Much like in Detroit, the fight to reform Philadelphia’s political system included a campaign to change how the city’s school district was governed. Antimachine businessmen—working closely with elite female activists and a handful of school administrators—supported this cause as well. Again their efforts were only partially successful. In 1905, independents won state legislation replacing the city’s ward-based school system with a small board composed of appointed, rather than elected, members. Yet the new law still left the composition of the new body largely up to machine leaders by giving the judges of the city’s court of common pleas the power to appoint the board. These were the same justices who continually named Peter Widener and his corporate allies to Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park Commission. In 1911, independents again tried to reform the city’s school system by replacing the appointed board of education with an even smaller body elected at large in the hopes of increasing elite influence. They also sought to give the school board the authority to tax and spend on its own instead of having Philadelphia’s city council control the school budget. In the end, independents won legislation reducing the size of the board and freeing it from council oversight. But machine bosses made sure that the judges of the court of common pleas would still determine who ran the city’s schools.50
Much as they did in the case of the Fairmount Park Commission, the city’s judges tended to stack the reconfigured school board with businessmen, wealthy lawyers, and other successful professionals, as well as with Philadelphians whose names appeared in the city’s social register, thus satisfying independent reformers’ hopes for an elite school board to a degree. Members of the redesigned board also furthered another of reformers’ goals. In Philadelphia, the campaign to transform school governance before World War I was part of a broader push to build an educational system that reformers hoped would address the challenges of urbanization, immigration, and training workers in an industrial economy. Between 1911 and 1915, Philadelphia’s school budget jumped from just over $7 million to more than $12 million—a major increase. In the 1920s, however, elites on the city’s school board would spend far more.51
As World War I came to a close, Philadelphia’s business leaders remained sharply divided over the question of boss rule. The city’s new charter had left major sources of machine power untouched. In fits and starts, public officials had managed to make progress on parts of the City Beautiful plans that elite businessmen had embraced, but many more remained unrealized. Antimachine businessmen and their allies had managed to reform school governance in the city to some degree and to increase educational funding, but local political bosses still retained sway over the city’s educational affairs. Whether for business leaders tightly aligned with Philadelphia’s political machine or for those strongly opposed to it, there had been few clear-cut victories in the first two decades of the century. In Atlanta, local business leaders’ political efforts led to similarly varied results.
Boosters Abroad, Muckrakers at Home
Atlanta’s economy never rivaled Philadelphia’s and Detroit’s in the early twentieth century, but the economic fortunes of the Gate City were clearly on the rise. By the early 1900s, twelve separate railroad lines converged in Atlanta. They delivered cotton and other agricultural products from the southern countryside to the city’s many mercantile enterprises, such as the S. M. Inman Company, one of the world’s largest cotton trading firms. In turn, Atlanta’s merchants packaged these crops for distribution throughout the nation and overseas. Meanwhile, the value of products manufactured in Atlanta rose more than sevenfold between 1900 and 1919 as the city became home to a growing assortment of cotton and lumber mills and factories producing a range of other goods, from fertilizers and agricultural machinery to the city’s signature product, Coca-Cola. As Atlanta assumed its central place in the southern economy, it also became the regional outpost for a number of national corporations and home to many of the South’s leading banks and insurance companies.52
Atlanta’s economic development pleased the well-off bankers, manufacturers, merchants, and high-end lawyers who made up the city’s white commercial and industrial elite—a group that was deeply committed to attracting new businesses to the city. But economic growth also brought social upheaval. Indeed, in the opening years of the century, Atlanta’s white business leaders especially struggled to reconcile the pristine, boosterish image of the city that they projected in newspapers and journals across the country with the reality that their hometown was riddled with social strife, health hazards, ramshackle schools, and other infrastructure that was buckling in the face of a major population boom. Atlanta’s white business elite was particularly fond of bragging about how Atlanta was free of the racial antipathies that plagued other southern cities. In 1906, however, tensions between the city’s quickly growing white and African American populations boiled over into a deadly riot that belied those claims. As Atlanta’s economy flourished, thousands of rural southerners flocked to the city, many of them hoping to escape the brutal grind of tenant farming and sharecropping at a time when cotton prices were abysmally low. The city’s population grew from just under 90,000 to nearly 155,000 between 1900 and 1910. By 1920, another 45,000 people would settle in Atlanta.53
Most of these migrants simply traded rural for urban poverty even as many aspects of their lives fundamentally changed. On the farm, parents could work the fields while keeping an eye on their children. In the city, where working-class newcomers toiled in factories, railroad depots, warehouses, or other locations away from their homes, parental supervision became much more haphazard. Anonymity was often impossible in the countryside. In the city, it was unavoidable. Temptations like the chance to get drunk in one of the city’s many saloons abounded in turn-of-the-century Atlanta. And so did members of the opposite race. In 1910, Atlanta was one-third African American and two-thirds white. Despite a rising tide of segregation laws, African American and white newcomers to the city tended to live, work, and spend their leisure time in greater proximity to one another than they had in countryside. The combination of a breakdown in traditional forms of supervision, anxiety over urban anonymity, worries over the rampant consumption of liquor and other intoxicants, and the inevitable intermingling of the races continually stoked the racist fears of white Atlantans. In the fall of 1906, white paranoia turned to rage after leading newspapers in the city published a series of sensationalist accounts describing African American men sexually assaulting white women. On September 22, a furious white mob went on a killing spree, chasing down random African American men in the streets and on the city’s streetcars. The violence lasted for three days and left at least two dozen African Americans dead.54
Before the riot, the city’s white business leaders had done little to quell the growing storm of white anger. After the killings, however, leaders of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce—the most influential commercial body in the city by far—scrambled to restore peace and to limit damage to Atlanta’s reputation. They included Sam D. Jones, chamber of commerce president and head of the Atlanta Stove Works; Charles T. Hopkins, one of Atlanta’s preeminent corporate lawyers; and James English—banker, manufacturer, and one of the wealthiest men in the city. In the aftermath of the riot, white business leaders like Jones, Hopkins, and English especially called for stricter separation of the races and for the swift adjudication of crimes related to the upheaval. In both cases, the burden fell almost exclusively on the city’s African Americans. To curb the purported threat of drunken black predators, the city closed two-thirds of the saloons that catered to African Americans and declared the rest of the bars in the city for white use only. To prove that the city’s criminal justice system could enforce the law without the assistance of vigilante mobs, judges convicted black men accused of riot-related transgressions almost automatically and gave them the maximum sentence that the law allowed. By contrast, the small number of white rioters who were indicted enjoyed a presumption