in U.S. history when the nation “swam in a sudden abundance” of policy choices, but their usefulness quickly fades when one attempts to differentiate between what the various political actors who waded in those waters—often with wildly different interests, intentions, and visions of reform—respectively chose and why.13 Nor is it particularly useful to characterize the businessmen who appear in the pages that follow as “corporate liberals”—another term that historians have employed from time to time—because the broad contours of their social politics did not foreshadow (let alone help to constitute) the social politics that would make New Deal liberalism distinct, as the concept “corporate liberalism” tends to imply when used in the context of social policy.14
Rather, as the Great Depression was approaching and the New Deal lay just around the bend, business leaders in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta had chosen a reformist path that they hoped would lead in a very different direction—a social politics that they believed would bolster their political and economic standing rather than set limits on corporate power as New Deal liberalism in part would do. That said, businessmen’s political activism prior to the 1930s did help encourage the coming of the New Deal. But as this book’s final pages detail, this was largely by accident, not by design.
The early twentieth century was an exceptionally rich political moment, a reformist age that encompassed the 1920s as much as the decades that surrounded them. Historians used to depict the 1920s as an “intermission” that brought the reformism of the early twentieth century to a temporary pause. The pages that follow confirm that this was not the case. Instead, the 1920s in part saw an exceptionally business-friendly strain of reformism flourish in American cities. Appreciating this fact is important not merely in terms of righting the historical record, however. A similar approach to urban issues would live on long after the business leaders who appear in this book would depart the historical stage. Indeed, one of this book’s contentions is that drawing attention to the social politics that capitalists embraced in the early twentieth century can help underscore shortcomings in urban social policy today.15
But before grappling with the present, it is necessary to get a better handle on the past. We begin in the opening years of the last century, a moment when elite businessmen in cities as diverse as Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta were already attempting to shape urban social policy but more often than not were failing to do so.
CHAPTER 1
At Cross Purposes
Businessmen’s Political Activism Before the Armistice
Urban business leaders advocated social spending in a number of areas in the early years of the twentieth century. They lobbied for the expansion and improvement of local school systems. They joined and often led campaigns to construct municipal playgrounds and to improve local health conditions. At their most ambitious, they called for an extensively remodeled city, the “City Beautiful,” an urban form designed to include elaborate and interconnected systems of parks and parkways as well as grandiose civic centers featuring ornate city halls, museums, and public libraries. In many cases, business elites hoped to erect these structures on some of urban America’s most valuable real estate, stretches of land already occupied by factories, stores, and homes.
Yet whether their plans were bold or modest, pricey or inexpensive, businessmen frequently stumbled in their attempt to implement them in the years preceding World War I. In Detroit, local business leaders’ political influence was remarkably limited at the time, a trend that encouraged their involvement in another effort: the so-called municipal reform movement, or the attempt to revamp the basic structure of city government through reforms like expanding the reach of the civil service or abolishing ward-based elections in favor of citywide contests. Municipal reformers generally hoped that such measures would weaken local political machines or dilute the strength of the working-class vote.1
Business leaders in Atlanta and Philadelphia were also involved in the municipal reform movement. In fact, in both cities businessmen’s support for municipal reform was a root cause of their troubles when it came to shaping local social policy before the war. In Atlanta, business leaders struggled to pull off a nearly impossible about-face—a pivot from denouncing local officials as incompetent and even corrupt when advocating municipal reform to pleading that voters give those same officials more money to spend when championing social spending. In Philadelphia, a handful of especially wealthy businessmen were the principal beneficiaries and even sponsors of the entrenched political machine that other leading businessmen in the city who were bent on municipal reform hoped to dislodge. On multiple occasions, public projects that Philadelphia’s commercial and industrial elite almost unanimously favored stalled because of local business leaders’ infighting over boss rule.
The tensions that riddled campaigns for municipal reform in cities like Philadelphia and Atlanta compounded the commonplace obstacles that might hinder any call for expensive public projects: the process of gaining eminent domain; legal controversies surrounding government jurisdiction; the architectural and structural problems inherent in planning large-scale public works, not to mention the main challenge that business leaders in Detroit faced—enlisting the support of local officials and the public in the first place. Commercial and industrial elites in different cities confronted varying combinations of these and other dynamics. But the effects were often similar. When it came to shaping local social policy in the years leading up to World War I, urban business leaders notched a record that was far more mixed than the one they would achieve after the armistice.
Struggling to Steer the New Motor City
In the opening years of the twentieth century, the rise of the automobile industry remade Detroit. In 1904, the city was home to an unremarkable smattering of manufacturing enterprises that employed just over sixty thousand workers. By the time the United States entered World War I, the auto industry alone employed twice that many, roughly 40 percent of the total number of factory workers in the city. The rest of Detroit’s industrial workforce toiled in one of the city’s many other manufacturing firms—building furnaces, producing chemicals, rolling cigars, or processing meat. Detroit was not a one-industry town, but auto manufacturing alone made the city an industrial powerhouse in a stunningly brief interval. In 1900—on the eve of the auto industry’s first major growth spurt—Detroit ranked sixteenth among American cities in terms of industrial output. By 1914, it ranked fourth.2
The rise of auto manufacturing produced a new group of tycoons. These men eventually displaced the merchants and manufacturers who had made their fortunes in pre-automotive Detroit as the vanguard of the city’s business elite. And yet this process was more amicable than one might expect. Detroiters who traced their wealth back to the city’s old nineteenth-century economy—rooted in the production of railcars and stoves, in lumber, and in mining—were among the first investors in the city’s fledgling car shops. Many of them profited from the car boom and quickly gleaned the importance of building strong social, political, and economic ties to the city’s newest moguls. Soon, recently flush automobile executives and the city’s old business leaders were comfortably hobnobbing together at Detroit’s toniest social clubs and serving alongside one another on various corporate boards. By 1916, the names of a number of the city’s new automobile magnates appeared alongside those of Detroit’s most established families in Dau’s Blue Book, essentially a who’s who of the local upper crust. Despite the almost revolutionary transformation of Detroit’s economy, the city’s new and established barons were coalescing into a relatively coherent business class.3
There was one important exception to this trend: Henry Ford. Members of Detroit’s pre-automotive elite had invested in Ford’s early companies, but Ford’s first venture flopped, and investors pushed him out of his second when he refused to embrace their vision for the firm. Even
