Business leaders managed to implement large swaths of their vision of a civic welfare state in 1920s Detroit because the city’s new political structure gave candidates with access to wealth an advantage that proved difficult for other political actors to surmount. Except for a brief interval between 1924 and 1926, candidates backed by the Detroit Citizens League held a supermajority on Detroit’s city council throughout the 1920s. Out of the seventeen councilmen who served between 1919 and 1929, ten were identifiable as corporate executives or businessmen in real estate, insurance, and banking.
Viewed from another angle, businessmen’s dominance of Detroit’s city council appears even more pronounced. In the eleven-year period between 1919 and 1929, the members of the nine-member council collectively served ninety-nine years in office. Businessmen served sixty-five out of those ninety-nine years. The remaining councilmen who served in the 1920s included three professional civil servants, a doctor, a dentist, former deputy assistant labor commissioner Castator, and finally Robert Ewald, a union man who managed to fight his way onto the city council early in the decade. In time, however, Ewald grew palatable enough to business interests to earn repeated Citizens League endorsements, suggesting that even the most worker-friendly councilman in 1920s Detroit walked a line between capital and labor.3
Candidates backed by the Detroit Citizens League also held a supermajority on the city’s school board at all times during the decade, and all but three of the board members who served during the 1920s were listed in the city’s social register. The superintendent of schools during the period was a former director of the Detroit Board of Commerce and was the board of commerce’s choice to head the schools. Finally, Detroit’s mayors, when they were not business executives themselves, forged close ties to the city’s commercial and industrial elite.4
Of course, businessmen’s political power could be neither constant nor absolute in a mass democracy like Detroit’s. A number of dynamics compromised business leaders’ influence during the decade, including a crisis in municipal finances, a grassroots insurgency led by the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan, and the sporadic political mobilization of organized labor. Indeed, there was a moment in the middle of the 1920s when it was unclear who would rule Detroit. Only a series of unforeseeable developments—including a working-class mayor who moved to broaden his base after nearly losing an election—enabled local business leaders to regain clout.
Yet despite slips in businessmen’s political influence, it is difficult to identify another political force in 1920s Detroit that truly rivaled the city’s business elite. The political fortunes of the Ku Klux Klan declined as quickly as they had arisen. Open-shop campaigns tended to sap organized labor’s political strength and narrow local unions’ political priorities. Insofar as they organized based on ethnicity, local immigrants rarely overcame the steep odds that they faced when trying to shape public policy in the city. Detroit’s largest immigrant group, Poles, constituted just 5 percent of the city’s population in 1920, a meager proportion in a political system based on citywide voting. The most prominent organization in Detroit’s quickly growing African American community, the Detroit Urban League, depended in large part on the support of wealthy white benefactors and tended to shy away from challenging the city’s white business leaders in the public sphere. Meanwhile, female activists, galvanized by the city’s vast network of women’s associations, fought most of their battles in the 1920s on the state and federal levels rather than in the local arena.
Lacking strong political organizations that could channel their demands, most Detroiters’ principal opportunity for shaping public policy came intermittently and indirectly at election time. Other than selecting among candidates, the electorate’s primary intervention in the policymaking process arose in a number of citywide referenda on major public improvement projects that entailed high levels of debt spending. Albeit often in elections with low turnout, voters approved the vast majority of the ballot initiatives enabling increased government expenditures that were put before them in the 1920s, suggesting that there was a basic consensus among Detroiters that the city needed more and better public services. Yet these referenda were worded in the most general terms and allowed voters to register only all-or-nothing, yea-or-nay votes on policies that were largely of elite design. At best, voters’ participation in bond referenda constituted oblique assertions of political power and highly abstract expressions of policy preferences. Most residents of 1920s Detroit barely had a voice in the city’s policymaking process due to the scarcity of effective and engaged political pressure groups. Members of Detroit’s commercial and industrial elite, on the other hand, had far less trouble making themselves heard as they sought to use local government to create the city and the citizenry that they desired.
Behind the Wheel, 1919–1922
In the first elections under Detroit’s new charter, voters not only elected every single candidate on the Citizens League’s slate for city council. They also chose one of the most well-known corporate executives in the city to serve as mayor. James Couzens had made his fortune as the general manager of the Ford Motor Company, where he worked until 1915. Over the years, Couzens had gained a reputation for being a maverick who was willing to take worker-friendly stances even if they put him at odds with his corporate brethren. While at Ford, Couzens helped dream up the five-dollar day, a policy that most employers in the city opposed. During a nationwide unemployment epidemic at the start of World War I, Couzens publicly chastised his fellow industrialists for not doing more to aid the jobless. In the 1918 mayoral campaign, Couzens ran on a platform calling for municipal ownership of the city’s street railway system. To show solidarity with Detroiters struggling in the face of high fares, Couzens boarded a streetcar and refused to pay. Other local citizens followed suit, sparking a wave of confrontations across the city. A number of local executives who opposed municipal ownership of Detroit’s street railways accused Couzens of opportunistic rabble-rousing. Henry Leland and the Detroit Citizens League chose to back another candidate for mayor.5
Still, despite such instances of friction, Couzens and the rest of Detroit’s commercial and industrial elite agreed in a number of realms. Couzens relied heavily on his corporate colleagues for input and advice throughout his term. At times Couzens denounced members of the business-dominated city council when they did not follow his lead, but he and local legislators moved in tandem on most major issues, a pattern that led to accusations in the local press that the city council was merely a rubber stamp for Couzens’s agenda. In fact, Couzens and the city council’s tendency to agree was indicative of a relatively robust consensus among elite Detroiters about what the city needed most.6
Detroit’s population had skyrocketed during the war as the city’s booming economy had drawn ever more people to the city. Between 1910 and 1920, the number of Detroiters grew from 465,766 to 993,768. By 1930, the city would boast 1,568,662 residents. Detroit’s geography was expanding at a similarly rapid pace. Between 1910 and 1920, annexations of nearby territories increased the size of the city from 41 square miles to 78, a number that would continue to grow until the city encompassed 138 square miles in 1930. Most of this new land was undeveloped. The throngs of newcomers who arrived in Detroit during the war and its immediate aftermath continued to crowd into the city’s densely populated core, an increasingly congested island in a sea of open land. Because of a shortage of classrooms, more than fifteen thousand grade-schoolers were able to attend only half-day sessions in 1919. By one account, over half the city’s school-aged children were not in school at all. Reports of crime and juvenile delinquency had increased during the war, a trend that elite Detroiters associated with the population boom and the concomitant shortage of housing, schools, recreational outlets, and other city services. As the Red Scare and militant strikes swept across the country in the wake of the armistice, the anxieties of Detroit’s