Figure 5. A depiction of the Atlanta race riot in a French publication with the caption “Massacre of Blacks in the Streets of Atlanta.” National and international coverage of the 1906 riot prodded Atlanta’s image-conscious white business elite to mobilize in the hopes of salvaging the city’s reputation. Courtesy of the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center.
The 1906 riot was just one of many developments that made white business elites’ boosterish rhetoric ring hollow. Atlanta had one of the worst mortality rates in the country. Forty percent of the city’s streets lacked access to sewers and a third lacked water mains. Fifty thousand Atlantans relied solely on outhouses. Other city services were also in shambles. The development of Atlanta’s park system lagged far behind other cities. According one investigation, nearly half of the city’s thirty schools were completely unsafe while seven others had sections that needed to be condemned.56
Controversy also swirled around city officials. One of the city’s mayors, James G. Woodward, was caught on multiple occasions visiting prostitutes and had a habit of appearing drunk in public, including at official city meetings and at a conference of the League of American Municipalities. Woodward was a printer by trade, a union man, and a favorite of the city’s white working class. He served two terms between 1899 and 1906. In 1908, Woodward managed to win the Democratic primary for mayor for a third time. Soon thereafter, his name appeared in a court case concerning two prostitutes who had gotten into a fight. Woodward was the client of one of the women the night of the incident and was again spotted drunk on the city’s streets. In his own feeble defense, Woodward blamed the corn whiskey that a doctor had supposedly prescribed him to stave off pneumonia.57
In the months surrounding Woodward’s escapade, local business leaders’ discomfort with the city’s growing array of political and social problems became increasingly clear. Atlanta was a one-party town. Normally, winning the Democratic primary as Woodward had done was the same as winning public office itself. But members of Atlanta’s commercial and industrial elite feared the national embarrassment that would follow if voters elected a chronic drunk and an apparently incorrigible john to Atlanta’s highest office for yet another term. Using the city’s chamber of commerce as their organizational base, a number of the city’s most influential businessmen mobilized to draft one of their own to run for mayor. Just weeks before the general election, the sitting president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and the founder of the Coca-Cola Company, Asa Griggs Candler, convened a mass meeting that in turn appointed a committee of twenty-five men to choose a candidate. Former chamber of commerce president J. K. Orr chaired the committee, which also included Candler, corporate lawyer Charles Hopkins, bank president Ernest Woodruff (who would later buy Coca-Cola), and two future presidents of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce: Victor Kriegshaber, a successful manufacturer of construction materials, and F. J. Paxon of Davison-Paxon-Stokes, one of Atlanta’s leading department stores. Members of the nominating committee quickly decided to back wealthy banker and past chamber of commerce president Robert F. Maddox.58 In stump speeches before the election, Maddox contended that the “business prosperity, good name and decency of the city was at stake” and urged voters to make the right choice between “decency and indecency; between law and order and lawlessness; between a well and liberally governed city and one in which unbridled license runs riot.” With all of the city’s newspapers against him, Woodward’s campaign barely limped along. Voters chose Maddox by a wide margin.59
In the months preceding Maddox’s election, a similar cohort of businessmen had begun to mobilize to improve city services. In early 1908, the manufacturer Harry L. Schlesinger published an open letter in the Atlanta Constitution calling for a large bond issue to fund a set of initiatives that promised to improve Atlanta’s “prestige and prosperity” as well as its citizens “mental and moral … development.” Schlesinger especially called for new parks, schools, and sewers as well as sidewalks and a new city hall.60 Soon thereafter, the Atlanta Constitution reported being “deluged” with “vigorous and unqualified approvals” of Schlesinger’s proposal from the city’s “most prominent business men,” an outpouring of support that prompted the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce to appoint a committee to evaluate the city’s needs.61 Members of the chamber’s committee were reportedly “astounded … by the disgraceful sanitary and hygienic conditions under which 50,000 Atlantans were living.”62 They were similarly distraught over the state of the city’s school system. Chamber leaders at first accepted the committee’s recommendation for a $1,500,000 bond issue—$500,000 for sewers, $500,000 for the city’s water system, and $500,000 to build sixteen new schools with playgrounds. After Robert Maddox’s triumph in that fall’s race for mayor, however, the city’s business elite called for double that total. In 1909, the leadership of the chamber of commerce and the Maddox administration launched a campaign to persuade voters to approve $3 million in bonds—the largest bond issue in the city’s history up to that time—to be repaid over thirty years from government revenue.63
In Atlanta, winning the right to float bonds was an exceptionally difficult task. Victory required the approval of two-thirds of the registered voters of the city. In most cities, including Detroit and Philadelphia, winning bond elections demanded a mere majority vote no matter voter turnout. To emerge victorious in Atlanta, by contrast, proponents of debt spending not only had to win a supermajority of the votes cast but also had to get at least a supermajority of the city’s registered electorate to the polls. Over time this requirement proved particularly nettlesome for Atlanta’s white business elite, whose strategy for luring new firms to the city focused on improving city services while keeping taxes low—a dual imperative that made debt spending businessmen’s leading option for pursuing public sector growth.64
As the 1910 referendum approached, the chamber of commerce took the lead in organizing an elaborate campaign to get out the vote. Its leaders sent over eight thousand letters to residents of neighborhoods that would benefit directly from the bond issue and contacted employers throughout the city to encourage them to get their employees to the polls. The city’s main union, the Atlanta Federation of Trades, and many of the city’s women’s clubs also organized on behalf of the bonds. All of these efforts helped make funding available for Atlanta’s only major burst of government spending between the turn of the twentieth century and the end of World War I. With the bond money in hand, the city built twelve new schools, constructed its first sewage treatment plants, and greatly expanded the reach of the city’s water system. Over nine thousand Atlantans were able to abandon germ-infested outhouses for modern plumbing. Predictably, the city’s African American neighborhoods garnered only about 6 percent of the $600,000 in bonds allocated to local schools. But they fared much better when it came to improvements to the city’s sewer and water systems. White Atlantans knew that they could not solve the city’s public health crisis without dramatically improving African Americans’ access to those services. “The disease germ knows no color or race line,” the editors of the Atlanta Constitution contended. Thanks to the 1910 bond issue, sizable portions of both working- and middle-class African American neighborhoods gained access to running water and sewers for the first time.65
The 1910 bond election was a significant victory for Atlanta’s business community, but the city’s business leaders wanted much more. As leading merchant F. J. Paxon declared during his tenure as chamber of commerce president, “We need more parks, more playgrounds and breathing spots for the people; we need a museum and an art gallery comparable to the Carnegie library,” which the city had constructed in 1902. “We want our city so healthy, so attractive, so wholesome and full of charm in every respect that people will come here because it is the best place to live and to educate their children.”66 During the two years of the exceptionally business-friendly Maddox administration, the city took a number of steps in this direction beyond what the 1910 bond issue had provided for. Citing parks and playgrounds as “great preventatives of disease and crime,” Maddox oversaw the construction of Atlanta’s first municipally run playgrounds and a number of improvements to the local park system that resulted from the city’s collaboration with two of the nation’s premier