Then came 1919, the first year after the armistice. The well-documented tumult that marked that year in part constituted an acute urban crisis from elite businessmen’s perspective. In 1919 alone, American workers took part in 2,600 strikes, many of which took place in cities. In general, workers struck for two reasons. First, the cost of living had skyrocketed during World War I and continued to do so for a time after the armistice. Workers needed higher wages to get by, and they were willing to walk off the job to get them. In addition, employers sought to reverse the gains that organized labor had won during the war thanks to a series of federal regulations that had aimed to promote industrial peace in order to maximize production. Membership in the American Federation of Labor, the nation’s largest and most influential union, had grown by over two million members during the war. Most employers hoped to restore the open shop after the armistice and to roll back the concessions that workers had won amid the wartime push for industrial harmony.78
The first truly major strike took place in Seattle that January. Initially, about thirty-five thousand workers at the city’s shipyards struck after negotiations broke down over their wages. Soon thereafter, sixty thousand other Seattle workers walked off their jobs in solidarity. The Seattle General Strike nearly shut down the whole city. It lasted only a week, but more conflicts followed elsewhere. Emboldened by their wartime gains, local unions in more than forty-five cities pledged to form a new political party, the American Labor Party, to push for legislation to permanently alter the balance of power between capital and labor. That spring, violence riddled May Day demonstrations in a number of urban areas, including Boston, New York, and Cleveland. By July, the nation was bracing itself for a national strike. Police forces in Philadelphia and New York implemented twenty-four-hour patrols on the Fourth of July, when the strike was supposedly going to begin. Officials in Chicago called in military reinforcements. A coordinated nationwide walkout never occurred, but strikes continued to break out in city after city. Nearly three-quarters of Boston’s police force walked off the job that September and stayed there even as a brief crime wave ensued. Weeks later, 350,000 of the nation’s steelworkers went on strike after the chairman of U.S. Steel refused to meet with union officials.79
All of these conflicts compounded fears that the radicalism that had brought communist revolution to Russia in 1917 had spread to the United States. With the nation’s proletariat already picketing in the streets, a spate of bombings and bomb threats sparked an anticommunist panic. In March, a newspaper in Chicago claimed to have discovered evidence of a looming attack. No bombs went off in the Windy City that spring, but explosions took place elsewhere. In late April, the mayor of Seattle found a bomb in his mail. A senator from Georgia received one that blew off the hands of his maid. On June 2, bombings took place in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and six other cities, including Washington, D.C., where a bomb exploded in front of the home of the U.S. attorney general.80
It had long been an American pastime to blame radicalism and labor agitation on the foreign born, and immigrants once again took the brunt of the blame. Public officials attempted to round up immigrants suspected of having radical political sympathies. In December 1919, federal officials deported 249 foreign-born political activists to the Soviet Union on a ship nicknamed the “Soviet Ark.” Raids targeting immigrants culminated in early 1920, when federal officials arrested over five thousand suspected radicals in a surprise sweep. But much more common than deporting or arresting the foreign born were pledges to redouble efforts to “Americanize” them and promote their assimilation into the nation’s political and cultural mainstream.81
A series of deadly race riots in over two dozen American towns and cities furthered panic over urban disorder. In Chicago, twenty-three African Americans and fifteen whites died in rioting that followed the fatal stoning of an African American boy who had accidentally drifted into an all-white swimming area in Lake Michigan. Washington, D.C., experienced its own version of the Atlanta riot of 1906 after the Washington Post ran a series of trumped-up articles describing African American men attacking white women. The uproar that followed killed six and injured over two hundred more.82
Amid all of this instability and continuing into the years that followed, urban business leaders responded in large part by doubling down on their conviction that government—particularly deployed at the local level—was essential for promoting social, economic, and political stability. Viewed from the 1920s, businessmen’s vision of a civic welfare state before World War I seems merely incipient, dwarfed by what came thereafter. In some cases, local business leaders were responding to working-class revolts or race riots in their own hometowns. In other cities, business elites turned to government to keep the disorder from spreading to their backyards. Elsewhere, boosterish businessmen viewed the postwar chaos as an opportunity and intensified their efforts to build cities that could lure firms from other towns that were seeking permanent refuge from urban unrest.
Fears of working-class radicalism, worries over the foreign born, and the conviction that city services were insufficient or ill designed to prevent problems like crime and vice all persisted throughout the 1920s. But as time wore on, business leaders’ concern for these issues increasingly overlapped with locally specific challenges that urban business elites hoped to overcome, including relentless population growth in Detroit, the early signs of economic decline in Philadelphia, and evidence that the efforts of Atlanta’s boosters were falling short. These and other dynamics kept heightened social spending at the forefront of business leaders’ public agenda in all three cities throughout the 1920s, even as businessmen’s distress over the war and its immediate aftermath grew less sharp. And in all three cities, business leaders would prove considerably more successful in implementing their policy objectives in the 1920s than they had been before the armistice. Even so, political realities would continually remind them that the power to shape public policy was a privilege that could not be assumed but had to be continually won.
CHAPTER 2
Detroit
Businessmen at Large
At the end of World War I, roughly one in three residents of Detroit was a first-generation immigrant. More than a third were children of at least one foreign-born parent. About forty thousand African Americans lived in the city. The vast majority of Detroit’s population was working class, and over half was Catholic.1
Yet when the city held its first elections under its new charter, the results would have better suited a place that was Detroit’s demographic inverse. The contest took place in November 1918, just as the last shots were being fired in Europe. Of the nine candidates who won Detroit’s first at-large elections for city council, none were foreign born. Just one had been born to immigrant parents, and only two were Catholic. All of the winners were white, and all were men. The city’s leading union, the Detroit Federation of Labor (DFL), ran a slate of candidates in the race for city council, but every one of them lost. Henry Leland’s business-dominated Detroit Citizens League, by contrast, supported all nine candidates who won out of the sixty-six who entered the race. Nearly all of the winners were businessmen. Five of the incoming councilmen were corporate executives, two were realtors, and one was a banker. The remaining councilman, Fred Castator, had previously served as deputy assistant labor commissioner for the state of Michigan. Though Castator