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.
CHAPTER 2
Detroit
Businessmen at Large
At the end of World War I, roughly one in three residents of Detroit was a first-generation immigrant. More than a third were children of at least one foreign-born parent. About forty thousand African Americans lived in the city. The vast majority of Detroit’s population was working class, and over half was Catholic.1
Yet when the city held its first elections under its new charter, the results would have better suited a place that was Detroit’s demographic inverse. The contest took place in November 1918, just as the last shots were being fired in Europe. Of the nine candidates who won Detroit’s first at-large elections for city council, none were foreign born. Just one had been born to immigrant parents, and only two were Catholic. All of the winners were white, and all were men. The city’s leading union, the Detroit Federation of Labor (DFL), ran a slate of candidates in the race for city council, but every one of them lost. Henry Leland’s business-dominated Detroit Citizens League, by contrast, supported all nine candidates who won out of the sixty-six who entered the race. Nearly all of the winners were businessmen. Five of the incoming councilmen were corporate executives, two were realtors, and one was a banker. The remaining councilman, Fred Castator, had previously served as deputy assistant labor commissioner for the state of Michigan. Though Castator was supposedly the Citizens League’s labor-friendly pick, the DFL had denounced Castator going into the election while the Michigan Manufacturers Association had supported him. The DFL eventually claimed Castator as an ally, but in 1918 he was a businessmen’s candidate. The composition of the city council had changed markedly since the eve of charter reform, when the council had included saloonkeepers, a druggist, a plumber, a barber, and several other members of the city’s petite bourgeoisie. In 1917, elections for the city’s new at-large school board brought similar changes to that body, except that a woman, Laura Osborn—leader of the prewar movement to reform the board—succeeded in winning a seat.2
Business leaders managed to implement large swaths of their vision of a civic welfare state in 1920s Detroit because the city’s new political structure gave candidates with access to wealth an advantage that proved difficult for other political actors to surmount. Except for a brief interval between 1924 and 1926, candidates backed by the Detroit Citizens League held a supermajority on Detroit’s city council throughout the 1920s. Out of the seventeen councilmen who served between 1919 and 1929, ten were identifiable as corporate executives or businessmen in real estate, insurance, and banking.
Viewed from another angle, businessmen’s dominance of Detroit’s city council appears even more pronounced. In the eleven-year period between 1919 and 1929, the members of the nine-member council collectively served ninety-nine years in office. Businessmen served sixty-five out of those ninety-nine years. The remaining councilmen who served in the 1920s included three professional civil servants, a doctor, a dentist, former deputy assistant labor commissioner Castator, and finally Robert Ewald, a union man who managed to fight his way onto the city council early in the decade. In time, however, Ewald grew palatable enough to business interests to earn repeated Citizens League endorsements, suggesting that even the most worker-friendly councilman in 1920s Detroit walked a line between capital and labor.3
Candidates backed by the Detroit Citizens League also held a supermajority on the city’s school board at all times during the decade, and all but three of the board members who served during the 1920s were listed in the city’s social register. The superintendent of schools during the period was a former director of the Detroit Board of Commerce and was the board of commerce’s choice to head the schools. Finally, Detroit’s mayors, when they were not business executives themselves, forged close ties to the city’s commercial and industrial elite.4
Of course, businessmen’s political power could be neither constant nor absolute in a mass democracy like Detroit’s. A number of dynamics compromised business leaders’ influence during the decade, including a crisis in municipal finances, a grassroots insurgency led by the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan, and the sporadic political mobilization of organized labor. Indeed, there was a moment in the middle of the 1920s when it was unclear who would rule Detroit. Only a series of unforeseeable developments—including a working-class mayor who moved to broaden his base after nearly losing an election—enabled local business leaders to regain clout.
Yet despite slips in businessmen’s political influence, it is difficult to identify another political force in 1920s Detroit that truly rivaled the city’s business elite. The political fortunes of the Ku Klux Klan declined as quickly as they had arisen. Open-shop campaigns tended to sap organized labor’s political strength and narrow local unions’ political priorities. Insofar as they organized based on ethnicity, local immigrants rarely overcame the steep odds that they faced when trying to shape public policy in the city. Detroit’s largest immigrant group, Poles, constituted just 5 percent of the city’s population in 1920, a meager proportion in a political system based on citywide voting. The most prominent organization in Detroit’s quickly growing African American community, the Detroit Urban League, depended in large part on the support of wealthy white benefactors and tended to shy away from challenging the city’s white business leaders in the public sphere. Meanwhile, female activists, galvanized by the city’s vast network of women’s associations, fought most of their battles in the 1920s on the state and federal levels rather than in the local arena.
Lacking strong political organizations that could channel their demands, most Detroiters’ principal opportunity for shaping public policy came intermittently and indirectly at election time. Other than selecting among candidates, the electorate’s primary intervention in the policymaking process arose in a number of citywide referenda on major public improvement projects that entailed high levels of debt spending. Albeit often in elections with low turnout, voters approved the vast majority of the ballot initiatives enabling increased government expenditures that were put before them in the
