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
