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
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