In other cities, public spending followed a similar trajectory. Los Angeles’s budget grew by nearly 300 percent between 1916 and 1929 adjusted for inflation with virtually all of this growth following the war. New York’s budget nearly doubled. Chicago’s rose by 85 percent and Birmingham’s by 250 percent. Whether in these cities or elsewhere, increased social spending drove a significant portion of this growth. Overall in the nation’s largest cities—those with populations over three hundred thousand—spending per person on schooling rose 73 percent between 1916 and 1929 adjusted for inflation; on recreational programs spending grew 72 percent; on libraries, 47 percent; on hospitals, 44 percent; on sewer systems, 30 percent; and on other facets of public health, 45 percent.
In fact, the pace of government growth was far higher in the 1920s than it had been earlier in the century in many American cities. Spending per person actually decreased by 5 percent between 1904 and 1916 in cities with populations over three hundred thousand adjusted for inflation. By contrast, in a similar twelve-year increment, between 1916 and 1928, spending per person rose 55 percent, again with all of this growth following World War I. Historians tend to treat the first two decades of the twentieth century as more significant than the 1920s in terms of government development. The prewar years were clearly a moment of great policy innovation in urban America, but it was the 1920s that saw the most local government growth.10
Table 1. Rate of Growth in Urban Government Spending Per Capita Before and After World War I
Note: Of the twenty-one cities with populations over 300,000 in 1920, sixteen experienced a higher rate of growth in government spending per capita adjusted for inflation between 1916 and 1928 than between 1904 and 1916. The specific cities listed above are those that had populations over 300,000 in 1920 as well the three largest southern cities after New Orleans (the only southern city with a population greater than 300,000 in 1920). Cities are listed in order of population size.
Source: Financial Statistics of Cities Having a Population of over 30,000
It will take more than this one study to unearth the politics that drove these trends in the wide variety of cities that experienced them. In taking the first steps toward that end, this book aims to strike a balance. Instead of digging deeply into the experience of just one city, as so many urban histories do, or touching superficially on a large number, it strives to offer an account that is detailed enough to reflect the unique political environments of individual cities while also shedding light on how various trends played out across urban America’s diverse political terrain.
Indeed, by the early twentieth century, American cities were so complex that a historian has to make difficult choices about which facets of that complexity to examine most closely. Following the lead of some of the most influential recent scholarship on American politics, this book especially scrutinizes how local laws and political institutions—from city charters and local political parties to the rules governing municipal spending—shaped urban politics. At the same time, however, the pages that follow seek to remedy shortcomings in that very same body of scholarship. The researchers who first highlighted the importance of such a “state-centered” approach to studying American politics did so in part by critiquing earlier writing on the history of American social policy—specifically on the social welfare state as defined above—that had vastly overstated the role of business interests in propelling that history.11 Despite their contributions on that front, authors working in this vein have tended to underplay the degree to which businessmen encouraged the development of other facets of American social policy in the early twentieth century, such as public schooling, public recreation, city planning, and the other urban programs that are the main focus here. Thus, whenever possible, this book attempts to underscore how local laws and political institutions—combined with the contingencies of history, shifts in businessmen’s political priorities and strategies, and variations in the respective interests and tactics of other political groups—allowed business interests to propel the development of American social policy to an unrivaled degree in certain places and at certain times.12
Hence the choice of Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta: by the 1920s, these cities typified some of the main political regimes that were prevalent in urban America at the time—the machine-dominated city (Philadelphia); the politically reformed, largely machine-free city (Detroit); and finally the city of widespread disfranchisement (Atlanta). Taken together, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta also offer the opportunity to examine a broad assortment of political actors, from professional politicians to grassroots groups. Finally, these three cities featured sharply different economies and economic histories. By the 1920s, Philadelphia was a long-established manufacturing hub that was home to an eclectic collection of factories of widely varying sizes in predominantly older industries. Detroit, by contrast, exemplified the new mass-production economy that had emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century and, unlike 1920s Philadelphia, was a boomtown that featured a single dominant industry. Finally, Atlanta was still primarily a commercial depot—a town with only a fledgling manufacturing sector but with great regional strength in banking, insurance, and the distribution of agricultural commodities—and a city whose economic development still largely lay in the future. Trying to identify a set of places that can fully capture the complexity of urban America in the early twentieth century is a fool’s errand. Still, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta reflect a great deal of that complexity and do so more efficiently than most.
A note on terminology before proceeding: readers attuned to how historians have written about American politics in the early twentieth century might notice the absence thus far of the terms “progressive” and “progressivism,” concepts that appear frequently in accounts of the era. I avoid using those terms for a number of reasons, most of all because they have been notoriously difficult for historians to define. This is not to say they are bereft of utility. But historians’ lengthy search for the essence of progressivism and for the true identity of the progressives has suggested that both concepts are best suited for painting with broad brushstrokes, not for the pointillism that a nuanced political history demands. They help evoke a complex era in U.S. history when the nation “swam in a sudden abundance” of policy choices, but their usefulness quickly fades when one attempts to differentiate between what the various political actors who waded in those waters—often with wildly different interests, intentions, and visions of reform—respectively chose and why.13 Nor is it particularly useful to characterize the businessmen who appear in the pages that follow as “corporate liberals”—another term that historians have employed from time to time—because the broad contours of their social politics did not foreshadow (let alone help to constitute) the social politics that would make New Deal liberalism distinct, as the concept “corporate liberalism” tends to imply when used in the context of social policy.14
Rather, as the Great Depression was approaching and the New Deal lay just around the bend, business leaders in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta had chosen a reformist path that they hoped would lead in a very different direction—a social politics that they believed would bolster their political and economic standing rather than set limits on corporate power as New Deal liberalism in part would do. That said, businessmen’s political activism prior to the 1930s did help encourage the coming of the New Deal. But as this book’s final pages detail, this was largely by accident, not by design.
The early twentieth century was an exceptionally rich political moment, a reformist age that encompassed the 1920s as much as the decades that surrounded