To be sure, some of the businessmen who appear in the pages that follow supported social spending just to make a quick buck. Constructing a park, a school, or a museum might drive up the value of property near real estate that a businessman owned. Building the infrastructure to promote residential decentralization might also bring water and sewer services closer to a factory that a particular company—searching for cheaper overhead or a way to expand—had built on the outskirts of town. But reducing the social politics of urban business leaders simply to the immediate economic self-interest of individual businessmen would be misleading. It is one thing for an entrepreneur to advocate constructing a school up the road from land that he owns to boost property values. It is quite another for a diverse assortment of businessmen—including at times fierce economic competitors—to more or less collectively champion a multimillion-dollar renovation of an urban school district or another similarly wide-ranging social initiative, which is precisely what business leaders in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta did repeatedly in the early twentieth century. Simple economic self-interest certainly explains businessmen’s motivations to a degree. But understanding the full scope of urban business leaders’ political activism demands taking their broader political, economic, and ideological concerns seriously as well—a collection of interrelated interests that the concept of the civic welfare state is intended to underscore.
For some businessmen, the struggle to build a civic welfare state and improve the nation’s citizenry was inseparable from another quest: implementing and enforcing regulations on various kinds of personal behavior, like drinking alcohol. But the famous debates that swirled around such proposals in the early twentieth century tended to divide wealthy businessmen more than many other social policy issues. Moguls like John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Henry Ford strongly backed Prohibition, for example, but it was also wealthy businessmen like Pierre DuPont, Henry Joy of Packard, and Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors who led the charge for repeal. Other attempts to regulate personal behavior could breed similar divisions. In urban America, this was in part because the battles that surrounded such efforts could put the two goals at the heart of business leaders’ attempt to build a civic welfare state into direct conflict. Campaigns aimed at shaping the comportment of local citizens by enforcing existing laws or passing new ones frequently entailed widely publicized exposés depicting cities as dens of crime, vice, and political corruption—revelations that threatened to undermine business interests’ simultaneous push to attract new enterprises to their city. For instance, when a group of especially religious business elites spearheaded an attempt to end prostitution in Atlanta on the eve of World War I, it was the local chamber of commerce that took the lead in limiting the crackdown. With police raids and investigations producing embarrassing headlines day after day, the leaders of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce feared that bad press would damage the city’s reputation and become a drag on the local economy.6
Some businessmen persisted in their fight against drinking, gambling, prostitution, and other vices as the early twentieth century progressed. But whether because of the divisions that those efforts tended to breed or due to most businessmen’s personal beliefs, urban business elites’ social policy agenda tended to focus elsewhere by the 1920s, especially on schooling, recreation, public health, urban decentralization, and city planning more generally. These were the issues at the center of Jazz Age businessmen’s campaign for a civic welfare state.
By the end of World War I, urban business leaders’ support for many of the public programs that they would advocate in the 1920s was nothing new. But during the war and its aftermath, the chronic urban crisis that they and other political activists had already been fretting over in the opening decades of the century seemed to take a sudden turn for the worse. Cities grew even more crowded, as migrants poured into urban America searching for work in one of the many industries that boomed during the war. In 1919—the first year following the peace—a wave of race riots, strikes, bombings, and bomb threats swept across urban America. In that year, business leaders in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta called for social spending as arguably never before. But even after the nation had returned to a state of relative calm, elite businessmen in those three cities remained committed to keeping spending levels high. As the 1920s wore on, their reasons for doing so became increasingly tied to the local circumstances that they faced. In Atlanta, the social politics of the city’s white business elite grew ever more linked to local boosterism. In Philadelphia, leading business interests redoubled their push for public spending because their immediate postwar effort had met with disappointment and because the city was slated to host a major international fair that elite businessmen hoped would help reverse the city’s already recognizable economic decline. In Detroit, the success of the auto industry continued to breed rapid urban growth and with it a host of social challenges that local business leaders believed only government could solve.
At the same time, business interests in all three cities proved far more successful at implementing their policy agenda in the 1920s than they had been in the years leading up to the war. In some cities, like Detroit, this was because business leaders had managed to restructure local government in ways that overwhelmingly favored the wealthy. Elsewhere, businessmen’s heightened desire for government growth prodded them to forge new alliances and to reorient their political priorities. In Philadelphia, frustration with political gridlock encouraged local business leaders to overcome their own internal divisions and motivated prominent businessmen who had formerly opposed Philadelphia’s corrupt political machine to increasingly make peace with its tactics. In Atlanta, the city’s white business leaders—who tended to view African Americans as political subjects, not citizens—generally sought to exclude African Americans from the benefits of the civic welfare state that they hoped to build. And yet on multiple occasions, members of Atlanta’s white business elite were forced to make concessions to a small group of African Americans, who despite being disfranchised in most regards still retained the right to vote in special elections, including the bond referenda that white business leaders needed to win in order to finance the government expansion that they so desired.
In the end, these two overarching developments—elite businessmen’s heightened commitment to social spending and their enhanced political efficacy—had major consequences for urban policy. Public spending surged in all three cities as local officials funneled money toward social initiatives that urban business leaders favored. Detroit’s budget was 340 percent larger in 1929 adjusted for inflation than it had been just before the United States entered the war. All of this growth took place after the armistice.7 Atlanta’s budget grew by 134 percent in the same period and Philadelphia’s by 75 percent. In all three cities spending expanded far faster than the local population. Detroit spent 58 percent more per person at the end of the 1920s than it had just before the United States declared war, again adjusted for inflation. Philadelphia spent 51 percent more per person and Atlanta 60 percent.8
These figures are all the more impressive because they exclude the costs that governments paid to finance their debts. If those sums were included, the growth of government spending would appear even higher. Cities across the country borrowed with abandon in the 1920s. Detroit’s municipal debt grew by over 700 percent. Philadelphia’s and Atlanta’s each rose by over 200 percent. In all three cities, businessmen called loudly and frequently for debt spending. Indeed, buying now and paying later was elite businessmen’s favorite method for financing the major projects that they advocated.9
Even so, commercial and industrial