various groups vying to tailor the movement to suit their respective interests. Elite women’s associations frequently dove into the fray, and so did local commercial groups. City Beautiful projects tended to increase local property values, yet they also promised more from businessmen’s perspective. As the lawyer, banker, and wealthy real estate developer Henry Morgenthau contended, proper city planning could ameliorate “disease, moral depravity, discontent, and socialism.” Moreover, City Beautiful plans frequently included proposals to construct new parks, museums, and libraries—initiatives that promised to nurture a variety of traits in the local citizenry that business elites found desirable. In cities as diverse as Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, the City Beautiful movement was propelled in large part by businessmen’s civic ambitions.14
In Detroit, business leaders’ City Beautiful aspirations hinged on the completion of two buildings—a new home for the Detroit Public Library and another for the city’s art museum—that were designed to sit across the street from one another and anchor the proposed cultural center. William C. Weber, a Detroit businessman who had made his fortune in timber and real estate, helped lead the campaign for the new buildings. As Weber argued, the cultural center promised to offer everyday Detroiters “high pleasures” as well as “higher ideals,” to teach “Detroit residents who could not afford to travel to Europe or New York” that there was “something better” than working-class “nickelodeons,” vaudeville theater, and other forms of mass entertainment.15
Yet implementing Weber’s vision proved difficult. As was often true in the early twentieth century, Andrew Carnegie donated the seed money for Detroit’s new library building, but in the Motor City’s case only after years of delay. George W. Radford, a Detroit attorney who served “large moneyed interests,” initiated discussions with Carnegie’s representatives in 1901. Carnegie quickly agreed to give Detroit $750,000—half for a new central library and the rest for a handful of branch libraries—with the stipulation that Detroit’s government purchase the necessary land and allocate $75,000 a year for maintenance. But the deal soon faced resistance from local papers, organized labor, and eventually members of the city council. Opponents decried Carnegie’s brutal treatment of workers in his steel mills, particularly during the infamous Homestead Strike of 1892, and argued that accepting funds from the steel titan amounted to taking “blood money.”16
With political opposition growing, supporters of the library project shifted tacks. They began lobbying for an appropriation from the city itself, all the while hoping to take advantage of Carnegie’s offer at a later date. In 1902, Detroiters were asked to approve a $500,000 bond issue to fund construction. The bond issue passed, but the library project immediately hit another roadblock. Members of the city’s board of estimates—who met to review the city’s budget just once a year and had a reputation for knee-jerk parsimony—agreed to appropriate only $150,000 of the approved funds. The library commission refused to accept the lower amount out of principle and thus received nothing. In 1904, leaders of the Detroit Board of Commerce floated another proposal for the library only to have the city council reject it. Years later, despite ongoing pressure from local business leaders, city officials had yet to accept Carnegie’s donation or to provide significant funding on their own. Finally, in 1910, with organized labor and other detractors no longer actively opposing the project, the city agreed to appropriate enough money for Detroit to accept the Carnegie funds. The secretary of the Detroit Board of Commerce, Charles B. Sawyer, traveled to Pittsburgh (Carnegie’s hometown) and helped finalize the deal.17
Even with Carnegie’s money in hand, however, progress on the library remained glacially slow. Some of the delays were inevitable. It took time, for instance, to select an architectural plan. Still, public officials did not start construction until 1915—five full years after the city had finally accepted Carnegie’s gift. Then, just months after the city had broken ground, building ceased when local officials failed to appropriate enough money to keep work going. For well over a year, the unfinished building stood as “a gaunt, naked skeleton of steel against the sky” and as a testament to business elites’ political inefficacy. Thereafter, World War I brought further delays.18
Business leaders’ attempt to build a new home for the city’s art museum was just as fraught. At the time, the museum was a private entity, but the wealthy businessmen who dominated its board wanted taxpayers to foot the bill for the new building. The Detroit Museum of Art was founded in the 1880s under the leadership of wealthy newspaper publisher James Scripps, a Scripps employee named William H. Brearley, and Thomas W. Palmer, a lumber magnate who also served as U.S. senator. By the early 1890s, the museum’s board had convinced city officials to appropriate several thousand dollars to the museum each year. Even so, the city charter capped the amount of funding that public officials could give: $20,000 annually for operating costs. City officials could appropriate additional funds to the museum “from time to time” for special construction projects, but the city council was prohibited from spending more than $50,000 in bond revenue on the museum. Led by cultural center booster William Weber and Dexter M. Ferry Jr. (a wealthy corporate executive and heir to his father’s seed distribution company), the museum’s trustees wanted to build a monumental structure that would cost far more.19
But their attempt to win public funding for the project would backfire. The city’s corporation counsel objected to the plan, contending that the city did not have the right under state law to offer additional funds to the museum. In a 1915 test case designed to settle the matter, the Michigan Supreme Court agreed. Moreover, much to the surprise of the museum’s trustees, the court outlawed all municipal appropriations to the museum and other private institutions like it. According to the court, even the funding practices outlined under the existing city charter were unconstitutional. For local officials to finance construction of a new building, the museum would have to become a municipally owned entity.20
Business leaders also hoped to increase the number of parks and playgrounds in the city, but their efforts fell short on this front as well. In 1913, leaders of the Detroit Board of Commerce hired Rowland Haynes, field secretary of the Playground and Recreation Association of America (PRAA), to survey the city and make recommendations for improving its recreational facilities. PRAA officials were leading proponents of the theory that playgrounds—when supervised by municipal employees who could oversee and coordinate children’s play—were singularly promising tools for addressing a host of urban problems. It might seem like an oddly utopian notion in retrospect, but a number of the most influential urban reformers in the early twentieth century agreed. Housing reformer Lawrence Veiller, social activist Jane Addams, and U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt were all strong supporters of the movement, while the muckraker Jacob Riis spoke of playgrounds as one of the most important “counterinfluences to the saloon, street gang, and similar evils.”21
Figure 2. This photograph appeared in the November 1913 issue of the Detroit Board of Commerce’s magazine, the Detroiter, amid the board of commerce’s prewar campaign for supervised playgrounds. Courtesy of Baker Old Class Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.
As for the Detroit Board of Commerce, its members seemed especially sold on the sections of Rowland Haynes’s report that argued that play, when supervised by trained adults, could prevent juvenile delinquency and promote good citizenship, particularly among idle boys. As a representative of the Detroit Board of Commerce argued in the organization’s monthly magazine, children were like “an unfinished product,” and wholesome recreation was a crucial input in their development. “The caliber of our future citizens depends largely upon the boys of today,” the author warned. Without playgrounds, the “animal spirits” of local boys were turning toward other “natural outlets,” such as “neighborhood gangs, petty thieving,” and similar “depredations.”22
Haynes’s report also emphasized the need for a centralized body charged with coordinating recreational initiatives in the city. The board of commerce
