A number of dynamics undercut business leaders’ efforts, but their involvement in the local municipal reform movement was among the most notable. Long disenchanted with the basic design of Atlanta’s government, elite businessmen initiated an aggressive drive to revamp Atlanta’s political system in 1911. Pursued largely under the auspices of the chamber of commerce, their campaign paralleled those of municipal reformers in Philadelphia and Detroit, except that a large segment of Atlanta’s business community embraced the so-called commission plan. First developed in Galveston, Texas, the commission plan entailed the citywide election of a small group of public officials, each of whom headed a city department. After failing in 1911, members of Atlanta’s mercantile and manufacturing elite tried to revise the charter again in 1913 but to no avail. In both cases, businessmen who favored commission government had to jettison their original vision due to resistance from organized labor (which feared a loss of working-class political influence) and from local officeholders, including a handful of businessmen who sat in the city council and did not want to risk losing their seats. In both campaigns business leaders eventually endorsed compromise measures that would have implemented some of their goals while also satisfying the demands of their leading opponents. But even these watered-down measures lost at the polls.69
The fight for a new city charter compromised businessmen’s push for debt spending on multiple occasions. In early 1913, after months of agitation for a multimillion-dollar bond issue, it seemed that local officials were about to call an election in the hopes of gaining voters’ approval. But the city’s mayor and local business leaders ended up changing strategies. Rather than asking voters to approve a large bond issue, they decided to prioritize charter reform. The exceptionally high threshold for winning bond elections in Atlanta, along with memories of the failed charter campaign of 1911, forced businessmen and their allies in public office to focus on one measure at a time. But in the end, they got neither.70
Meanwhile, in arguing for charter reform, local business leaders continually undermined their attempt to get voters to put more money into public officials’ hands. In one speech during the 1911 charter campaign, for instance, chamber of commerce leader and wealthy attorney Charles Hopkins denounced the “set of petty grafters and peanut politicians” who were currently running the city and pointed to numerous examples of political favoritism and corruption.71 After voters rejected charter reform in 1911, members of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce continued to take the lead in underscoring flaws in the city’s political system. In 1912, the chamber’s leadership commissioned a study of the city administration. The resulting report exposed a number of problems that provided fodder for the charter fight. But it also offered a host of reasons for local voters not to entrust city officials with more public funds. In trying to convince the electorate to embrace one part of their political agenda—charter reform—businessmen fueled voter resistance to another—debt spending.72
Another local reform movement spawned similar dynamics. In 1911, a handful of successful businessmen, including former mayor Maddox, joined with local pastors to form a branch of the Men and Religion Forward Movement (MRFM), a Protestant organization that sought to encourage men’s involvement in the church and in moral reform. In Atlanta, the group’s first goal was to abolish the city’s red-light district. MRFM members also accused a number of public officials of being involved in the city’s vice trade. MRFM leaders found a strong ally in the city’s police chief, James L. Beavers, who initiated an extensive campaign to shut down the city’s brothels. In time, Beavers and his supporters in the MRFM set their sights on other illicit establishments in the city, such as those that violated Georgia’s prohibition law, passed in 1908. As the purview of Beavers’s moral crusade expanded, however, so did local opposition. A growing segment of the city’s business community complained that headlines in local papers regarding Beavers’s raids were making Atlanta seem as if it were plagued by crime, an impression made worse by the MRFM’s tactic of taking out full-page advertisements to expose illegal activity in the city. Eventually the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce resolved to pressure local newspapers to stop publishing material submitted by the MRFM. The city’s mayor tried to rein in Beavers, but the police chief resisted. In July 1915, Beavers was demoted for insubordination after a trial before the mayor and the city’s police board. Outraged, members of the MRFM spearheaded a recall campaign to remove the mayor and police administrators from office.73
Throughout that fall, the recall effort dominated public debate. Among many measures that suffered was yet another proposal for a major bond issue, this one for roughly $3.3 million, including a million dollars each for schools and sewers, $750,000 to improve the city’s water system, and $375,000 for the city’s public hospital. The electorate was slated to vote on the bonds on September 30, 1915, but city officials canceled the election as the recall campaign intensified. Voters rejected the recall, but only after the MRFM’s moral crusade had pushed debt spending onto the political back burner yet again.74
In the meantime, years of accusations of collusion between Atlanta officials and purveyors of vice in the city had further undermined Atlantans’ faith in local government. The secretary of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, W. G. Cooper, vented about these dynamics in an open letter to the Atlanta Constitution in September 1915. Bitter over the ongoing failure to increase public spending in the city, Cooper argued that “several years of severe criticism of the city government … has so shaken the confidence of the people in the public officials administering the city’s affairs that voters are unwilling to put in the hands of these officials for disbursement the millions of money required to supply Atlanta’s needs.” Cooper continued, “This severe criticism began about the time when commission government became a burning issue” and surfaced yet again when the “Men and Religion bulletins began” circulating. “City officials, in one way or another, have been under fire for four or five years, almost without cessation.”75
Cooper blamed the city’s newspapers for this barrage of criticism. But the chamber of commerce had engaged in many of the same tactics in its fight for charter reform and so had the businessmen in the MRFM. As in Philadelphia and Detroit, business elites in Atlanta embraced a varied political agenda in the years leading up to the war but one that included internal tensions that compromised business leaders’ political efforts on numerous occasions.
New Directions
By the 1920s, elite businessmen’s political priorities would notably shift in all three cities. In Detroit, corporate leaders’ success in rewriting the city charter would make the question of municipal reform more or less moot in the years that followed. In Philadelphia, the city’s independent reform movement would largely dissolve early in the decade. Atlanta’s business community would participate in another failed attempt to revise the city’s charter in 1922. But when a new movement for charter reform picked up steam a few years later, most of the city’s business leaders declined to join. Instead, they resolved to focus their efforts on yet another push to lure new firms to the city in part by improving local social programs through another major bond issue.76
As the Atlanta case suggests, the municipal reform movement lived on in the 1920s and so did businessmen’s involvement in it, a fact that historians have long known. But historians have rarely examined how businessmen’s enthusiasm for municipal reform either before the war or after fit into business interests’ larger public agenda, which also included support for public schooling and the construction of parks, playgrounds, museums, and libraries, as well as improving public health by building better sewer and water systems. Judging from the three cities examined here, for many businessmen the desire to achieve a growing number of social policy goals would increasingly trump questions of political process