At Cross Purposes

      Businessmen’s Political Activism Before the Armistice

      Urban business leaders advocated social spending in a number of areas in the early years of the twentieth century. They lobbied for the expansion and improvement of local school systems. They joined and often led campaigns to construct municipal playgrounds and to improve local health conditions. At their most ambitious, they called for an extensively remodeled city, the “City Beautiful,” an urban form designed to include elaborate and interconnected systems of parks and parkways as well as grandiose civic centers featuring ornate city halls, museums, and public libraries. In many cases, business elites hoped to erect these structures on some of urban America’s most valuable real estate, stretches of land already occupied by factories, stores, and homes.

      Yet whether their plans were bold or modest, pricey or inexpensive, businessmen frequently stumbled in their attempt to implement them in the years preceding World War I. In Detroit, local business leaders’ political influence was remarkably limited at the time, a trend that encouraged their involvement in another effort: the so-called municipal reform movement, or the attempt to revamp the basic structure of city government through reforms like expanding the reach of the civil service or abolishing ward-based elections in favor of citywide contests. Municipal reformers generally hoped that such measures would weaken local political machines or dilute the strength of the working-class vote.¹

      Business leaders in Atlanta and Philadelphia were also involved in the municipal reform movement. In fact, in both cities businessmen’s support for municipal reform was a root cause of their troubles when it came to shaping local social policy before the war. In Atlanta, business leaders struggled to pull off a nearly impossible about-face—a pivot from denouncing local officials as incompetent and even corrupt when advocating municipal reform to pleading that voters give those same officials more money to spend when championing social spending. In Philadelphia, a handful of especially wealthy businessmen were the principal beneficiaries and even sponsors of the entrenched political machine that other leading businessmen in the city who were bent on municipal reform hoped to dislodge. On multiple occasions, public projects that Philadelphia’s commercial and industrial elite almost unanimously favored stalled because of local business leaders’ infighting over boss rule.

      The tensions that riddled campaigns for municipal reform in cities like Philadelphia and Atlanta compounded the commonplace obstacles that might hinder any call for expensive public projects: the process of gaining eminent domain; legal controversies surrounding government jurisdiction; the architectural and structural problems inherent in planning large-scale public works, not to mention the main challenge that business leaders in Detroit faced—enlisting the support of local officials and the public in the first place. Commercial and industrial elites in different cities confronted varying combinations of these and other dynamics. But the effects were often similar. When it came to shaping local social policy in the years leading up to World War I, urban business leaders notched a record that was far more mixed than the one they would achieve after the armistice.

       Struggling to Steer the New Motor City

      In the opening years of the twentieth century, the rise of the automobile industry remade Detroit. In 1904, the city was home to an unremarkable smattering of manufacturing enterprises that employed just over sixty thousand workers. By the time the United States entered World War I, the auto industry alone employed twice that many, roughly 40 percent of the total number of factory workers in the city. The rest of Detroit’s industrial workforce toiled in one of the city’s many other manufacturing firms—building furnaces, producing chemicals, rolling cigars, or processing meat. Detroit was not a one-industry town, but auto manufacturing alone made the city an industrial powerhouse in a stunningly brief interval. In 1900—on the eve of the auto industry’s first major growth spurt—Detroit ranked sixteenth among American cities in terms of industrial output. By 1914, it ranked fourth.²

      The rise of auto manufacturing produced a new group of tycoons. These men eventually displaced the merchants and manufacturers who had made their fortunes in pre-automotive Detroit as the vanguard of the city’s business elite. And yet this process was more amicable than one might expect. Detroiters who traced their wealth back to the city’s old nineteenth-century economy—rooted in the production of railcars and stoves, in lumber, and in mining—were among the first investors in the city’s fledgling car shops. Many of them profited from the car boom and quickly gleaned the importance of building strong social, political, and economic ties to the city’s newest moguls. Soon, recently flush automobile executives and the city’s old business leaders were comfortably hobnobbing together at Detroit’s toniest social clubs and serving alongside one another on various corporate boards. By 1916, the names of a number of the city’s new automobile magnates appeared alongside those of Detroit’s most established families in Dau’s Blue Book, essentially a who’s who of the local upper crust. Despite the almost revolutionary transformation of Detroit’s economy, the city’s new and established barons were coalescing into a relatively coherent business class.³

      There was one important exception to this trend: Henry Ford. Members of Detroit’s pre-automotive elite had invested in Ford’s early companies, but Ford’s first venture flopped, and investors pushed him out of his second when he refused to embrace their vision for the firm. Even after Ford had become an unparalleled success, he remained at odds with many of his corporate colleagues. His competitors were furious when he announced the five-dollar day in 1914, fearing wage inflation throughout the city. They ridiculed his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I. When Ford endorsed the reelection campaign of Democratic president Woodrow Wilson in 1916, members of Detroit’s solidly Republican business elite jeered. Perhaps taking the hint—or maybe out of spite—Henry Ford’s involvement in local politics grew increasingly sporadic.⁴

      Other car executives, by contrast, grew all the more involved in local affairs. In the run-up to World War I, leaders of the automobile industry took charge of the local business community’s most prominent civic organizations. Between 1911 and America’s entry into the war, the presidents of the Detroit Board of Commerce were all in car manufacturing. Representatives of the auto industry also dominated the organization’s directorate. Meanwhile, auto executives like Hugh Chalmers of Chalmers Motor Company, F. F. Beall of Packard, and A. L. McMeans of Dodge took the helm of the Detroit Employers’ Association, the corporate elite’s organizational base for waging war on local unions.⁵

      It was also one of the city’s most successful carmakers, Henry Leland, who established the civic organization that spearheaded the municipal reform movement in Detroit, including the attempt to reconfigure the city’s basic political structure by revising Detroit’s city charter. Born in 1843 in Vermont, Leland came of age as the industrial revolution was spreading through New England. In his early professional years, he gained a hands-on education as a toolmaker and machinist working in factories throughout the Northeast. In 1890, Leland established a new enterprise in Detroit, where he quickly earned a reputation as an exceptional engineer. When Henry Ford’s second company began to struggle in 1902, investors