to a social welfare state, they sought to build what might be called a civic welfare state, a network of programs that in the minds of elite businessmen promised to further both the goals of urban reform and urban boosterism, to prepare citizens for work and democracy while helping to lure new firms to their hometowns.
Commercial and industrial elites were far from the only political activists in the early twentieth century who supported such programs. But by the end of World War I, urban business leaders had become exceptionally adept at promoting the public social policies that they favored. Prodded in part by these businessmen’s political activism, urban budgets skyrocketed in the 1920s. In some cities spending grew by 50 percent adjusted for inflation; elsewhere budgets doubled or even tripled. Across urban America expenditures rose at rates that far outpaced population growth and in many cases spending before the war. The 1920s were hardly a moment of government retrenchment or a time when government growth was limited to Prohibition, early federal forays into economic planning, and the development of a smattering of other programs. On the contrary, business interests helped make the 1920s a moment of aggressive government expansion in urban America.1
This book tells the story of how urban business leaders attempted to implement their vision for American social policy in three cities—Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—that experienced the tumult of the early twentieth century in importantly different ways. It pays close attention to a wide range of political actors, including local unions, middle-class women’s organizations, immigrant groups, African American activists, and the Ku Klux Klan. But its main protagonists are successful men of industry and commerce, including a subset of wealthy lawyers and other high-end professionals, who accumulated enough political and economic clout to capture local political office or to steer major local business organizations such as their city’s chamber of commerce at a time when white men dominated local government and urban America’s largest commercial bodies. It shows how these white business leaders moved from a position of limited political influence when it came to shaping urban social policy in the years preceding World War I to a perch of relative dominance thereafter. It describes how their social policy agenda expanded in the wake of the war and how the configuration of urban political institutions and the unequal distribution of power and economic resources tended to push other political activists to the sidelines in the decade following the armistice.
And yet even as businessmen’s political fortunes reached new heights, there was nowhere in urban America where the so-called ruling class could simply rule. Whether in cities that were strongholds of crooked political machines like Philadelphia, in places with relatively free and fair elections like Detroit, or in communities where disfranchisement had sharply limited the electorate like Atlanta, urban business leaders consistently faced resistance. Everywhere they had to forge alliances. Repeatedly they were forced to compromise. This, then, is a book about wealth, social politics, power, and American democracy in the early twentieth century in its various, often unequal, at times corrupt, and in some instances deeply circumscribed forms.
Like other political actors in the early 1900s, businessmen had an incredible number of alternatives to choose from when considering which social policies to pursue. In the decades following the Civil War, the rapid expansion of factory-based manufacturing had thrown not only American but also European cities into an almost chronic state of crisis. Overcrowding was commonplace. So were poverty and squalor. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, socially concerned activists on both sides of the Atlantic crafted a stunning array of policy proposals in hopes of ameliorating the social repercussions of industrial capitalism. They focused on everything from the distribution of wages, workplace safety, benefits for the unemployed, and pensions for the elderly to the allocation of housing and the fundamental layout of cities themselves. In addition to the new ideas that sprang from this transatlantic exchange, American businessmen could draw on the United States’ already generations-old tradition of using government as a tool for addressing urban social problems, whether through public schooling, the construction of sprawling urban parks like Central Park in New York City and Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, or through legal prohibitions on the consumption of alcohol and other types of behavior that various reformers had attempted to regulate since the earliest days of the republic.2
Faced with such a diverse array of options, both old and new, businessmen in the early twentieth century tended to gravitate toward certain kinds of public social programs and to reject proposals for others. They proved particularly resistant to policies that threatened to interfere with employers’ ability to determine workers’ wages, hours, working conditions, and fringe benefits, at least in the case of the relatively small but growing group of employers who offered them at the time.3 It was precisely these kinds of government programs that would eventually constitute the nexus of policies that scholars generally refer to as the social welfare state: unemployment compensation, old-age pensions, and other forms of government-sponsored social insurance; laws regulating workers’ schedules and pay; and, finally, public assistance to the poor, including payments to single and widowed mothers—early precursors of programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children and today’s Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, the policy commonly referred to as “welfare.” To borrow from a widely used definition, social welfare state programs generally serve one of two goals. They either stipulate how employers have to treat, compensate, or otherwise provide for their employees, or they lessen the degree to which certain categories of the economically vulnerable, such as the elderly or unemployed, have to depend on the labor market in order to survive.4
Business interests did not unanimously oppose the implementation of all facets of a social welfare state defined along these lines. For instance, in the years leading up to World War I, employers in many cases supported the creation of the nation’s first workmen’s compensation laws, which many of them saw as a vast improvement over settling disputes related to workplace injuries in the courts. In addition, as the final chapter of this book details, by the early 1920s prominent businessmen in cities across the country had come to embrace the task of aiding the jobless during especially severe economic downturns through a combination of public and private initiatives. Toward the end of the 1920s, a handful of corporate executives began to flirt with the notion of offering public pensions to the elderly, and in the 1930s a few high-profile businessmen would even participate in designing New Deal legislation that created facets of the social welfare state that we know today. But the significance of such exceptions should not be overdrawn. Most businessmen in the early twentieth century were far more likely to oppose than to support calls for public social policies that limited employers’ control over their own firms or that lessened the degree to which working-class Americans had to rely on the labor market in order to get by.5
Nonetheless, at various points in the early twentieth century and especially in the 1920s, elite businessmen in cities across the country called for heavy government spending on a host of public social programs. In justifying their support for these policies—whether to the public, to politicians, or to one another—these businessmen tended to offer two interrelated arguments on these programs’ behalf. The concept of the civic welfare state is meant to connote both of these arguments at once.
First, urban business leaders frequently touted the ability of certain public social policies to mold local residents into good citizens, a concept that in businessmen’s minds entailed being a good worker but also more: being lawabiding, being prepared for “responsible” democratic participation, and even being physically healthy. When calling for greater spending on public education, business elites commonly praised schools’ potential for preparing the young for both work and democracy. In urging the promotion of residential decentralization through the construction of streets, sewers, water mains, and other basic infrastructure, they frequently contended that dispersing settlement would help cure the crime, vice, and health problems that many of them associated with residential congestion and poor housing conditions. Residential decentralization also promised to encourage homeownership, which many urban business leaders believed had the power to curb working-class radicalism as members of the nation’s burgeoning urban proletariat invested in private property, the fundamental building block of the capitalist system.
