campaign even headed the new commission. But the bulk of businessmen’s vision for the city’s recreation system remained unfulfilled. In the spring of 1915, the board of estimates declined to appropriate funding for social centers in the city, an initiative that the board of commerce had backed. Moreover, it granted only $15,000 in bonds for purchasing land for new playgrounds even though the board of commerce had wanted much more.23
Thus, whether they were lobbying for playgrounds or attempting to build a new library and museum, business leaders in Detroit were reminded that they lacked the political influence that they desired. Charter reform promised to give it to them. Above all, Henry Leland and his corporate brethren sought to implement a charter that would abolish Detroit’s ward-based city council and replace it with a much smaller, nine-member body that the electorate would choose as a whole. As Leland and his allies well knew, citywide elections strongly favored wealthy or well-funded candidates who could afford to wage extensive advertising campaigns. The city’s largest union, the Detroit Federation of Labor, immediately recognized the proposal as a power grab and opposed it, arguing that workers would lose their voice in city hall without their ward representatives. But other Detroiters viewed the matter differently. Tired of inefficiencies and the potential for corruption in Detroit’s existing political system, multiple Polish newspapers endorsed Leland and the Citizens League’s proposed charter, as did newspapers in the city’s Jewish and Italian communities. A local African American newspaper came out in favor of the business-backed charter as well, contending that citywide elections would allow African Americans to vote as a bloc instead of having their votes split among different wards. Placing the charter question on the ballot required gathering thirteen thousand signatures on a petition. The Citizens League and its allies managed to collect eighteen thousand in short order in part because major employers like Ford, Packard, and Cadillac allowed representatives of the Citizens League to solicit signatures from employees in their plants. A significant number of these workers no doubt signed because their bosses made clear that they were expected to do so. Still, evidence suggests that Detroiters from all walks of life supported the Citizens League’s proposals. When the electorate voted on the new charter in June 1918, every single precinct in the city approved it. Political conditions in the city were so poor that many Detroiters were hungry for change. By funneling their wealth toward charter reform, elite businessmen succeeded in determining what that change would look like.24
In addition to reconfiguring the city council, the new charter replaced the three-member commissions that had previously administered local affairs with streamlined departments whose heads were appointed by the mayor. It transformed the city’s art museum into a municipal entity, thus opening the way for a new building financed by taxpayer dollars. Finally, the charter put the mayor and city council in charge of all city expenditures, free from the oversight of the old board of estimates.25
One modification that the city charter did not make was reforming the city’s school system—a cause that Detroit’s business leaders also embraced in the years leading up to the war. The main thrust of businessmen’s involvement in Detroit’s educational politics before World War I had less to do with implementing specific policies or expanding local facilities, as it would in the 1920s. Rather, business leaders’ primary concern was ridding the school system of ward politics. Their effort paralleled their campaign to redesign the city government more generally, although in the case of school reform businessmen largely followed the lead of female activists in the city, especially members of the Detroit Federation of Women’s Clubs, who in turn mobilized behind a wealthy Detroiter named Laura Osborn.
A committed prohibitionist, Osborn shared Henry Leland’s distaste for the Voteswappers and denounced their influence on the city’s schools. Married to a successful businessman and listed in the city’s social register, she joined many of her wealthy peers in fearing the growing political power of Detroit’s increasingly immigrant working class. In 1913, Osborn and two male collaborators—an executive at Detroit Edison and a professor at the University of Michigan—convinced state legislators to pass a law restructuring how the city’s school district was governed. The Detroit Citizens League and the Detroit Board of Commerce strongly supported the measure, which abolished the existing ward-based school board and replaced it with a much smaller body composed of six members chosen in citywide elections. Opponents of the new law mounted a series of legal challenges that stopped its implementation for several years. Finally, in November 1916, legislators asked Detroit’s electorate to weigh in. In the lead-up to the referendum, the Detroit Federation of Women’s Clubs waged an extensive campaign with the strong support of the Detroit Board of Commerce and the Detroit Citizens League. The measure carried in 284 of the city’s 285 precincts. As in the battle to revise the city charter, wealthy elites led the campaign to reform Detroit’s school system, but their success depended on widespread disenchantment with the status quo.26
In driving the Voteswappers out of school politics, however, Detroiters opened the door for another clique to run the city’s schools, much as they did when they rubber-stamped the Citizens League’s charter proposals. Elite businessmen in Detroit failed to realize most of their social policy goals in the years before the armistice. But by successfully transforming how city officials were elected, they established the groundwork for their future political dominance. It was an outcome that business leaders in Philadelphia would have envied.
Stuck in the Gears of the World’s Workshop
“Corrupt and contended”: that was how muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens characterized politics in Philadelphia in 1903. Few statements about the city are more famous. And yet Steffens was only partially right. A crooked political machine aligned with the Republican Party dominated Philadelphia’s political scene in the opening decades of the century. But the city was also home to a committed municipal reform movement composed of “independent” Republicans who repeatedly tried to loosen the machine’s hold on power. First, in 1905, independents helped galvanize public protest to thwart an especially brazen attempt by machine politicians to line their pockets with public funds. Then, in 1911, independent reformers exploited divisions within the machine’s ranks and elected their own handpicked candidate for mayor. Finally, in 1919, independents took advantage of yet another conflict within the Republican machine and won a revised city charter that made a number of alterations to Philadelphia’s political structure.27
Corruption may have been at the center of Philadelphia’s political environment, but contentment simply was not. Independents—including the many elite businessmen in their midst—were obviously among the most disillusioned with local affairs. But the city’s business community in general had other reasons to gripe. Attempting to shape public policy within such a divided and scandal-ridden political environment was a regular source of frustration. On multiple occasions, progress on some of local business elites’ most cherished policy goals stalled after they became focal points in the ongoing struggle between the city’s bosses and independent reformers.
Understanding this pattern requires making peace with a tension. Throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, leading businessmen in Philadelphia agreed on a number of fronts, such as the need to rebuild parts of Philadelphia following City Beautiful ideals. Nonetheless, the city’s business elite was deeply divided when it came to other issues, most of all the question of who should run the government and how. On one side of this conflict stood some of the wealthiest men in Philadelphia (and, in fact, the nation), most notably Peter A. B. Widener. In the late nineteenth century, Widener, along with fellow Philadelphians William L. Elkins, William H. Kemble, and Thomas Dolan, had built corporate monopolies that controlled gas, electric, and street railway systems in a number of cities across the country, including in their hometown. In Philadelphia, Widener and his colleagues’ economic success had depended on their close ties to machine politicians in the Republican Party—state and local bosses who had helped Widener and his allies win the franchises and other legislation necessary to construct their utility empires.28
By the turn of the century, Philadelphia’s Republican machine was more centralized
