Big City Policy Systems Adjust to Working Class Participation
An important reason that Big City urban policy systems are usually characterized as modern by the 1920’s was that lower and working class Big City residents had matured and were autonomously participating in elections and therefore the policy system. This had been increasingly true since the turn of the century. No longer were municipal policy systems the near-exclusive preserve of business and the upper classes. Progressive Age working class participation typically was top-down, through traditional business elites (social reform mayors, for example), with the occasional socialist political party tossed in. Political machines/bosses complicated the picture, but where machines were strong, they increasingly allied with business elements, at least until the mid-twenties.
In either case, the Big City policy agenda was heavily impacted by working class priorities. More often than not, that agenda was internally inconsistent and ran into practical difficulties. The 1920’s policy process that followed was frustrating, inconsistent and uneven. What had previously been a strong commitment to economic development-related initiatives and strategies, however, was replaced by working class social and economic issues, the latter often submerged in union-related activities. Where economic development, infrastructure and chamber-style economic development, was prioritized in the Gilded Age, and physical redevelopment in the Progressive Age, by the Twenties economic development lost a great deal of its priority intensity. Though it appears that much “building” and infrastructure was “completed” during the Twenties, a great deal of it was the last phases of the City Beautiful/City Efficient –infrastructure compelled by congestion caused by the automobile.
Accordingly, there was an obvious need to devise “structures” through which the working classes could participate in the policy process. A political party was one, a political boss (with or without a “machine”) and charismatic/populist mayors were others. Unions were certainly a third alternative. Participation in the municipal policy system meant accommodating a different set of issues and value priorities. Hard as it may be for many to accept, business elites were more “Progressive” than the working class. Business classes were split badly in how they viewed immigrants, their cultures, and their issue priorities—but a significant wing of the business class not only accepted fundamental elements of the Progressive political culture, but embraced them and actively sought their approval and implementation.
The working classes, however, were, if only because of their strained household and economic situation were considerably more individualistic, Privatist, aspirational (through personal achievement), and motivated, often negatively by social and demographic groups than Progressive communitarians. Working class used alcohol and flaunted their “entertainment” tastes in ways seldom appreciated by traditional middle class and the general business community. During Prohibition, alcohol, and the mobsters and bootleggers associated with it, played a meaningful role in working class life styles and policy priorities.
Prohibition was the dominant social issue of the day. Originally, Prohibition had been a Yankee (and Progressive) issue (the Carrie Nation hatchet era), but by the early twentieth century it had gotten comingled with fundamental Protestant evangelism, anti immigrant, anti-city, and anti-crime[1] emotions. Prohibition undermined anti-municipal corruption efforts, corrupting police, and fostering lax anti-crime criminal justice efforts. Prohibition attitudes frequently ignored my Progressive/Privatist definitions mixing up classes and political cultures. The middle class generally perceived Prohibition in terms of the maintenance of proper social order, cultural stability and anti-crime/corruption.
The working class did not. Ethnic lifestyles revolved around neighborhood bars, card-playing, having a drink; the typical mobster was a working class entrepreneur—not necessarily a law-breaker. In its own way, and this may be stretching it, Prohibition included a little slice of economic development in that slums, immigrant lifestyles, residential patterns, and individual economic growth and social integration seemed to many to be linked to the responsible use of alcohol—sort of how many today view “drugs” such as marihuana (prompting marihuana entrepreneurs). We do ourselves a disservice to think of 1920’s Prohibition as “Carrie Nation with a hatchet” rather than a cultural divide between immigrants and Protestant nativist. There was a cultural divide during these years—and the municipal policy cycle had to accommodate it.
So old style city growth and urban competitive hierarchy attitudes abated during these years. Social (including racial) concerns were elevated. Working class tastes seldom included dour businessmen, and Donald Trump style outrageous populism stirred the juices. The middle class usually took its politics and policy straight; the working class watered it down with a bit of anti-authoritarianism and fun. In any case, the arrival of a modern municipal policy system came at a time when economic development was less highly placed on the municipal agenda than social and cultural issues. More deserving of our Roaring Twenties attention, however, is to trace the development of working class-related policy“ structures” that the newly arrived working classes would use to participate in their municipal policy system. If so, then (1) unions and (2) a new-style political machine located within a city-wide political party apparatus and dominated by an elected mayor should be discussed.
Accordingly, in line with its reduced priority, economic development rides in the back seat of this topic section. The next topic area, however, will focus totally on economic development in this period. It is more important at this point to understand the policy systems and political actors which developed to accommodate the working classes into Big City policy systems and so the next section will consider the union movement in terms of how the business elites dealt with unions. For us, the importance of unions as policy actors is not limited to unions being a vehicle for working class participation in urban policy-making, or a workforce issue as to how labor inputs affect the jurisdictional economic base and municipal GNP, but rather how unions divided the American business elites—a division which continues to the present day.
The remainder of this section will include several case studies that provide insight into what most, certainly many, Big Cities were going through during the Twenties. Chicago is the obvious choice—and our most developed case study. We will also return to Minneapolis and St Paul, and take a peek at Jersey City and Frank Sprague. Our case studies frequently start in the last years of the Progressive Age, more precisely the World War I years, and will overlap into the first years of the Depression—topics don’t always fit neatly into our decade approach.
.
A Fault Line Emerges: Business Elites Confront Working Class Unions
The issue at hand is not difficult to understand. With the rise of unions, corporate elite consensus collapsed. Many business leaders did not want to share control of their corporations or their position in the urban policy system—others did, at least in a muted form. Some corporate executives thought unions were great, in somebody else’s corporation—but not theirs. Others believed maintenance of the social order required some form of unions and some access to policy systems. In an important way, these corporate elites redefined our Progressivism-imbuing it with a policy position which continues to the present day. Over the previous generation, businesses and businessmen had dominated both the urban policy system and the urban policy culture. But not after 1920 or so.
Politics and the business policy culture had badly fractured during the Progressive Era. The one per center, the top commercial mangers, the professional business class, and the “small (but still quite large) regional manufacturer” had spite into polarized, and frequently warring opponents. Each held a different perspective in regards to a newly emerging force in business, the economy, the jurisdictional economic base, and the urban policy system: the union. Before we describe how business elites adjusted to working class unions, therefore, it is necessary to spend a moment to update the reader on how our policy cultures, Progressivism in particular, affected our newly emerging modern urban policy systems. The brief update is an important update, critical to the reader’s future understanding of how political culture affects our modern day economic development policy-making.
Throughout the previous chapters, the reader may have discerned one important element of our political culture model: that political cultures are maintained and preserved through the inertia of structures such as form of government, state constitutions, Dillon’s Law, judicial interpretations, and the legacy of EDO-structures (such as chambers), and tools. Perhaps less obvious, was that political culture entered policy making through the attitudes, values, and priorities of the elites that played in the urban policy system playground. Most notable, to this point of course, to the urban policy system and economic development policy-making of the elites have been the varieties of business elites which evolved over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
That is about to change; working class structures are now trying to turn what had been a “bit part” into a major role of urban policy-making. The various business elite segments had to fight or adjust to this insurgency. Many of those that eventually adjusted to unions and working class participation in policy-making wound up redefining a more secular, business-perspective approach to our Progressive political culture. Likewise, many of those that choose to fight in the Twenties, continue to do so by passing right to work laws—a Privatist solution. Unions, and how to deal with them, became a fault line in our bi-polar policy cultures—and that fault line really took form during the Twenties.
Throughout this volume, the various sub-categories of business elites have been touched on and some explanation provided on how several gravitated into EDO’s and affected the policy system. Too many readers, especially those whose views of capitalism are quite negative, i.e. tending socialist, these distinctions and business sub-types are not of particular value. All money is green and all capitalists are more or less equally bad. The system has to be replaced. Obviously, that is not the position taken in this trilogy.
The business community, I have repeatedly proclaimed, is not monolithic—never really has been—and those distinctions are going to be really important to the urban and economic development policy systems in the remaining two volumes. As interesting to our history is that some business elements will gravitate over time to higher levels of government, only intermittedly active in local affairs—the one per centers, for example. Regional corporate elites, professionals and business sector elites (real estate, for example), and jurisdiction-bound small business elites will replace them. The configuration (i.e. diversity within) the local economic base (for example service, technology or manufacturing sectors) will also flavor the jurisdictional policy process. In short, the distinctions within the business community will play a very vital role in future volumes of this trilogy. The Twenties is when these business distinctions acquire a distinctly modern configuration.
The Fledgling Origins of Modern Segmented Business Elites
This is not intended to be a detailed history of unionization, the liberal state—or anything else other than economic development. And in this section we are not directly addressing economic development per se. This topic-section deals with how the business community dealt with unions during the Twenties and how that business community fragmented into segments that, in some form, continued for the next one hundred years. In fragmenting, the business community redefined our two policy cultures, created huge variation among urban/municipal/state policy systems, and crystallized into our “two ships” passing in the night—the current state of economic development as I write this chapter.
Whether they liked it or respected it, business elites appreciated that government and public policy impacted their profits, their firms, and in the 1920’s their manufacturing employees. That is why during the Progressive Era, business elites of all types modernized their cities, upgraded their infrastructure, and reformed, by adding capacity and competence, the municipal and state policy systems. The Great White City, City Beautiful, the City Efficient and the City Manager/Commission movements were business-led largely Progressive Era that created the modern policy system. Now business had to adjust to working class participation and unions in their firms. Unionization struck at the core of the industrial city’s economic base; unionization affected manufacturing firms mostly—the now very mature, Stage 2 and sometimes Stage 3, former gazelles of the 1890’s. Service sector, and finance sectors were marginally affected, and were usually by-standers in the struggle we are about to describe.
Business, usually dependent on their sector, size and market area wanted different things from government—and since not all levels of government could provide what each segmented wanted, business segments gradually gravitated to the level of government most useful to their purposes. This had already been happening since 1900 when the U.S. Chamber, National Association of Manufacturers and numerous other groups had formed in Washington D.C. Naturally, the largest firms whose market areas crossed interstate boundaries were drawn to the federal government. So the clear tendency of the one per cent and the top corporate managers of these firms was away from local policy systems to the federal government—most dealt with the states only to the extent they needed to—why bother with the middle man. Oligarchies were forming as consolidation and mergers were widespread during the decade. Our profit-cycle model is slowly becoming more salient to our policy system.
As we have already discussed, new business elites acquired control of chambers and infused municipal policy systems. One of the bigger “cheeses” in the new municipal policy system was the regional, usually branch, basic materials, durable and consumer goods manufacturing firms that populated the industrial base of the industrial city—especially in the northern/midwestern region hegemony. The new gazelles of the Era (automotive-related) were also important. During the Twenties, these were the firms most directly affected by unionization.
While a few Darwinian dinosaurs remained, most segments of the business community had moved into more Progressive Era modes of thought. Forged by confronting the robber barons, the hordes of desperate foreign-born immigrants, and more lately the rise of unions and socialism these business elites worried about the maintenance of the “social order”—which obviously included their primary economic position, corporate profits, and social/political status. As Southern Planters previous to the Civil War feared slave rebellions, the more powerful and successful elements of the business community feared a socialist revolution, or simple anarchy. In many ways, that was what the Progressive Era was all about—replacing a socio-economic order characterized by survival of the fittest with “a responsible social order in which all classes could look forward to some form of recognition and sharing in the benefits of an ever-expanding economy …. ‘Based on the industrial and commercial structure which is the indispensible shelter of us all’”.[2] The key operative word in this quote is the definition of the word “responsible” that was adopted by the various corporate elites.
For many, Jane Adams for example, responsibility meant that society had to take special care for those most desperate, marginal and underprivileged. For others, such as Herbert Croly (a leading Progressive historian of the era and editor of the New Republic) believed that responsibility included admitting the new working class into the policy fabric so that revolution and disruption of the social order could be averted. For some, (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.) preserving the social order mean checking the power, regulating of the large corporations (such as we witnessed in the Port Authority movement, municipal ownership of utilities and street car franchises)—increasingly these elements turned to higher levels of government. Others, of considerable number it must be noted, defined the social order in terms of personal achievement and liberty usually expressed in work and success in career and business from which social and economic mobility was obtained. For them, the social order required a minimum of regulation and maximum possible freedom to pursue one’s definition of success and opportunity. Sound familiar? The various strands of Progressivism and Privatism already in existence, plus personal greed and the residues of Darwinism, could easily permeate into how one defined a responsible social order.
The timing and the intensity of developing this new social order also affecting the thinking of the business community. Involvement in policy, and participation in internal corporation decisions (through strikes for example) could be gradual or outside the responsible social order. The responsible social order did not have to be similar to a light switch, a flick of the button—or plug in too much change, too fast and the contraptions begin to break down. In short, today’s hindsight didn’t exist in the Twenties and real people and most business segments saw few easy answers, complexity; today things seem so simple, moral, and right. Unions had activated a cultural divide within the business community.
[1] Prohibition was ratified by the 36th state on January 16, 1919 by Nebraska—and at that point by law went into effect on January 1, 1920. Interestingly, only Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire were among those first thirty-six states. New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Connecticut and Rhode Island—home of significant numbers of immigrant ethnics—were not among the first thirty-six states. The midwestern states of Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa were among the last of the first thirty-six. Ohio and Maryland were the only states with large immigrant populations that approved early on. Five of the earliest ten states that approved the eighteenth amendment fought for the Confederacy—and Maryland could be added to them. The momentum behind Prohibition in 1917-1919 was far less Yankee Progressivism, than southern, western and midwestern rural Protestantism. Connecticut and Rhode Island were the only two states to NEVER approve the 18th Amendment.
[2] James Weinstein, the Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 (Boston, Beacon Press, 1968), p. x.
Ron W. Coan 