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
