With political opposition growing, supporters of the library project shifted tacks. They began lobbying for an appropriation from the city itself, all the while hoping to take advantage of Carnegie’s offer at a later date. In 1902, Detroiters were asked to approve a $500,000 bond issue to fund construction. The bond issue passed, but the library project immediately hit another roadblock. Members of the city’s board of estimates—who met to review the city’s budget just once a year and had a reputation for knee-jerk parsimony—agreed to appropriate only $150,000 of the approved funds. The library commission refused to accept the lower amount out of principle and thus received nothing. In 1904, leaders of the Detroit Board of Commerce floated another proposal for the library only to have the city council reject it. Years later, despite ongoing pressure from local business leaders, city officials had yet to accept Carnegie’s donation or to provide significant funding on their own. Finally, in 1910, with organized labor and other detractors no longer actively opposing the project, the city agreed to appropriate enough money for Detroit to accept the Carnegie funds. The secretary of the Detroit Board of Commerce, Charles B. Sawyer, traveled to Pittsburgh (Carnegie’s hometown) and helped finalize the deal.17
Even with Carnegie’s money in hand, however, progress on the library remained glacially slow. Some of the delays were inevitable. It took time, for instance, to select an architectural plan. Still, public officials did not start construction until 1915—five full years after the city had finally accepted Carnegie’s gift. Then, just months after the city had broken ground, building ceased when local officials failed to appropriate enough money to keep work going. For well over a year, the unfinished building stood as “a gaunt, naked skeleton of steel against the sky” and as a testament to business elites’ political inefficacy. Thereafter, World War I brought further delays.18
Business leaders’ attempt to build a new home for the city’s art museum was just as fraught. At the time, the museum was a private entity, but the wealthy businessmen who dominated its board wanted taxpayers to foot the bill for the new building. The Detroit Museum of Art was founded in the 1880s under the leadership of wealthy newspaper publisher James Scripps, a Scripps employee named William H. Brearley, and Thomas W. Palmer, a lumber magnate who also served as U.S. senator. By the early 1890s, the museum’s board had convinced city officials to appropriate several thousand dollars to the museum each year. Even so, the city charter capped the amount of funding that public officials could give: $20,000 annually for operating costs. City officials could appropriate additional funds to the museum “from time to time” for special construction projects, but the city council was prohibited from spending more than $50,000 in bond revenue on the museum. Led by cultural center booster William Weber and Dexter M. Ferry Jr. (a wealthy corporate executive and heir to his father’s seed distribution company), the museum’s trustees wanted to build a monumental structure that would cost far more.19
But their attempt to win public funding for the project would backfire. The city’s corporation counsel objected to the plan, contending that the city did not have the right under state law to offer additional funds to the museum. In a 1915 test case designed to settle the matter, the Michigan Supreme Court agreed. Moreover, much to the surprise of the museum’s trustees, the court outlawed all municipal appropriations to the museum and other private institutions like it. According to the court, even the funding practices outlined under the existing city charter were unconstitutional. For local officials to finance construction of a new building, the museum would have to become a municipally owned entity.20
Business leaders also hoped to increase the number of parks and playgrounds in the city, but their efforts fell short on this front as well. In 1913, leaders of the Detroit Board of Commerce hired Rowland Haynes, field secretary of the Playground and Recreation Association of America (PRAA), to survey the city and make recommendations for improving its recreational facilities. PRAA officials were leading proponents of the theory that playgrounds—when supervised by municipal employees who could oversee and coordinate children’s play—were singularly promising tools for addressing a host of urban problems. It might seem like an oddly utopian notion in retrospect, but a number of the most influential urban reformers in the early twentieth century agreed. Housing reformer Lawrence Veiller, social activist Jane Addams, and U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt were all strong supporters of the movement, while the muckraker Jacob Riis spoke of playgrounds as one of the most important “counterinfluences to the saloon, street gang, and similar evils.”21
Figure 2. This photograph appeared in the November 1913 issue of the Detroit Board of Commerce’s magazine, the Detroiter, amid the board of commerce’s prewar campaign for supervised playgrounds. Courtesy of Baker Old Class Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.
As for the Detroit Board of Commerce, its members seemed especially sold on the sections of Rowland Haynes’s report that argued that play, when supervised by trained adults, could prevent juvenile delinquency and promote good citizenship, particularly among idle boys. As a representative of the Detroit Board of Commerce argued in the organization’s monthly magazine, children were like “an unfinished product,” and wholesome recreation was a crucial input in their development. “The caliber of our future citizens depends largely upon the boys of today,” the author warned. Without playgrounds, the “animal spirits” of local boys were turning toward other “natural outlets,” such as “neighborhood gangs, petty thieving,” and similar “depredations.”22
Haynes’s report also emphasized the need for a centralized body charged with coordinating recreational initiatives in the city. The board of commerce convinced local officials to establish one in 1914. A leader of the board of commerce’s recreation campaign even headed the new commission. But the bulk of businessmen’s vision for the city’s recreation system remained unfulfilled. In the spring of 1915, the board of estimates declined to appropriate funding for social centers in the city, an initiative that the board of commerce had backed. Moreover, it granted only $15,000 in bonds for purchasing land for new playgrounds even though the board of commerce had wanted much more.23
Thus, whether they were lobbying for playgrounds or attempting to build a new library and museum, business leaders in Detroit were reminded that they lacked the political influence that they desired. Charter reform promised to give it to them. Above all, Henry Leland and his corporate brethren sought to implement a charter that would abolish Detroit’s ward-based city council and replace it with a much smaller, nine-member body that the electorate would choose as a whole. As Leland and his allies well knew, citywide elections strongly favored wealthy or well-funded candidates who could afford to wage extensive advertising campaigns. The city’s largest union, the Detroit Federation of Labor, immediately recognized the proposal as a power grab and opposed it, arguing that workers would lose their voice in city hall without their ward representatives. But other Detroiters viewed the matter differently. Tired of inefficiencies and the potential for corruption in Detroit’s existing political system, multiple Polish newspapers endorsed Leland and the Citizens League’s proposed charter, as did newspapers in the city’s Jewish and Italian communities. A local African American newspaper came out in favor of the business-backed charter as well, contending that citywide elections would allow African Americans to vote as a bloc instead of having their votes split among different wards. Placing the charter question on the ballot required gathering thirteen thousand signatures on a petition. The Citizens League and its allies managed to collect eighteen thousand in short order in part because major employers like Ford, Packard, and Cadillac allowed representatives of the Citizens League to solicit signatures from employees in their plants. A significant number of these workers no doubt signed because their bosses made clear that they were expected to do so. Still, evidence suggests that Detroiters from all walks of life supported the Citizens League’s proposals. When the electorate voted on the new charter