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
