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Gavin Wright, Daniel Amsterdam. Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1641–1642, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1641
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In Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State, historian Daniel Amsterdam seeks to augment the literature on welfare capitalism during the 1920s by recounting the role of business elites in campaigns for civic betterment in three cities: Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. The book is largely non-quantitative, consisting mainly of detailed political histories, drawing upon extensive archival sources. The central theme is that employer efforts to build a stable, productive, non-union workforce through personnel policies were complemented by a local political agenda that Amsterdam calls the “civic welfare state”: schools, public health, parks, and other urban amenities.
The political narratives make clear that implementation of this program was not clear sailing for elites anywhere. Detroit’s automobile executives had the greatest success—with little help from the idiosyncratic Henry Ford—through Henry M. Leland and the Detroit Citizen’s League (17–19). Even here, voters rejected the expensive subway plan that corporate Detroiters favored (81). In Philadelphia, elites succeeded only through an alliance with the old-line Republican machine, and their prioritized 1926 sesquicentennial fair, for which the city reclaimed an enormous swampy area, proved to be a “colossal flop” (101). Atlanta’s business elite had similar goals but labored under the self-imposed handicap of prior commitment to low taxes as a way of attracting new firms to the city. In the decade following World War I, only two of six business-backed bond issues were approved by voters, and Atlanta’s public spending per person in 1929 was only half that of Detroit (143).
