In addition to reconfiguring the city council, the new charter replaced the three-member commissions that had previously administered local affairs with streamlined departments whose heads were appointed by the mayor. It transformed the city’s art museum into a municipal entity, thus opening the way for a new building financed by taxpayer dollars. Finally, the charter put the mayor and city council in charge of all city expenditures, free from the oversight of the old board of estimates.25
One modification that the city charter did not make was reforming the city’s school system—a cause that Detroit’s business leaders also embraced in the years leading up to the war. The main thrust of businessmen’s involvement in Detroit’s educational politics before World War I had less to do with implementing specific policies or expanding local facilities, as it would in the 1920s. Rather, business leaders’ primary concern was ridding the school system of ward politics. Their effort paralleled their campaign to redesign the city government more generally, although in the case of school reform businessmen largely followed the lead of female activists in the city, especially members of the Detroit Federation of Women’s Clubs, who in turn mobilized behind a wealthy Detroiter named Laura Osborn.
A committed prohibitionist, Osborn shared Henry Leland’s distaste for the Voteswappers and denounced their influence on the city’s schools. Married to a successful businessman and listed in the city’s social register, she joined many of her wealthy peers in fearing the growing political power of Detroit’s increasingly immigrant working class. In 1913, Osborn and two male collaborators—an executive at Detroit Edison and a professor at the University of Michigan—convinced state legislators to pass a law restructuring how the city’s school district was governed. The Detroit Citizens League and the Detroit Board of Commerce strongly supported the measure, which abolished the existing ward-based school board and replaced it with a much smaller body composed of six members chosen in citywide elections. Opponents of the new law mounted a series of legal challenges that stopped its implementation for several years. Finally, in November 1916, legislators asked Detroit’s electorate to weigh in. In the lead-up to the referendum, the Detroit Federation of Women’s Clubs waged an extensive campaign with the strong support of the Detroit Board of Commerce and the Detroit Citizens League. The measure carried in 284 of the city’s 285 precincts. As in the battle to revise the city charter, wealthy elites led the campaign to reform Detroit’s school system, but their success depended on widespread disenchantment with the status quo.26
In driving the Voteswappers out of school politics, however, Detroiters opened the door for another clique to run the city’s schools, much as they did when they rubber-stamped the Citizens League’s charter proposals. Elite businessmen in Detroit failed to realize most of their social policy goals in the years before the armistice. But by successfully transforming how city officials were elected, they established the groundwork for their future political dominance. It was an outcome that business leaders in Philadelphia would have envied.
Stuck in the Gears of the World’s Workshop
“Corrupt and contended”: that was how muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens characterized politics in Philadelphia in 1903. Few statements about the city are more famous. And yet Steffens was only partially right. A crooked political machine aligned with the Republican Party dominated Philadelphia’s political scene in the opening decades of the century. But the city was also home to a committed municipal reform movement composed of “independent” Republicans who repeatedly tried to loosen the machine’s hold on power. First, in 1905, independents helped galvanize public protest to thwart an especially brazen attempt by machine politicians to line their pockets with public funds. Then, in 1911, independent reformers exploited divisions within the machine’s ranks and elected their own handpicked candidate for mayor. Finally, in 1919, independents took advantage of yet another conflict within the Republican machine and won a revised city charter that made a number of alterations to Philadelphia’s political structure.27
Corruption may have been at the center of Philadelphia’s political environment, but contentment simply was not. Independents—including the many elite businessmen in their midst—were obviously among the most disillusioned with local affairs. But the city’s business community in general had other reasons to gripe. Attempting to shape public policy within such a divided and scandal-ridden political environment was a regular source of frustration. On multiple occasions, progress on some of local business elites’ most cherished policy goals stalled after they became focal points in the ongoing struggle between the city’s bosses and independent reformers.
Understanding this pattern requires making peace with a tension. Throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, leading businessmen in Philadelphia agreed on a number of fronts, such as the need to rebuild parts of Philadelphia following City Beautiful ideals. Nonetheless, the city’s business elite was deeply divided when it came to other issues, most of all the question of who should run the government and how. On one side of this conflict stood some of the wealthiest men in Philadelphia (and, in fact, the nation), most notably Peter A. B. Widener. In the late nineteenth century, Widener, along with fellow Philadelphians William L. Elkins, William H. Kemble, and Thomas Dolan, had built corporate monopolies that controlled gas, electric, and street railway systems in a number of cities across the country, including in their hometown. In Philadelphia, Widener and his colleagues’ economic success had depended on their close ties to machine politicians in the Republican Party—state and local bosses who had helped Widener and his allies win the franchises and other legislation necessary to construct their utility empires.28
By the turn of the century, Philadelphia’s Republican machine was more centralized and disciplined than ever before. A local politician named Israel “Iz” Durham had recently restructured the city’s Republican organization to cut down on intraparty strife. Backed by state party boss Matthew Quay, Durham had successfully maneuvered to gain control of the party’s central body, the Republican City Committee. Durham had changed party rules so that he and his closest allies picked the committee’s membership. He then put committee members first in line for lucrative patronage posts to ensure their loyalty. Durham also succeeded in giving the Republican City Committee the power to credential the delegates who nominated candidates for local office.29 According to one observer, once a candidate won Durham’s backing, he could skip the party’s nominating convention. Instead, he could go off and “rusticate in Florida or luxuriate at the Hot Springs,” confident that his nomination was assured.30
Whether or not Durham’s power ever reached such proportions, the more influence Durham gained, the more party regulars lined up behind him. The number of factions within Philadelphia’s Republican organization dwindled. Durham and state boss Matthew Quay never enjoyed absolute authority over Philadelphia’s political machine. Nor did their successors, “Sunny Jim” McNichol (who replaced Durham after his retirement in 1906) and U.S. Senator Boies Penrose (who assumed leadership of the state Republican Party after Quay’s death in 1904). McNichol and Penrose especially struggled to control George, William, and Edwin Vare, three brothers who held a tight grip on politics in Philadelphia’s southern neighborhoods. In the late nineteenth century, the Vares started a family business hauling refuse and ashes in an impoverished South Philadelphia neighborhood known as “the Neck.” Over time they built a multimillion-dollar contracting business that performed sanitation and construction work for the city as well as for local companies. The Vares used their profits and their connections to city government to establish a formidable political organization allied with the Republican Party that increasingly controlled South Philadelphia. Durham, Penrose, and McNichol usually collaborated with the Vares. Sporadically, however, the two factions tried to outmaneuver one another. Still, such conflicts played out within a local Republican Party that was more centralized than ever before thanks to Durham’s innovations.31
Widener and the city’s other utility owners had supported this process of party consolidation. Cutting down on rivalries within the Republican Party promised Widener and his colleagues a more predictable legislative process. Utility companies depended on public franchises, and