’s art museum into a municipal entity, thus opening the way for a new building financed by taxpayer dollars. Finally, the charter put the mayor and city council in charge of all city expenditures, free from the oversight of the old board of estimates.²⁵

One modification that the city charter did not make was reforming the city’s school system—a cause that Detroit’s business leaders also embraced in the years leading up to the war. The main thrust of businessmen’s involvement in Detroit’s educational politics before World War I had less to do with implementing specific policies or expanding local facilities, as it would in the 1920s. Rather, business leaders’ primary concern was ridding the school system of ward politics. Their effort paralleled their campaign to redesign the city government more generally, although in the case of school reform businessmen largely followed the lead of female activists in the city, especially members of the Detroit Federation of Women’s Clubs, who in turn mobilized behind a wealthy Detroiter named Laura Osborn.

A committed prohibitionist, Osborn shared Henry Leland’s distaste for the Voteswappers and denounced their influence on the city’s schools. Married to a successful businessman and listed in the city’s social register, she joined many of her wealthy peers in fearing the growing political power of Detroit’s increasingly immigrant working class. In 1913, Osborn and two male collaborators—an executive at Detroit Edison and a professor at the University of Michigan—convinced state legislators to pass a law restructuring how the city’s school district was governed. The Detroit Citizens League and the Detroit Board of Commerce strongly supported the measure, which abolished the existing ward-based school board and replaced it with a much smaller body composed of six members chosen in citywide elections. Opponents of the new law mounted a series of legal challenges that stopped its implementation for several years. Finally, in November 1916, legislators asked Detroit’s electorate to weigh in. In the lead-up to the referendum, the Detroit Federation of Women’s Clubs waged an extensive campaign with the strong support of the Detroit Board of Commerce and the Detroit Citizens League. The measure carried in 284 of the city’s 285 precincts. As in the battle to revise the city charter, wealthy elites led the campaign to reform Detroit’s school system, but their success depended on widespread disenchantment with the status quo.²⁶

In driving the Voteswappers out of school politics, however, Detroiters opened the door for another clique to run the city’s schools, much as they did when they rubber-stamped the Citizens League’s charter proposals. Elite businessmen in Detroit failed to realize most of their social policy goals in the years before the armistice. But by successfully transforming how city officials were elected, they established the groundwork for their future political dominance. It was an outcome that business leaders in Philadelphia would have envied.

Stuck in the Gears of the World’s Workshop

“Corrupt and contended”: that was how muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens characterized politics in Philadelphia in 1903. Few statements about the city are more famous. And yet Steffens was only partially right. A crooked political machine aligned with the Republican Party dominated Philadelphia’s political scene in the opening decades of the century. But the city was also home to a committed municipal reform movement composed of “independent” Republicans who repeatedly tried to loosen the machine’s hold on power. First, in 1905, independents helped galvanize public protest to thwart an especially brazen attempt by machine politicians to line their pockets with public funds. Then, in 1911, independent reformers exploited divisions within the machine’s ranks and elected their own handpicked candidate for mayor. Finally, in 1919, independents took advantage of yet another conflict within the Republican machine and won a revised city charter that made a number of alterations to Philadelphia’s political structure.²⁷

Corruption may have been at the center of Philadelphia’s political environment, but contentment simply was not. Independents—including the many elite businessmen in their midst—were obviously among the most disillusioned with local affairs. But the city’s business community in general had other reasons to gripe. Attempting to shape public policy within such a divided and scandal-ridden political environment was a regular source of frustration. On multiple occasions, progress on some of local business elites’ most cherished policy goals stalled after they became focal points in the ongoing struggle between the city’s bosses and independent reformers.

Understanding this pattern requires making peace with a tension. Throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, leading businessmen in Philadelphia agreed on a number of fronts, such as the need to rebuild parts of Philadelphia following City Beautiful ideals. Nonetheless, the city’s business elite was deeply divided when it came to other issues, most of all the question of who should run the government and how. On one side of this conflict stood some of the wealthiest men in Philadelphia (and, in fact, the nation), most notably Peter A. B. Widener. In the late nineteenth century, Widener, along with fellow Philadelphians William L. Elkins, William H. Kemble, and Thomas Dolan, had built corporate monopolies that controlled gas, electric, and street railway systems in a number of cities across the country, including in their hometown. In Philadelphia, Widener and his colleagues’ economic success had depended on their close ties to machine politicians in the Republican Party—state and local bosses who had helped Widener and his allies win the franchises and other legislation necessary to construct their utility empires.²⁸

By the turn of the century, Philadelphia’s Republican machine was more centralized and disciplined than ever before. A local politician named Israel “Iz” Durham had recently restructured the city’s Republican organization to cut down on intraparty strife. Backed by state party boss Matthew Quay, Durham had successfully maneuvered to gain control of the party’s central body, the Republican City Committee. Durham had changed party rules so that he and his closest allies picked the committee’s membership. He then put committee members first in line for lucrative patronage posts to ensure their loyalty. Durham also succeeded in giving the Republican City Committee the power to credential the delegates who nominated candidates for local office.²⁹ According to one observer, once a candidate won Durham’s backing, he could skip the party’s nominating convention. Instead, he could go off and “rusticate in Florida or luxuriate at the Hot Springs,” confident that his nomination was assured.³⁰

Whether or not Durham’s power ever reached such proportions, the more influence Durham gained, the more party regulars lined up behind him. The number of factions within Philadelphia’s Republican organization dwindled. Durham and state boss Matthew Quay never enjoyed absolute authority over Philadelphia’s political machine. Nor did their successors, “Sunny Jim” McNichol (who replaced Durham after his retirement in 1906) and U.S. Senator Boies Penrose (who assumed leadership of the state Republican Party after Quay’s death in 1904). McNichol and Penrose especially struggled to control George, William, and Edwin Vare, three brothers who held a tight grip on politics in Philadelphia’s southern neighborhoods. In the late nineteenth century, the Vares started a family business hauling refuse and ashes in an impoverished South Philadelphia neighborhood known as “the Neck.” Over time they built a multimillion-dollar contracting business that performed sanitation and construction work for the city as well as for local companies. The Vares used their profits and their connections to city government to establish a formidable political organization allied with the Republican Party that increasingly controlled South Philadelphia. Durham, Penrose, and McNichol usually collaborated with the Vares. Sporadically, however, the two factions tried to outmaneuver one another. Still, such conflicts played out within a local Republican Party that was more centralized than ever before thanks to Durham’s innovations.³¹

Widener and the city’s other utility owners had supported this process of party consolidation. Cutting down on rivalries within the Republican Party promised Widener and his colleagues a more predictable legislative process. Utility companies depended on public franchises, and a powerful, well-oiled political machine promised to deliver them. It hardly bothered Widener and the city’s other utility moguls that their allies in the Republican machine commonly resorted to voter intimidation and electoral fraud. Men like Widener had spent millions building the city’s electric, gas, and transit systems. They preferred to have their investments insulated from the whims of democracy.³²

While Widener and the city’s utility interests backed the political machine, other segments of Philadelphia’s business community led the opposition. No single industry dominated Philadelphia’s economy as automobile manufacturing did Detroit’s. Rather, Philadelphia’s factories produced an exceptional assortment of goods, everything from textiles, leather products, and cigars to ships, streetcars, and train engines—an eclectic bounty that led local boosters to brag that their hometown was “the workshop of the world.”³³

The ranks of the city’s antimachine “independent” reformers reflected this economic diversity. In 1905, independents established a new political organization, the Committee of Seventy. Its members included owners and top managers of firms that produced machine tools, locomotives, gas fixtures, soaps, and dyes, as well as bankers and merchants who dealt in coal, wool, and other dry goods. Prominent doctors and other professionals also joined the group. Lawyers, most of them well-off, signed up in especially large numbers. In 1911, a similar collection of businessmen and elite professionals united behind the successful mayoral candidacy of independent reformer and manufacturer Rudolph Blankenburg. When independents organized to revise the city charter in 1919, some of the most successful businessmen in the city backed the cause. They included Alba Johnson, president of the city’s mammoth Baldwin Locomotive Works; William Disston, vice president of another of Philadelphia’s largest factories; Coleman Sellers Jr., a major manufacturer of machine tools; Samuel Fels, a wealthy soap manufacturer; and Ernest Trigg, a factory executive and a director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Trigg was also president of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce—a stronghold of antimachine Republicans that helped spearhead the fight for charter reform along with the Committee of Seventy.³⁴

Sharply divided over the question of machine rule, Philadelphia’s commercial and industrial leaders nonetheless managed to unify behind a number of policy goals. Easily the most ambitious was a sweeping, City Beautiful–inspired plan to expand the city’s park system and to construct a network of parkways to increase access to green space throughout the city. Integral to this project was the completion of a downtown boulevard, inspired by the Champs-Élysées in Paris, that would connect the center of the city to Philadelphia’s exceptionally large Fairmount Park. Supporters of the downtown parkway hoped to line the roadway with a series of grand monuments and civic structures, including new homes for the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the city’s Free Library. A number of local organizations joined forces in support of these plans. Elite businessmen led many of them, including executives of the Pennsylvania Railroad; the owner of one of the city’s principal department stores; and a partner in Baldwin Locomotives as well as Peter Widener, his lawyer, John Johnson, and Widener’s preferred banker and arguably the most influential financier in Philadelphia, E. T. Stotesbury. In 1904, these businessmen and the civic groups that they helped to run—such as the Fairmount Park Art Association, the City Parks Association of Philadelphia, and the Parkway Association—joined with a number of other local organizations to found a new umbrella group: Organizations Allied for the Acquisition of a Comprehensive Park System (OAACPS). The Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and other commercial organizations joined OAACPS, as did the city’s leading organization of elite women, the Philadelphia Civic Club.³⁵

Figure 3. Plans for Philadelphia’s downtown parkway, first in 1908 (on the left) and then, as the plans evolved, in 1917 (on the right). Paul Philippe Cret Collection, The Athenaeum of Philadelphia.

A handful of municipal departments and public commissions also appeared on OAACPS’s roster, most notably the Fairmount Park Commission, a body that Peter Widener and his inner circle controlled. The judges of Philadelphia’s court of common pleas—many of whom were closely tied to the Republican machine—appointed the members of the park commission and habitually named Philadelphians tied to the city’s utility interests. From this perch, Widener and his close allies directed the planning of the proposed downtown parkway and the civic buildings that they hoped would line it. Widener was especially committed to constructing new buildings for the city’s Free Library and art museum. He was a trustee of the library and wanted the new museum to house his extensive art collection along with those of his closest business associates, John Johnson and William Elkins. Completing the new buildings and the downtown parkway would entail the demolition of acres upon acres of existing structures, including working-class homes and a number of factories. Businessmen whose property was slated for removal tended to oppose the plan, but most of the city’s business community embraced it.³⁶

Figure 4. The intended site of the downtown parkway. The parkway was designed to cut diagonally from where the photograph is taken, through a stretch of structures that would have to be demolished, pass just to the left of the domed building, and end near the edge of the Schuylkill River, just before the river widens and the photograph begins to go out of focus. Courtesy of PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Records.

In addition to the downtown parkway, members of OAACPS backed a much more extensive set of proposals authored by a leading advocate of City Beautiful planning, Andrew Wright Crawford. In 1903, Crawford—in collaboration with the well-known architect Frank Miles Day—published a multivolume treatise that called for the construction of the downtown parkway and a set of new parks that would run alongside Tacony and Pennypack Creeks in Northeast Philadelphia and Cobbs Creek in the city’s southwest. Crawford’s report also endorsed a plan that city officials had already proposed for a new parkway running through the city’s largely undeveloped north. The Northeastern Boulevard, as it was commonly called, promised to encourage residential settlement throughout the area and to provide access to the parks that Crawford wanted the city to build there. Crawford also advocated building new parks and parkways in South Philadelphia and on the western bank of the Schuylkill River, one of the city’s two principal waterways.³⁷

It was an ambitious vision. And as the extensive membership of OAACPS suggests, it was a relatively popular one, at least in corporate and professional circles. Nonetheless, the path toward realizing OAACPS’s plans would be far from smooth.³⁸

In 1905, Iz Durham was preparing to retire. To secure his and his allies’ financial future, Durham concocted an intricate plan to bring millions of dollars into the city’s coffers—money that local lawmakers would then funnel back to Durham and his machine associates through city contracts. To get the funds, Durham turned to one of the city’s leading utility firms, the United Gas Improvement Company (UGI). Durham proposed to cancel UGI’s existing short-term lease on the city’s gasworks, which UGI paid for annually, and replace it with a long-term, seventy-five-year lease that the gas company would pay off in a lump sum of $25 million. By some estimates, this was $100 to $125 million less than UGI would have paid under its existing contract. Independent reformers’ immediately drew attention to the scam.³⁹

To counter the charges of his detractors, Durham contended that the city desperately needed the $25 million from UGI. But the city’s existing budget contradicted his claim, so Durham and his allies resolved to make his assertion true. Soon after the gas controversy began, Durham and his allies on the city council introduced legislation providing for the downtown parkway, the Northeastern Boulevard, the park and parkway along Cobbs Creek, and a number of Crawford’s and OOACPS’s proposals for South Philadelphia.

But Durham’s attempt to inflate the city budget simply fed the opposition. In May 1905, in front of a gallery filled with protestors, city councilmen allied with Durham passed bills providing for the park and parkway projects and soon thereafter approved the new gas lease. Local manufacturers opposed to machine rule reportedly gave their workers time off to protest the so-called gas steal. As public anger continued to mount, Durham and the city council abandoned all of the measures.⁴⁰

Crawford’s and OAACPS’s City Beautiful plans gained a degree of momentum two years later, but only temporarily. During the administration of Mayor John E. Reyburn—a machine politician who took office in 1907—the city constructed the western tip of the downtown parkway and began purchasing land for the proposed parks along Pennypack Creek and Cobbs Creek. The Reyburn administration also completed large portions of the Northeastern Boulevard—a project that proved to be a boon to Reyburn’s political allies. A number of machine politicians bought property in the path of the proposed roadway as well as in surrounding areas. They then sold the land needed to build the street back to the city for a sizable profit and watched the values of their remaining property rise as the boulevard was constructed. Political power broker “Sunny Jim” McNichol owned the contracting firm that built the road in exchange for $1.4 million in public funds. In antimachine circles, the project became known as the “McNichol Boodlevard.”⁴¹

After Reyburn left office, however, friction between the city’s bosses and reformers once again stymied progress on these and other projects. In 1911, independents successfully exploited a power struggle between the two main factions of the Republican machine and elected as mayor longtime independent reformer and manufacturer Rudolph Blankenburg. Even so, machine politicians continued to dominate the city council. The result was gridlock. Blankenburg attempted to squeeze graft out of the city’s political system, while city councilmen allied with the machine clung to the status quo and tried to keep Blankenburg’s legislative achievements to a minimum. Bickering over how the city awarded public contracts held up construction on the downtown parkway for the entirety of Blankenburg’s four-year term. Similar dynamics hampered progress on the art museum project. Hewing to strict budgetary principles, Blankenburg refused to appropriate funds for the building early in his tenure. When he finally bowed to public pressure and did so, the city council suddenly turned against the proposal in an attempt to humiliate the mayor. Major appropriations for the museum failed to make it into the city’s budget until Blankenburg’s third year in office. Architectural challenges then brought further delays. Quarrels between Blankenburg and the city council also slowed work on the proposed library, so much so that in 1915—the third year of Blankenburg’s term—the popular preacher Billy Sunday was able to hold a revival on the empty lot where the library was slated to stand.⁴²

The machine returned to power in full force under Blankenburg’s successor, Mayor Thomas B. Smith. In characteristic machine fashion, Smith funneled money from the city’s treasury to his political allies through contracts on public projects, including the downtown parkway. Just a month before the end of World War I, the parkway finally opened to traffic. The commitment of the city’s most powerful politicians and its wealthiest citizens had easily swept aside resistance among business owners and working-class Philadelphians displaced by the project. The vehicles that christened the new roadway traveled on pavement that “Sunny Jim” McNichol’s construction company had helped to lay just before McNichol died. But they also drove down a street wholly unadorned by the civic structures that local business leaders had hoped to build. Despite progress, the Tacony, Pennypack, and Cobbs Creek park and parkway projects remained unfinished as the nation transitioned from war to peace.⁴³

Independent reformers’ fight against boss rule reaped a similarly disappointing harvest—a fact that had major consequences for business leaders’ political activism in the years that followed. In 1917, another rift developed between the two main wings of Philadelphia’s Republican machine—one controlled by the Vare brothers and the other by Boies Penrose (who ruled on his own after his partner “Sunny Jim” McNichol passed away). The fissure stemmed from a municipal primary in the city’s Fifth Ward, an area in the heart of what was once colonial Philadelphia. Tensions mounted in the lead-up to the election, as policemen allied with the Vares repeatedly harassed supporters of Penrose’s candidate, James A. Carey. As voters cast their ballots, Vare underlings in the city’s police department arrested over two dozen Carey backers and closed a number of polls. When Carey and two colleagues went to check on reports of foul play, a group of Vare-hired thugs accosted them. The Vare henchmen eventually opened fire and killed a police officer who had tried to intervene.⁴⁴

The outcry that followed the killing suggested that local sentiment had turned sharply against the Vares. In an attempt to capitalize on public outrage, independent reformers established a new political party—the Town Meeting Party—and ran candidates in the November general election against the Vares’ Republican slate. In a rare move, Penrose urged his supporters to vote for the Town Meeting Party’s antimachine candidates. But even murder and Penrose’s endorsement could not bring independent reformers a decisive victory. The Vares survived the 1917 election, yet so did the fledgling partnership between Penrose and the city’s independent reformers. Within a year, Penrose and independents—including leaders of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce—had begun to plot a major reformation of the city charter and with it the Vares’ demise.⁴⁵

In designing the new charter, independents especially sought to change the composition of Philadelphia’s city council, which at the time was a bicameral body with 146 members elected from the city’s forty-eight wards. Unlike their counterparts in Detroit, municipal reformers in Philadelphia did not attempt to replace the existing city council with one elected entirely at large. Their newfound ally Penrose would have rejected such a proposal since his power was in part ward based. Still, reformers hoped that the new council would feature at least some at-large representation to dilute ward politicians’ strength. They also wanted to reform Philadelphia’s civil service system. Under existing law the mayor had the power to appoint the city’s three-member civil service commission. Mayors allied with the Republican machine regularly turned the commission into a patronage mill. Independents wanted the city council to appoint a single civil service commissioner by a two-thirds vote. They also proposed bringing the sizable county government (whose jurisdiction was coterminus with the city itself) under civil service law in order to cut a major source of machine patronage.⁴⁶

Yet the legislative process and the whims of Boies Penrose whittled down each one of these proposals. Pennsylvania governor William C. Sproul came out early against anything but token at-large representation in the city council, most likely to mollify machine politicians in the state legislature who opposed abolishing ward power. When a revised charter became law in June 1919, it made no provision for at-large members in the new council. Instead, it provided for a single-chamber body with twenty-one members drawn from the city’s eight senatorial districts. The new system apportioned a council member to each district plus another for every twenty thousand voters within a given district’s boundaries.⁴⁷

Legislative wrangling also weakened the civil service reforms that independents had initially proposed. Instead of one civil service commissioner appointed by two-thirds of the city council, as reformers had advocated, the final law left the city’s existing three-member commission intact. The new charter gave the city council rather than the mayor the power to appoint the commissioners, as reformers had wanted, but by majority rather than supermajority vote. Meanwhile, rural legislators, some of them aligned with Penrose, balked at bringing Philadelphia County under civil service regulations. Many of them were products of county patronage systems and feared that changing the laws that governed Philadelphia would open the floodgates for statewide reform. Once enacted, the new charter brought an additional fifteen thousand city jobs into the civil service system, but county jobs remained unregulated. This loophole left thousands of positions open to patronage appointment, including in the county courts as well as in the offices of the county commissioners, county coroner, the register of wills, and the recorder of deeds. As independents had wanted, the new charter outlawed politicking among the city’s police and firemen (a reaction to the murder in the Fifth-Ward primary). But the political activities of other public employees remained largely unregulated, including campaign contributions. Thus, political bosses could continue one of their most lucrative practices under the new charter: filling their war chests with mandatory donations from Philadelphians whom they had placed in patronage posts.⁴⁸

Independents were more successful in implementing some of the administrative and procedural reforms that they sought. The new charter abolished a number of antiquated public commissions and replaced them with new municipal departments featuring clearer lines of authority. Independents also succeeded in revising the city’s budget-making process. Still, it is difficult to imagine that independents viewed the new charter as anything but a flawed, compromise document. At best its reorganization of the city council, various departments, and budgetary procedures promised modest gains in the efficiency of the city’s legislative process and in its bureaucracy. Many of the charter’s other provisions, however, such as the election of councilmen from senatorial districts and the city council’s power to appoint the civil service commission, meant that preventing machine domination under the new system would demand winning hard-fought elections to capture and maintain an independent majority in city council—a daunting task considering that the new charter left intact major sources of machine funding and patronage.⁴⁹

Much like in Detroit, the fight to reform Philadelphia’s political system included a campaign to change how the city’s school district was governed. Antimachine businessmen—working closely with elite female activists and a handful of school administrators—supported this cause as well. Again their efforts were only partially successful. In 1905, independents won state legislation replacing the city’s ward-based school system with a small board composed of appointed, rather than elected, members. Yet the new law still left the composition of the new body largely up to machine leaders by giving the judges of the city’s court of common pleas the power to appoint the board. These were the same justices who continually named Peter Widener and his corporate allies to Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park Commission. In 1911, independents again tried to reform the city’s school system by replacing the appointed board of education with an even smaller body elected at large in the hopes of increasing elite influence. They also sought to give the school board the authority to tax and spend on its own instead of having Philadelphia’s city council control the school budget. In the end, independents won legislation reducing the size of the board and freeing it from council oversight. But machine bosses made sure that the judges of the court of common pleas would still determine who ran the city’s schools.⁵⁰

Much as they did in the case of the Fairmount Park Commission, the city’s judges tended to stack the reconfigured school board with businessmen, wealthy lawyers, and other successful professionals, as well as with Philadelphians whose names appeared in the city’s social register, thus satisfying independent reformers’ hopes for an elite school board to a degree. Members of the redesigned board also furthered another of reformers’ goals. In Philadelphia, the campaign to transform school governance before World War I was part of a broader push to build an educational system that reformers hoped would address the challenges of urbanization, immigration, and training workers in an industrial economy. Between 1911 and 1915, Philadelphia’s school budget jumped from just over $7 million to more than $12 million—a major increase. In the 1920s, however, elites on the city’s school board would spend far more.⁵¹

As World War I came to a close, Philadelphia’s business leaders remained sharply divided over the question of boss rule. The city’s new charter had left major sources of machine power untouched. In fits and starts, public officials had managed to make progress on parts of the City Beautiful plans that elite businessmen had embraced, but many more remained unrealized. Antimachine businessmen and their allies had managed to reform school governance in the city to some degree and to increase educational funding, but local political bosses still retained sway over the city’s educational affairs. Whether for business leaders tightly aligned with Philadelphia’s political machine or for those strongly opposed to it, there had been few clear-cut victories in the first two decades of the century. In Atlanta, local business leaders’ political efforts led to similarly varied results.

Boosters Abroad, Muckrakers at Home

Atlanta’s economy never rivaled Philadelphia’s and Detroit’s in the early twentieth century, but the economic fortunes of the Gate City were clearly on the rise. By the early 1900s, twelve separate railroad lines converged in Atlanta. They delivered cotton and other agricultural products from the southern countryside to the city’s many mercantile enterprises, such as the S. M. Inman Company, one of the world’s largest cotton trading firms. In turn, Atlanta’s merchants packaged these crops for distribution throughout the nation and overseas. Meanwhile, the value of products manufactured in Atlanta rose more than sevenfold between 1900 and 1919 as the city became home to a growing assortment of cotton and lumber mills and factories producing a range of other goods, from fertilizers and agricultural machinery to the city’s signature product, Coca-Cola. As Atlanta assumed its central place in the southern economy, it also became the regional outpost for a number of national corporations and home to many of the South’s leading banks and insurance companies.⁵²

Atlanta’s economic development pleased the well-off bankers, manufacturers, merchants, and high-end lawyers who made up the city’s white commercial and industrial elite—a group that was deeply committed to attracting new businesses to the city. But economic growth also brought social upheaval. Indeed, in the opening years of the century, Atlanta’s white business leaders especially struggled to reconcile the pristine, boosterish image of the city that they projected in newspapers and journals across the country with the reality that their hometown was riddled with social strife, health hazards, ramshackle schools, and other infrastructure that was buckling in the face of a major population boom. Atlanta’s white business elite was particularly fond of bragging about how Atlanta was free of the racial antipathies that plagued other southern cities. In 1906, however, tensions between the city’s quickly growing white and African American populations boiled over into a deadly riot that belied those claims. As Atlanta’s economy flourished, thousands of rural southerners flocked to the city, many of them hoping to escape the brutal grind of tenant farming and sharecropping at a time when cotton prices were abysmally low. The city’s population grew from just under 90,000 to nearly 155,000 between 1900 and 1910. By 1920, another 45,000 people would settle in Atlanta.⁵³

Most of these migrants simply traded rural for urban poverty even as many aspects of their lives fundamentally changed. On the farm, parents could work the fields while keeping an eye on their children. In the city, where working-class newcomers toiled in factories, railroad depots, warehouses, or other locations away from their homes, parental supervision became much more haphazard. Anonymity was often impossible in the countryside. In the city, it was unavoidable. Temptations like the chance to get drunk in one of the city’s many saloons abounded in turn-of-the-century Atlanta. And so did members of the opposite race. In 1910, Atlanta was one-third African American and two-thirds white. Despite a rising tide of segregation laws, African American and white newcomers to the city tended to live, work, and spend their leisure time in greater proximity to one another than they had in countryside. The combination of a breakdown in traditional forms of supervision, anxiety over urban anonymity, worries over the rampant consumption of liquor and other intoxicants, and the inevitable intermingling of the races continually stoked the racist fears of white Atlantans. In the fall of 1906, white paranoia turned to rage after leading newspapers in the city published a series of sensationalist accounts describing African American men sexually assaulting white women. On September 22, a furious white mob went on a killing spree, chasing down random African American men in the streets and on the city’s streetcars. The violence lasted for three days and left at least two dozen African Americans dead.⁵⁴

Before the riot, the city’s white business leaders had done little to quell the growing storm of white anger. After the killings, however, leaders of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce—the most influential commercial body in the city by far—scrambled to restore peace and to limit damage to Atlanta’s reputation. They included Sam D. Jones, chamber of commerce president and head of the Atlanta Stove Works; Charles T. Hopkins, one of Atlanta’s preeminent corporate lawyers; and James English—banker, manufacturer, and one of the wealthiest men in the city. In the aftermath of the riot, white business leaders like Jones, Hopkins, and English especially called for stricter separation of the races and for the swift adjudication of crimes related to the upheaval. In both cases, the burden fell almost exclusively on the city’s African Americans. To curb the purported threat of drunken black predators, the city closed two-thirds of the saloons that catered to African Americans and declared the rest of the bars in the city for white use only. To prove that the city’s criminal justice system could enforce the law without the assistance of vigilante mobs, judges convicted black men accused of riot-related transgressions almost automatically and gave them the maximum sentence that the law allowed. By contrast, the small number of white rioters who were indicted enjoyed a presumption of innocence once in court, so much so that few of them were actually convicted and those who were received far lighter sentences than their African American counterparts.⁵⁵

Figure 5. A depiction of the Atlanta race riot in a French publication with the caption “Massacre of Blacks in the Streets of Atlanta.” National and international coverage of the 1906 riot prodded Atlanta’s image-conscious white business elite to mobilize in the hopes of salvaging the city’s reputation. Courtesy of the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center.

The 1906 riot was just one of many developments that made white business elites’ boosterish rhetoric ring hollow. Atlanta had one of the worst mortality rates in the country. Forty percent of the city’s streets lacked access to sewers and a third lacked water mains. Fifty thousand Atlantans relied solely on outhouses. Other city services were also in shambles. The development of Atlanta’s park system lagged far behind other cities. According one investigation, nearly half of the city’s thirty schools were completely unsafe while seven others had sections that needed to be condemned.⁵⁶

Controversy also swirled around city officials. One of the city’s mayors, James G. Woodward, was caught on multiple occasions visiting prostitutes and had a habit of appearing drunk in public, including at official city meetings and at a conference of the League of American Municipalities. Woodward was a printer by trade, a union man, and a favorite of the city’s white working class. He served two terms between 1899 and 1906. In 1908, Woodward managed to win the Democratic primary for mayor for a third time. Soon thereafter, his name appeared in a court case concerning two prostitutes who had gotten into a fight. Woodward was the client of one of the women the night of the incident and was again spotted drunk on the city’s streets. In his own feeble defense, Woodward blamed the corn whiskey that a doctor had supposedly prescribed him to stave off pneumonia.⁵⁷

In the months surrounding Woodward’s escapade, local business leaders’ discomfort with the city’s growing array of political and social problems became increasingly clear. Atlanta was a one-party town. Normally, winning the Democratic primary as Woodward had done was the same as winning public office itself. But members of Atlanta’s commercial and industrial elite feared the national embarrassment that would follow if voters elected a chronic drunk and an apparently incorrigible john to Atlanta’s highest office for yet another term. Using the city’s chamber of commerce as their organizational base, a number of the city’s most influential businessmen mobilized to draft one of their own to run for mayor. Just weeks before the general election, the sitting president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and the founder of the Coca-Cola Company, Asa Griggs Candler, convened a mass meeting that in turn appointed a committee of twenty-five men to choose a candidate. Former chamber of commerce president J. K. Orr chaired the committee, which also included Candler, corporate lawyer Charles Hopkins, bank president Ernest Woodruff (who would later buy Coca-Cola), and two future presidents of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce: Victor Kriegshaber, a successful manufacturer of construction materials, and F. J. Paxon of Davison-Paxon-Stokes, one of Atlanta’s leading department stores. Members of the nominating committee quickly decided to back wealthy banker and past chamber of commerce president Robert F. Maddox.⁵⁸ In stump speeches before the election, Maddox contended that the “business prosperity, good name and decency of the city was at stake” and urged voters to make the right choice between “decency and indecency; between law and order and lawlessness; between a well and liberally governed city and one in which unbridled license runs riot.” With all of the city’s newspapers against him, Woodward’s campaign barely limped along. Voters chose Maddox by a wide margin.⁵⁹

In the months preceding Maddox’s election, a similar cohort of businessmen had begun to mobilize to improve city services. In early 1908, the manufacturer Harry L. Schlesinger published an open letter in the Atlanta Constitution calling for a large bond issue to fund a set of initiatives that promised to improve Atlanta’s “prestige and prosperity” as well as its citizens “mental and moral … development.” Schlesinger especially called for new parks, schools, and sewers as well as sidewalks and a new city hall.⁶⁰ Soon thereafter, the Atlanta Constitution reported being “deluged” with “vigorous and unqualified approvals” of Schlesinger’s proposal from the city’s “most prominent business men,” an outpouring of support that prompted the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce to appoint a committee to evaluate the city’s needs.⁶¹ Members of the chamber’s committee were reportedly “astounded … by the disgraceful sanitary and hygienic conditions under which 50,000 Atlantans were living.”⁶² They were similarly distraught over the state of the city’s school system. Chamber leaders at first accepted the committee’s recommendation for a $1,500,000 bond issue—$500,000 for sewers, $500,000 for the city’s water system, and $500,000 to build sixteen new schools with playgrounds. After Robert Maddox’s triumph in that fall’s race for mayor, however, the city’s business elite called for double that total. In 1909, the leadership of the chamber of commerce and the Maddox administration launched a campaign to persuade voters to approve $3 million in bonds—the largest bond issue in the city’s history up to that time—to be repaid over thirty years from government revenue.⁶³

In Atlanta, winning the right to float bonds was an exceptionally difficult task. Victory required the approval of two-thirds of the registered voters of the city. In most cities, including Detroit and Philadelphia, winning bond elections demanded a mere majority vote no matter voter turnout. To emerge victorious in Atlanta, by contrast, proponents of debt spending not only had to win a supermajority of the votes cast but also had to get at least a supermajority of the city’s registered electorate to the polls. Over time this requirement proved particularly nettlesome for Atlanta’s white business elite, whose strategy for luring new firms to the city focused on improving city services while keeping taxes low—a dual imperative that made debt spending businessmen’s leading option for pursuing public sector growth.⁶⁴

As the 1910 referendum approached, the chamber of commerce took the lead in organizing an elaborate campaign to get out the vote. Its leaders sent over eight thousand letters to residents of neighborhoods that would benefit directly from the bond issue and contacted employers throughout the city to encourage them to get their employees to the polls. The city’s main union, the Atlanta Federation of Trades, and many of the city’s women’s clubs also organized on behalf of the bonds. All of these efforts helped make funding available for Atlanta’s only major burst of government spending between the turn of the twentieth century and the end of World War I. With the bond money in hand, the city built twelve new schools, constructed its first sewage treatment plants, and greatly expanded the reach of the city’s water system. Over nine thousand Atlantans were able to abandon germ-infested outhouses for modern plumbing. Predictably, the city’s African American neighborhoods garnered only about 6 percent of the $600,000 in bonds allocated to local schools. But they fared much better when it came to improvements to the city’s sewer and water systems. White Atlantans knew that they could not solve the city’s public health crisis without dramatically improving African Americans’ access to those services. “The disease germ knows no color or race line,” the editors of the Atlanta Constitution contended. Thanks to the 1910 bond issue, sizable portions of both working- and middle-class African American neighborhoods gained access to running water and sewers for the first time.⁶⁵

The 1910 bond election was a significant victory for Atlanta’s business community, but the city’s business leaders wanted much more. As leading merchant F. J. Paxon declared during his tenure as chamber of commerce president, “We need more parks, more playgrounds and breathing spots for the people; we need a museum and an art gallery comparable to the Carnegie library,” which the city had constructed in 1902. “We want our city so healthy, so attractive, so wholesome and full of charm in every respect that people will come here because it is the best place to live and to educate their children.”⁶⁶ During the two years of the exceptionally business-friendly Maddox administration, the city took a number of steps in this direction beyond what the 1910 bond issue had provided for. Citing parks and playgrounds as “great preventatives of disease and crime,” Maddox oversaw the construction of Atlanta’s first municipally run playgrounds and a number of improvements to the local park system that resulted from the city’s collaboration with two of the nation’s premier landscape architects, John Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.⁶⁷

Nonetheless, within a year of Maddox’s departure from office, elite businessmen were clamoring for another large bond issue—including Paxon; William Blalock, the president of Fulton National Bank; Coca-Cola’s Asa Candler; and former mayor Maddox himself. A similar collection of merchants, bankers, and manufacturers continued to press for debt spending for years to come. After he became mayor in 1917, for instance, Asa Candler indicated that he was in favor of a $5 million bond issue and even a modest tax increase to help finance the new debt. Yet despite the wishes of men like Candler, Atlanta’s budget grew only incrementally until the 1920s.⁶⁸

A number of dynamics undercut business leaders’ efforts, but their involvement in the local municipal reform movement was among the most notable. Long disenchanted with the basic design of Atlanta’s government, elite businessmen initiated an aggressive drive to revamp Atlanta’s political system in 1911. Pursued largely under the auspices of the chamber of commerce, their campaign paralleled those of municipal reformers in Philadelphia and Detroit, except that a large segment of Atlanta’s business community embraced the so-called commission plan. First developed in Galveston, Texas, the commission plan entailed the citywide election of a small group of public officials, each of whom headed a city department. After failing in 1911, members of Atlanta’s mercantile and manufacturing elite tried to revise the charter again in 1913 but to no avail. In both cases, businessmen who favored commission government had to jettison their original vision due to resistance from organized labor (which feared a loss of working-class political influence) and from local officeholders, including a handful of businessmen who sat in the city council and did not want to risk losing their seats. In both campaigns business leaders eventually endorsed compromise measures that would have implemented some of their goals while also satisfying the demands of their leading opponents. But even these watered-down measures lost at the polls.⁶⁹

The fight for a new city charter compromised businessmen’s push for debt spending on multiple occasions. In early 1913, after months of agitation for a multimillion-dollar bond issue, it seemed that local officials were about to call an election in the hopes of gaining voters’ approval. But the city’s mayor and local business leaders ended up changing strategies. Rather than asking voters to approve a large bond issue, they decided to prioritize charter reform. The exceptionally high threshold for winning bond elections in Atlanta, along with memories of the failed charter campaign of 1911, forced businessmen and their allies in public office to focus on one measure at a time. But in the end, they got neither.⁷⁰

Meanwhile, in arguing for charter reform, local business leaders continually undermined their attempt to get voters to put more money into public officials’ hands. In one speech during the 1911 charter campaign, for instance, chamber of commerce leader and wealthy attorney Charles Hopkins denounced the “set of petty grafters and peanut politicians” who were currently running the city and pointed to numerous examples of political favoritism and corruption.⁷¹ After voters rejected charter reform in 1911, members of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce continued to take the lead in underscoring flaws in the city’s political system. In 1912, the chamber’s leadership commissioned a study of the city administration. The resulting report exposed a number of problems that provided fodder for the charter fight. But it also offered a host of reasons for local voters not to entrust city officials with more public funds. In trying to convince the electorate to embrace one part of their political agenda—charter reform—businessmen fueled voter resistance to another—debt spending.⁷²

Another local reform movement spawned similar dynamics. In 1911, a handful of successful businessmen, including former mayor Maddox, joined with local pastors to form a branch of the Men and Religion Forward Movement (MRFM), a Protestant organization that sought to encourage men’s involvement in the church and in moral reform. In Atlanta, the group’s first goal was to abolish the city’s red-light district. MRFM members also accused a number of public officials of being involved in the city’s vice trade. MRFM leaders found a strong ally in the city’s police chief, James L. Beavers, who initiated an extensive campaign to shut down the city’s brothels. In time, Beavers and his supporters in the MRFM set their sights on other illicit establishments in the city, such as those that violated Georgia’s prohibition law, passed in 1908. As the purview of Beavers’s moral crusade expanded, however, so did local opposition. A growing segment of the city’s business community complained that headlines in local papers regarding Beavers’s raids were making Atlanta seem as if it were plagued by crime, an impression made worse by the MRFM’s tactic of taking out full-page advertisements to expose illegal activity in the city. Eventually the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce resolved to pressure local newspapers to stop publishing material submitted by the MRFM. The city’s mayor tried to rein in Beavers, but the police chief resisted. In July 1915, Beavers was demoted for insubordination after a trial before the mayor and the city’s police board. Outraged, members of the MRFM spearheaded a recall campaign to remove the mayor and police administrators from office.⁷³

Throughout that fall, the recall effort dominated public debate. Among many measures that suffered was yet another proposal for a major bond issue, this one for roughly $3.3 million, including a million dollars each for schools and sewers, $750,000 to improve the city’s water system, and $375,000 for the city’s public hospital. The electorate was slated to vote on the bonds on September 30, 1915, but city officials canceled the election as the recall campaign intensified. Voters rejected the recall, but only after the MRFM’s moral crusade had pushed debt spending onto the political back burner yet again.⁷⁴

In the meantime, years of accusations of collusion between Atlanta officials and purveyors of vice in the city had further undermined Atlantans’ faith in local government. The secretary of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, W. G. Cooper, vented about these dynamics in an open letter to the Atlanta Constitution in September 1915. Bitter over the ongoing failure to increase public spending in the city, Cooper argued that “several years of severe criticism of the city government … has so shaken the confidence of the people in the public officials administering the city’s affairs that voters are unwilling to put in the hands of these officials for disbursement the millions of money required to supply Atlanta’s needs.” Cooper continued, “This severe criticism began about the time when commission government became a burning issue” and surfaced yet again when the “Men and Religion bulletins began” circulating. “City officials, in one way or another, have been under fire for four or five years, almost without cessation.”⁷⁵

Cooper blamed the city’s newspapers for this barrage of criticism. But the chamber of commerce had engaged in many of the same tactics in its fight for charter reform and so had the businessmen in the MRFM. As in Philadelphia and Detroit, business elites in Atlanta embraced a varied political agenda in the years leading up to the war but one that included internal tensions that compromised business leaders’ political efforts on numerous occasions.

New Directions

By the 1920s, elite businessmen’s political priorities would notably shift in all three cities. In Detroit, corporate leaders’ success in rewriting the city charter would make the question of municipal reform more or less moot in the years that followed. In Philadelphia, the city’s independent reform movement would largely dissolve early in the decade. Atlanta’s business community would participate in another failed attempt to revise the city’s charter in 1922. But when a new movement for charter reform picked up steam a few years later, most of the city’s business leaders declined to join. Instead, they resolved to focus their efforts on yet another push to lure new firms to the city in part by improving local social programs through another major bond issue.⁷⁶

As the Atlanta case suggests, the municipal reform movement lived on in the 1920s and so did businessmen’s involvement in it, a fact that historians have long known. But historians have rarely examined how businessmen’s enthusiasm for municipal reform either before the war or after fit into business interests’ larger public agenda, which also included support for public schooling and the construction of parks, playgrounds, museums, and libraries, as well as improving public health by building better sewer and water systems. Judging from the three cities examined here, for many businessmen the desire to achieve a growing number of social policy goals would increasingly trump questions of political process after World War I.

This shift doubtless first sprang from dynamics related to the war itself. Developments on the home front exacerbated many of the social trends that business elites already found distressing. As factories expanded production to supply troops in Europe, a heightened demand for labor drew even more workers to American cities. Surging populations strained municipal services. To make matters worse, the federal government mandated a moratorium on all but the most essential public projects during the war to save material and labor for the fight overseas. Meanwhile, complaints came in from military officials that a large proportion of the men who had reported for duty were physically and intellectually unprepared to serve, a pattern that seemed to confirm many middle-and upper-class Americans’ worst fears about the growing inadequacies of the nation’s citizenry, especially when it came to the foreign born, who tended to perform poorly on the culturally biased intelligence tests that were used at the time.⁷⁷

Then came 1919, the first year after the armistice. The well-documented tumult that marked that year in part constituted an acute urban crisis from elite businessmen’s perspective. In 1919 alone, American workers took part in 2,600 strikes, many of which took place in cities. In general, workers struck for two reasons. First, the cost of living had skyrocketed during World War I and continued to do so for a time after the armistice. Workers needed higher wages to get by, and they were willing to walk off the job to get them. In addition, employers sought to reverse the gains that organized labor had won during the war thanks to a series of federal regulations that had aimed to promote industrial peace in order to maximize production. Membership in the American Federation of Labor, the nation’s largest and most influential union, had grown by over two million members during the war. Most employers hoped to restore the open shop after the armistice and to roll back the concessions that workers had won amid the wartime push for industrial harmony.⁷⁸

The first truly major strike took place in Seattle that January. Initially, about thirty-five thousand workers at the city’s shipyards struck after negotiations broke down over their wages. Soon thereafter, sixty thousand other Seattle workers walked off their jobs in solidarity. The Seattle General Strike nearly shut down the whole city. It lasted only a week, but more conflicts followed elsewhere. Emboldened by their wartime gains, local unions in more than forty-five cities pledged to form a new political party, the American Labor Party, to push for legislation to permanently alter the balance of power between capital and labor. That spring, violence riddled May Day demonstrations in a number of urban areas, including Boston, New York, and Cleveland. By July, the nation was bracing itself for a national strike. Police forces in Philadelphia and New York implemented twenty-four-hour patrols on the Fourth of July, when the strike was supposedly going to begin. Officials in Chicago called in military reinforcements. A coordinated nationwide walkout never occurred, but strikes continued to break out in city after city. Nearly three-quarters of Boston’s police force walked off the job that September and stayed there even as a brief crime wave ensued. Weeks later, 350,000 of the nation’s steelworkers went on strike after the chairman of U.S. Steel refused to meet with union officials.⁷⁹

All of these conflicts compounded fears that the radicalism that had brought communist revolution to Russia in 1917 had spread to the United States. With the nation’s proletariat already picketing in the streets, a spate of bombings and bomb threats sparked an anticommunist panic. In March, a newspaper in Chicago claimed to have discovered evidence of a looming attack. No bombs went off in the Windy City that spring, but explosions took place elsewhere. In late April, the mayor of Seattle found a bomb in his mail. A senator from Georgia received one that blew off the hands of his maid. On June 2, bombings took place in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and six other cities, including Washington, D.C., where a bomb exploded in front of the home of the U.S. attorney general.⁸⁰

It had long been an American pastime to blame radicalism and labor agitation on the foreign born, and immigrants once again took the brunt of the blame. Public officials attempted to round up immigrants suspected of having radical political sympathies. In December 1919, federal officials deported 249 foreign-born political activists to the Soviet Union on a ship nicknamed the “Soviet Ark.” Raids targeting immigrants culminated in early 1920, when federal officials arrested over five thousand suspected radicals in a surprise sweep. But much more common than deporting or arresting the foreign born were pledges to redouble efforts to “Americanize” them and promote their assimilation into the nation’s political and cultural mainstream.⁸¹

A series of deadly race riots in over two dozen American towns and cities furthered panic over urban disorder. In Chicago, twenty-three African Americans and fifteen whites died in rioting that followed the fatal stoning of an African American boy who had accidentally drifted into an all-white swimming area in Lake Michigan. Washington, D.C., experienced its own version of the Atlanta riot of 1906 after the Washington Post ran a series of trumped-up articles describing African American men attacking white women. The uproar that followed killed six and injured over two hundred more.⁸²

Amid all of this instability and continuing into the years that followed, urban business leaders responded in large part by doubling down on their conviction that government—particularly deployed at the local level—was essential for promoting social, economic, and political stability. Viewed from the 1920s, businessmen’s vision of a civic welfare state before World War I seems merely incipient, dwarfed by what came thereafter. In some cases, local business leaders were responding to working-class revolts or race riots in their own hometowns. In other cities, business elites turned to government to keep the disorder from spreading to their backyards. Elsewhere, boosterish businessmen viewed the postwar chaos as an opportunity and intensified their efforts to build cities that could lure firms from other towns that were seeking permanent refuge from urban unrest.

Fears of working-class radicalism, worries over the foreign born, and the conviction that city services were insufficient or ill designed to prevent problems like crime and vice all persisted throughout the 1920s. But as time wore on, business leaders’ concern for these issues increasingly overlapped with locally specific challenges that urban business elites hoped to overcome, including relentless population growth in Detroit, the early signs of economic decline in Philadelphia, and evidence that the efforts of Atlanta’s boosters were falling short. These and other dynamics kept heightened social spending at the forefront of business leaders’ public agenda in all three cities throughout the 1920s, even as businessmen’s distress over the war and its immediate aftermath grew less sharp. And in all three cities, business leaders would prove considerably more successful in implementing their policy objectives in the 1920s than they had been before the armistice. Even so, political realities would continually remind them that the power to shape public policy was a privilege that could not be assumed but had to be continually won.