His competitors were furious when he announced the five-dollar day in 1914, fearing wage inflation throughout the city. They ridiculed his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I. When Ford endorsed the reelection campaign of Democratic president Woodrow Wilson in 1916, members of Detroit’s solidly Republican business elite jeered. Perhaps taking the hint—or maybe out of spite—Henry Ford’s involvement in local politics grew increasingly sporadic.4
Other car executives, by contrast, grew all the more involved in local affairs. In the run-up to World War I, leaders of the automobile industry took charge of the local business community’s most prominent civic organizations. Between 1911 and America’s entry into the war, the presidents of the Detroit Board of Commerce were all in car manufacturing. Representatives of the auto industry also dominated the organization’s directorate. Meanwhile, auto executives like Hugh Chalmers of Chalmers Motor Company, F. F. Beall of Packard, and A. L. McMeans of Dodge took the helm of the Detroit Employers’ Association, the corporate elite’s organizational base for waging war on local unions.5
It was also one of the city’s most successful carmakers, Henry Leland, who established the civic organization that spearheaded the municipal reform movement in Detroit, including the attempt to reconfigure the city’s basic political structure by revising Detroit’s city charter. Born in 1843 in Vermont, Leland came of age as the industrial revolution was spreading through New England. In his early professional years, he gained a hands-on education as a toolmaker and machinist working in factories throughout the Northeast. In 1890, Leland established a new enterprise in Detroit, where he quickly earned a reputation as an exceptional engineer. When Henry Ford’s second company began to struggle in 1902, investors called on Leland to save the firm. Soon, the newly renamed Cadillac Automobile Company gained international fame for producing the first cars with fully interchangeable parts.6
In addition to being a master engineer, Leland was a devout Presbyterian, an ardent prohibitionist, and a staunch opponent of organized labor. He was a significant contributor to the Michigan Anti-Saloon League and helped to establish the city’s antiunion Employers’ Association. An unapologetic elitist, Leland believed that the “better class” of Americans—meaning primarily wealthy, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men—was most fit to govern.7
Unfortunately for Leland, Detroit was becoming less Anglo-Saxon, less Protestant, and more working class with each passing day. Jobs created by the auto boom drew hundreds of thousands of migrants to the city. Most of them were desperately poor. Many of them were Catholic and Jewish peasants from southern and eastern Europe. Between 1900 and 1920, Detroit’s population grew from 285,000 to just under one million, and the number of immigrants in the city roughly tripled. By 1920, nearly 300,000 Detroiters had been born in another country.8
Initially, these immigrants settled in enclaves throughout older sections of the city. At the time, Detroit elected most of its public officials from neighborhood wards. As the city’s largely immigrant proletariat grew, so did its influence on local affairs. A man like Leland, who believed in rule by the “better class,” had few sympathies for a political system that gave workers, let alone immigrants, so much sway in local elections. What offended Leland most, however, was the influence that the so-called Voteswappers League had on local politics. The Voteswappers were a band of small-scale political bosses who controlled a number of the neighborhood-based boards that oversaw elections in Detroit and thus were able to manipulate vote counts in favor of their political allies. Worse still for the teetotaling Leland, many of the Voteswappers doubled as saloonkeepers and their primary financial sponsor was the Royal Ark, Detroit’s main association of liquor dealers.9
Figure 1. Henry Leland, president of the Detroit Citizens League and the Cadillac Motor Company, photographed circa 1920. National Automotive History Collection, Detroit Public Library.
In 1912, Leland founded a new political organization that eventually became known as the Detroit Citizens League. Elite businessmen dominated the group’s board and quickly adopted charter reform as a leading goal. The Detroit Board of Commerce soon joined the charter fight, while wealthy executives like John and Horace Dodge, Edsel Ford, and S. S. Kresge (whose name would eventually put the K in Kmart) all donated large sums to fund the Citizens League’s effort.10
Detroit’s commercial and industrial elite supported charter reform for a variety of reasons. Some shared Leland’s distaste for the Voteswappers and their connection to the saloon. Others were weary of the scandals that intermittently rocked the city. Clouds of suspicion hovered over the city’s sanitation and street-repair services and over the police department’s relationship with local saloonkeepers. At one point, three-quarters of Detroit’s city council had been arrested on charges that they had accepted bribes from a regional railroad company. The courts eventually acquitted the lawmakers, but the controversy lasted for over a year.11
Business leaders also hoped to streamline a political system that was undeniably cumbersome. Under the existing charter, Detroit was governed by a mayor and a city council that had thirty-six members elected by ward. Government appropriations demanded approval from the city’s enormous board of estimates, composed of forty-one officials. Every city department was run by a committee consisting of three members each. It was a system plagued by inefficiencies. Like municipal reformers across the country, businessmen in Detroit wanted city officials to run the government like a private corporation, with efficiency as a primary goal.12
But most of all, business elites joined the fight for charter reform because they wanted more political power. Indeed, despite their wealth, leaders of Detroit’s business community had a difficult time influencing local politics in the early years of the century. Their failure to shape the local social policymaking process especially attests to this pattern.
Among the commercial and industrial elite’s most ambitious social policy proposals in the years preceding World War I was the construction of a new multistructure cultural center just a few miles from Detroit’s downtown. Its design was rooted in a movement in architectural and urban planning that had sprung from multiple sources and was just beginning to make its way across the country. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, village improvement associations had begun tinkering with coordinated planning and beautification in small towns in various parts of the nation. In urban America, Frederick Law Olmsted and others had made a splash in the years surrounding the Civil War by designing bucolic common spaces, like New York’s Central Park, that they believed could counteract everything from rising class tensions to the hustle-bustle of city life. In Europe, another urban vision was taking shape, one exemplified most clearly by Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s reconstruction of large swaths of Paris to fit Napoléon III’s dreams for France’s Second Empire. In the early 1890s, the American city planner Daniel Burnham drew heavily on Haussmann’s ideas in constructing his famous White City at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, a fair marking the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Burnham’s work inspired a growing collection of planners who hoped to use beautification and urban design to address a variety of forces—from rising inequality to haphazard urban development—that they believed were tearing American cities apart. These planners found additional inspiration in the work of Charles Mulford Robinson, especially from his 1901 Improvement of Towns and Cities, a manifesto that argued for the transformative potential of architecture, urban planning, municipal art, and parks. The fledgling City Beautiful movement got an additional boost just after the turn of the century when federal officials decided to redesign portions of Washington, D.C., by elaborating on Pierre L’Enfant’s original plan for the city. The main product of that effort was an expanded and reconceived National Mall lined with neoclassical structures and embellished with a large reflecting pool and the monuments that would eventually become the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. A few blocks away, the Pennsylvania Railroad agreed to construct a new building of its own, Union Station, in a similar spirit.13
