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WORK TITLE: Roaring Metropolis
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https://www.iac.gatech.edu/people/faculty/amsterdam
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PERSONAL
Born 1977.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A., 1999; Brown University, M.A.T., 2003; University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian, educator, and writer. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, MA, visiting scholar, 2009-10; the Ohio State University, Columbus, assistant professor of history, 2010-13; Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, assistant professor in the School of History and Sociology, 2013—. Previously a teacher in public and parochial schools that served low-income urban neighborhoods.
AWARDS:Fellowships from American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Council of Learned Societies, and Council on Library and Information Resources.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books and encyclopedias, including The Encyclopedia of American Environmental History, Facts on File, 2010; and Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America, edited by Kim Phillips-Fein and Richard John, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Contributor to professional journals, including Journal of American History, Journal of Urban History, Journal of Urban Affairs, and History of Education Quarterly, and to websites, including Atlantic Online and Origins.
SIDELIGHTS
Historian Daniel Amsterdam conducts research primarily focusing on cities and social policy in the United States since the turn of the twentieth century. He is especially interested in issues associated with governance inequality and social justice in relation to race and ethnicity. A contributor to professional journals, Amsterdam is the author of Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State. The book examines urban capitalists of the early twentieth century and their support for government’s role in promoting social programs.
Commenting on the relationship between various business interests and social-policy development, Amsterdam writes in the introduction to Roaring Metropolis: “Businessmen of various stripes actually supported the implementation and expansion of a wide range of public social programs throughout the period. In fact, between the end of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression, commercial and industrial elites helped drive social spending in American cities to unprecedented heights.”
In Roaring Metropolis, Amsterdam points out that many business leaders across the United States believed in government support of public schooling and public health and the building of community resources, from libraries and museums to parks and playgrounds. This support came at a time of significant and sometimes chaotic urban growth. The business leaders believed such social programs would improve society “by educating, improving, and ‘Americanizing’ the working class,” explained reviewer G.D. Mackin in Choice. Amsterdam focuses on urban business leaders in three cities—Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—and how they attempted to initiate their visions for social policy in these cities. Amsterdam chose these cities because, as he writes in the book’s introduction, “by the 1920s, these cities typified some of the main political regimes that were prevalent in urban America at that time—the machine-dominated city (Philadelphia); the politically reformed, largely machine-free city (Detroit); and finally the city of widespread disfranchisement (Atlanta).”
Following the introduction, Amsterdam begins with a discussion of businessmen’s political activism prior to the armistice at the end of World War I. He goes on to devote a chapter to each of the three cities and the main accomplishments that activists in the business world helped bring about. For example, Amsterdam points out how each of the cities underwent numerous civic initiatives from new schools and new sewer and water infrastructure to many miles of new roads. While Amsterdam praises these efforts, he includes a chapter in which he discusses the failures of these activists and the cities they tried to improve, including the failure to develop adequate policies designed to help people cope with the suffering that was caused at times by the huge cities moving forward into a modern age of industrialism. According to Amsterdam, many of the business leaders also were more interested in fostering worker loyalty to industry than in creating an effective social safety net. Amsterdam ends Roaring Metropolis with an epilogue focusing on how the cities fared over the 1920s and then during the Great Depression. He also discusses the book’s themes in relation to modern-day life in American cities.
“Roaring Metropolis is a great success because it tells a fascinating story very effectively, it links historical events to present day challenges, and it discusses three cities that appear to be representative of the experiences of a wide range of American cities,” wrote EH.net website contributor Fred H. Smith. Marko Maunula, writing for the Journal of Southern History, remarked that the book “offers a useful reminder of continuity for casual observers, who often are tempted to view the 1920s as a conservative breather between the hectic reforms of the Progressive and New Deal decades.” In Choice, Mackin deemed Roaring Metropolis “highly recommended.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Amsterdam, Daniel, Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2016.
PERIODICALS
Business History Review, winter, 2016, Mason B. Williams, review of Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State, p. 790.
Choice, October, 2016, G.D. Mackin, review of Roaring Metropolis, p. 252.
Journal of Southern History, August, 2017, Marko Maunula, review of Roaring Metropolis, p. 718.
ONLINE
EH.net, https://eh.net/ (October 1, 2016), Fred H. Smith, review of Roaring Metropolis.
Georgia Institute of Technology, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Website, https://www.iac.gatech.edu/ (December 5, 2017), faculty profile.
Scholars Strategy Network, http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/ (December 5, 2017), author profile.
Daniel Amsterdam is an assistant professor in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Tech.
Daniel Amsterdam
amsterdam.daniel's picture
Assistant Professor of History, Georgia Institute of Technology
Old Civil Engineering Building, Room G18
221 Bobby Dodd Way
Atlanta, GA 30332
daniel.amsterdam@hts.gatech.edu
@DanAmsterdam
(404) 894-6834
AREAS OF EXPERTISE & CIVIC INVOLVEMENTS
Amsterdam is an historian who studies cities and social policy in the United States from roughly the turn of the twentieth century through the present, including everything from schooling, public health, housing and city planning to the development of policies like social security, unemployment insurance and public assistance to the poor. He is especially interested in unearthing the political roots of the United States’ particular approach to tackling urban problems. Before earning a PhD in history, Amsterdam was a teacher in public and parochial schools that served low-income urban neighborhoods.
Daniel Amsterdam, Ph.D.
School of History and Sociology
Assistant Professor
Photo of Daniel Amsterdam, Ph.D.
Contact & Information
Old CE Building G18
Fax:
404-894-0535
Email
Curriculum Vitae
Overview
Overview
Dan Amsterdam is an historian whose research focuses primarily on cities and social policy in the United States since the turn of the twentieth century. He completed his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also received Penn's Graduate Certificate in Urban Studies. Among other honors, he has been awarded fellowships by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Council on Library and Information Resources. He has authored, co-authored, and/or edited pieces that have appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of Urban Affairs, the History of Education Quarterly, and in essay collections focused on American politics and political economy. His book, Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2016. He is currently working on two long-term research projects: first, a book tracing the dissolution of school desegregation efforts in the United States from roughly the late 1970s forward; and second, a study focused on the unequal development of Greater Atlanta in the late twentieth century. A recipient of Georgia Tech's Class of 1940 Course Survey Teaching Effectiveness Award, he was a Class of 1969 Teaching Fellow in 2015-2016.
Research Areas
Global Cities and Urban Society U.S. Society and Politics/Policy Perspectives
Geographic Focus
United States
Issues
Governance Inequality and Social Justice Race/Ethnicity
CV: file:///C:/Users/mohdaswan.mohdjohari/Downloads/cv.pdf
Daniel Amsterdam
Assistant Professor of History
School of History and Sociology
The Georgia Institute of Technology
daniel.amsterdam@hsoc.gatech.edu
Academic Employment:
Assistant Professor, School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013-
Assistant Professor, Department of History, The Ohio State University, 2010-2013
Member of the history department and graduate faculty on the Columbus Campus. Taught
undergraduate courses on the Mansfield Campus.
Visiting Scholar, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2009-2010
Education:
University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. (History) and Graduate Certificate in Urban Studies, 2009
Brown University, M.A.T., 2003
Yale University, B.A., 1999
Scholarly Publications:
“Toward the Resegregation of Southern Schools: African American Suburbanization and Historical
Erasure in Freeman v. Pitts,” History of Education Quarterly (Nov. 2017), 451-479.
“The President, Congress, and Social Policy in the 1970s,” in Mark Rose and Roger Biles, eds., The
Presidency and American Capitalism since 1945 (University Press of Florida, 2017).
“Toward a Civic Welfare State: Business and City-Building in the 1920s,” in Kim Phillips-Fein and
Richard John, eds., Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State (University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2016).
Guest editor and author of introduction, “From Site to Place?: Michael B. Katz’s Reflections on a
Changing Field,” a forum in the Journal of Urban History (July 2015), 559-602.
“Before the Roar: U.S. Unemployment Relief after World War I and the Long History of a Paternalist
Welfare Policy,” Journal of American History (March 2015), 1123-1143.
With Michael B. Katz, Mathew Creighton and Merlin Chowkwanyun, “Immigration and the New
Metropolitan Geography,” Journal of Urban Affairs (Dec. 2010), 523-47.
Miscellaneous Publications:
“The Shortcomings of Billionaire Philanthropy,” The Atlantic, Dec. 5, 2015 (on-line).
With Richard Doner and Jonathan Schneer, “How Recent Changes in Voting Laws Threaten Equal Rights
in Georgia,” Scholars Strategy Network Basic Facts (January 2014).
2
Miscellaneous Publications (continued):
“Down and Out (Again): America’s Long Struggle against Mass Unemployment,” Origins, (December
2011).
With Domenic Vitiello, “Immigration since 1930,” in The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia (Rutgers
University Press, forthcoming in print; published on-line Summer 2013).
“Eight Questions: Urban History,” In the Service of Clio (July 10, 2012).
Review of Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration and the American Welfare State by Cybelle Fox,
Journal of Interdisciplinary History (Spring 2013).
The Department of Housing and Urban Development,” in The Encyclopedia of American Environmental
History (Facts on File, 2010).
Fellowships and Honors:
Class of 1940 Course Survey Teaching Effectiveness Award, Georgia Tech, 2016
Serve, Learn, Sustain Smart Cities, Connected Communities Fellow, Spring 2017
Class of 1969 Teaching Fellow, Georgia Tech, 2015-2016
Balch Institute Fellow, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 2011-2012
2010 Award for the Best Article Published in the Journal of Urban Affairs
Visiting Scholar, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2009-2010
ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2009-2010 (Declined)
CLIR/Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities for Research in Original Sources, 2007-2008
Co-Winner, Best Paper in American History, 2007 Barnes Club Conference, Temple University
Hugh Davis Graham Award, Institute for Political History, 2006
Presentations and Panel Discussions:
“Teaching Justice at a Tech Institute,” Roundtable Discussion sponsored by Georgia Tech’s Serve, Learn
Sustain, Jan. 2017.
“Capitalism and the Metropolis,” (Roundtable), The Urban History Association Conference, Chicago, IL,
Oct. 2016.
Comment, “Disrupting Regimes (and Regime Theory): The Work of Politics in Recent Atlanta History,”
The Urban History Association Conference, Chicago, IL, Oct. 2016.
“Metropolitan America in a Globalizing Age: Inequalities and Opportunities,” (Moderator and
Organizer), Georgia Institute of Technology, April 2016
“The Flint Water Crisis,” Roundtable Discussion sponsored by Georgia Tech’s Serve, Learn Sustain, Feb.
2016.
3
Presentations and Panel Discussions (Continued):
“The President, Congress, and Social Policy in the 1970s,” Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Feb.
2016
Comment, “Public Housing in the Hope VI Era,” 2016 American Historical Association Conference,
Atlanta, GA, Jan. 2016
“The City as Studio,” ICLAST panel, Georgia Tech, February 2015
“Business, Public Recreation, and Sport in the Early-Twentieth-Century U.S,” Just Sport and Sustainable
Cities Workshop, Georgia Tech, March 2015
Comment, “The Public History of Public Housing: Politics, Sources, Strategies, Memory,” 2014 Urban
History Association Conference, Philadelphia PA
“The Business of Civic Welfare: Using Cities to Reconsider Corporate Social Politics in the Early
Twentieth Century,” 2014 Urban History Association Conference, Philadelphia, PA
“The Last Time the Motor City Went Bust: The Corporate Roots of Detroit’s Default in the Great
Depression,” 2014 Policy History Conference, Columbus, OH.
Invited Lecture, Georgia State University History Department, March 2014
“Building a Civic Welfare State: Businessmen’s Forgotten Campaign to Remake Industrial America,”
2013 Hagley Museum and Library Fall Conference
“Corporate Power and the Problem of Politics: Business Elites, Social Policy and Urban ‘Democracy’ in
the Early Twentieth Century,” 2013 Organization of American Historians Annual Conference, San
Francisco, CA
“The Cultural Promises of the State: A Reconsideration of Corporate Social Politics in 1920s America,”
2013 Business History Conference, Columbus, OH
“Building a Civic Welfare State: Businessmen’s Forgotten Campaign to Remake Industrial America,
1919-1929, ”2012 Organization of American Historians Annual Conference, Milwaukee, WI
“The 1%” (Roundtable Discussion, Co-Organizer and Co-Moderator), 2012 Business History Conference,
Philadelphia PA
“The Existential Crisis of Urban Studies: A Roundtable Discussion,” (Co-organizer and panelist), 2011
Social Science History Association Conference, Boston, MA
“From Neighborhood to Nation: The Effect of Local Politics on National Agendas” (Discussant) 2011
Social Science History Association Conference, Boston, MA
“Beyond Sombart’s Query: Incorporating Education into American Political Development,” 2011 Social
Science History Association Conference, Boston, MA
“Confronting Government Interventions,” (Chair), 2011 Business History Conference, St. Louis, MO
Invited Presenter, Boston University’s American Political History Seminar Series, Feb. 2010
4
Presentations and Panel Discussions (Continued):
“Education and the Welfare State” (Roundtable Moderator and Chair), 2009 History of Education Society
Conference, Philadelphia, PA
“Beyond ‘Faith’ in American Education,” 2009 History of Education Society Conference, Philadelphia,
PA
“Immigration in a Re-emerging Gateway: Philadelphia, 1970-2006” (Roundtable), 2008 Urban History
Association Conference, Houston, TX
“Building the Civic Welfare State in 1920s America,” 2008 Policy History Conference, St. Louis, MO
“Before the Roar: Unemployment and the Paternalism of American Welfare,” 2007 Social Science
History Association Conference, Chicago, IL
“The Roaring Metropolis: Government Growth in 1920s America,” 2006 Urban History Association
Conference, Phoenix, AZ
Courses Offered:
Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013-
The United States Since 1877
The City in American History
The United States in the 1960s
The United States in the Twentieth Century (Graduate Seminar)
Undergraduate Research Methods
Race and Immigration in Recent U.S. History
The Ohio State University, 2010-2013
Introduction to American Civilization since 1877
The Contemporary United States, 1970-Present
Wealth and Power in U.S. History, A Senior Research Seminar
University Service and Other Professional Experience:
Member, Speakers Committee, School of History and Sociology, Georgia Tech, 2017-
Member, Search Committee, School Chair, School of History and Sociology, Georgia Tech, 2016-17
Symposium Organizer, “Metropolitan America in a Globalizing Age: Inequalities and Opportunities,”
Georgia Tech, 2015-16.
Graduate Committee, School of History and Sociology, Georgia Tech, 2014-
Member, Faculty Library Advisory Board, Georgia Tech, 2014-
Search Committee, U.S. Urban History, The Ohio State University History Department, 2012-2013
Diversity Committee, The Ohio State University at Mansfield, 2011-2013
Regional Campus Task Force, The Ohio State University History Department, 2011-2013
Dean’s Ad Hoc Committee on Research, The Ohio State University at Mansfield, 2011-2013
Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen's Campaign for a Civic Welfare State
Marko Maunula
83.3 (Aug. 2017): p718+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen's Campaign for a Civic Welfare State. By Daniel Amsterdam. American Business, Politics, and Society. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. [viii], 230. $45.00, ISBN 978-08122-4810-4.)
Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen's Campaign for a Civic Welfare State challenges the oft-perceived juxtaposition of the Progressive era and the 1920s. Using Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta as his case study cities, Daniel Amsterdam demonstrates occasional continuity between the pre-World War I Progressive (a term the author shuns) agenda and the 1920s attempts for urban reforms. The author shows how local elite businessmen and the higher-end professional class were often even more committed to directing money to build these cities than were their Progressive-era predecessors.
Through dramatically increased spending on urban infrastructure, schools, and recreational facilities, elite businessmen sought to create better workers by building better cities, serving businessmen's booster instincts and political and economic interests alike. While new schools, playgrounds, and decentralized neighborhoods improved the quality of life for the cities' working-class majorities, leading businessmen also fought to maintain their power over wages and working conditions. Amsterdam argues that these businessmen wanted to build a "civic welfare state," not a "social" one (p. 1).
While the businessmen's vision for their cities might have been conservative, their spending most definitely was not. In Detroit, government spending per capita rose 98 percent between 1916 and 1928, in Philadelphia 56 percent, and in Atlanta 55 percent. These cities struggled to keep up their services with the continued flow of in-migrants, both domestic and foreign. Rapid growth necessitated extensive investment in infrastructure. How this growth was channeled determined much of the character of the city. Businessmen emphasized decentralized neighborhoods and slum clearance as methods of turning urban workers into property-owning citizens and dedicated, civic-minded members of the community.
While Amsterdam emphasizes the centrality of these elite businessmen, he points out that their power was rarely (if ever) unchecked. Successful projects required building political alliances, be it with labor or older city machines. For example, in Atlanta, as Amsterdam points out, otherwise disenfranchised African Americans actually could vote in local bond referenda, skillfully using this power to improve their educational facilities and neighborhoods.
Roaring Metropolis is a very self-confident book, clearly organized and written with effective and persuasive prose. The research relies heavily on secondary literature and newspapers and other publications of the era, spiced with some archival research. The lack of bibliography is a minor inconvenience to a reader interested in exploring the topic further.
The three cities under study are well chosen, representing differing regional political traditions and political structures. An addition of a western city would have further expanded the book's reach and its thesis's universality. Occasionally, Amsterdam could be a bit more precise when categorizing his protagonists. His definition of elite businessmen takes its cue from Potter Stewart. The book is often better with telling than explaining. Its analysis remains underdeveloped at parts, overshadowed by the book's rich and nuanced data. While Roaring Metropolis offers a fair and informative account of the topic, expanding and improving our view of 1920s urban politics, Amsterdam ends with an oddly disjointed and ahistorical political call to use the lessons of the era for shaping present policies.
Roaring Metropolis is very useful reading for urban historians and excellent for graduate course discussions exploring the era and its politics. It offers a useful reminder of continuity for casual observers, who often are tempted to view the 1920s as a conservative breather between the hectic reforms of the Progressive and New Deal decades.
Marko Maunula
Clayton State University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Maunula, Marko. "Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen's Campaign for a Civic Welfare State." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2017, p. 718+. General OneFile, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501078165/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bc06ee7f. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501078165
QUOTE: "by educating, improving, and 'Americanizing' the working class" "highly recommended"
Full Text:
Amsterdam, Daniel. Roaring metropolis: businessmen's campaign for a civic welfare state. Pennsylvania, 2016. 230p index afp ISBN 9780812248104 cloth, $45.00; ISBN 9780812292732 ebook, $45.00
54-0756
HN57
2015-38836
CIP
In the popular imagination, the 1920s are often construed as an era in which people were opposed to governmental activism and public spending. Amsterdam's Roaring Metropolis offers an important corrective to this understanding. Focusing on the political activism of business leaders in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, Amsterdam (Georgia Institute of Technology) examines the ways in which business leaders supported what he calls the "civic welfare state." This includes spending on public schools, health, libraries, museums, playgrounds, parks, and other similar public projects. Such projects, the business leaders believed, could help alleviate poverty not by altering distributions of economic power but by educating, improving, and "Americanizing" the working class. As Amsterdam notes in his final chapters, this history illuminates important features of the contemporary American welfare state, including its focus on changing the behaviors of supposedly problematic populations and its origins in long-standing practices of public policy. Roaring Metropolis is well written and meticulously researched, and though it would be useful if it were situated more clearly within the literature on the origins and development of the US welfare state, it is important reading for all those interested in public policy and poverty. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.--G. D. Mackin, Eastman School of Music/ University of Rochester
Mackin, G.D.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mackin, G.D. "Amsterdam, Daniel. Roaring metropolis: businessmen's campaign for a civic welfare state." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Oct. 2016, p. 252. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A479868976/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2d747dd5. Accessed 23 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479868976
Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State
Author(s): Amsterdam, Daniel
Reviewer(s): Smith, Fred H.
Published by EH.Net (October 2016)
Daniel Amsterdam, Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. v + 230 pp. $45 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-8122-4810-4.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Fred H. Smith, Department of Economics, Davidson College.
Most economists know that there was a fundamental change in the government’s role in the American economy during the first decades of the twentieth century. With the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, the First World War, and the Great Depression, there were abundant opportunities for the government to become ever more interwoven into the fabric of the economy. However, I suspect that it is much less widely known or understood that that these changes were happening at federal and at local levels of government and that the magnitude of the changes at the local level was truly massive. In Roaring Metropolis, Daniel Amsterdam presents a case study of three cities — Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta — in order to show how these changes occurred and how the changes affected the lives of the cities’ residents.
In the introductory chapter Amsterdam makes it clear that his book fills a meaningful gap in the urban economic history literature. He shows that local government expenditures exploded in cities across the United States between 1916 and 1928, and makes a persuasive case that the challenges faced by urban leaders in the 1910s and 1920s are remarkably similar to the challenges faced by urban leaders today. He also defines the term “civic welfare” to make it clear that it meant something very different to the business leaders of the early twentieth century than it might to the policy makers of today. This is especially critical to understanding all that is to follow in Roaring Metropolis. The civic welfare that Amsterdam writes about in the core chapters of the book describes social policy that was created to make a city more economically competitive with its neighbors; it was not policy designed to buffer a city’s residents from the harsh realities of a modern, industrial economy.
Chapter one introduces us to the earliest efforts of business leaders and politicians seeking to enact civic welfare policies. While the civic leaders in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta faced some common obstacles in implementing civic welfare policy, each set of leaders also faced a distinct challenge that affected their city more than it did the other two. In Detroit, business leaders of the 1910s were forced to work with a large, inefficient city council. Philadelphia’s leaders faced off against a powerful Republican political machine that was reluctant (initially) to support civic welfare initiatives. And, finally, Atlanta’s leaders had to navigate the interactions of a racially heterogeneous population and a city charter that required a supermajority in order to approve any referendum on bond financed spending. Amsterdam shows that the combination of challenges each city faced before the end of World War I prevented any real progress from being made on the civic welfare programs that business leaders wanted. In identifying the root causes of each city’s failures, he also sets the stage for the core chapters of the book (chapters two through four) — the case studies of each of the three cities.
The case studies focus on how the leaders of each city navigated the particular set of challenges that stood before them as they sought to implement the civic welfare initiatives they supported. Given the difficulties Detroit has faced for the last three decades, it is ironic that it stands out as an especially well-functioning city in Roaring Metropolis. Detroit’s major obstacle to enacting civic welfare before and during World War I was the structure of its city council. The city charter called for a ward-based city council with thirty-six members. With such a large city council, and with representatives loyal to their respective wards, it was difficult for business leaders to garner the support for their preferred projects. So, civic leaders persuaded the electorate to allow the city’s charter to be rewritten. Under the new charter the city council was comprised of nine members who were elected at large. At-large representation, coupled with a smaller city council, made it easy for business leaders to ensure that their preferred candidates won seats and supported key civic welfare initiatives.
The business leaders in Philadelphia, with its well-established political machine, had a more difficult road to travel. Philadelphia’s leaders had to work within the existing political structure, but, through carefully formed political alliances that allowed them to leverage existing political rivalries within the city’s Republican machine, they finally made progress on their civic welfare goals in the 1920s. Indeed, of the three cities Amsterdam examines in Roaring Metropolis Philadelphia completed the most iconic civic welfare projects: The downtown parkway and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Atlanta’s business leaders also enjoyed successes in implementing their civic welfare policies, but they faced a set of challenges rather unlike Detroit or Philadelphia’s. In 1920 Atlanta was a much smaller city than Detroit or Philadelphia, but it was also much more racially heterogeneous. While Atlanta’s white population typically had no interest in seeing the city’s African-Americans vote, the city’s charter forced them to reconsider this position when it came to mustering support for civic welfare projects. Atlanta’s city charter required the support of a two-thirds majority of registered voters in order to issue municipal bonds. Thus, not only did the business leaders need a supermajority to pass a bond initiative, they needed to turn out at least two-thirds of the registered voters to even have a chance of passing the initiative. African-American voters gained a surprising degree of power through this arrangement. Simply registering to vote and staying home on election day exerted influence in Atlanta. When looking to pass a new bond initiative, white civic leaders ignored the African-American community at their peril.
Ultimately, chapters two through four show us the myriad accomplishments of the cities’ business leaders. In each city, civic welfare initiatives led to some combination of new schools, new sewers, additional water lines, and miles of new streets. In Philadelphia, the city also spent money on public transportation infrastructure and constructed its first subway line. Moreover, Detroit and Philadelphia built beautiful art museums, public libraries, and parks. But, chapter five shows us what civic leaders did not accomplish. Civic leaders did not implement civic welfare policies designed to alleviate the suffering that could be caused by living in a large city in a modern, industrial economy. As Amsterdam points out, the “welfare capitalism” business leaders experimented with in the 1920s — limited fringe benefits, structured opportunities to socialize with co-workers outside of work, and recreational facilities at the firm — was designed to increase workers’ loyalty to their employers. Business leaders still had no desire to create a social safety net of the sort that would be created during the Great Depression.
Roaring Metropolis ends with an epilogue that provides a brief overview of how each of these cities was to fare after the close of the decade, and, more specifically, how the cities fared during the Great Depression. It also weaves the themes of the book together in a way that highlights the important contributions of this book and that ties the themes of the book to the present day. In particular, Amsterdam does an exceptional job of making two points.
First, the civic welfare policies implemented in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta made these cities more livable, but, more importantly, these policies made the cities more attractive for businesses. Yes, a better school system was a benefit to residents. But an educated workforce made a city a more attractive place to open or operate a firm, too. Moreover, it is essential to remember that the civic welfare policies implemented in the 1920s did little to insulate city residents from the forces of a modern industrial economy.
Second, these gains were achieved almost exclusively through debt financing. This is a theme that will be all too familiar to urban economists in the twenty-first century. The business leaders and residents of a city might want better schools, additional acres of parks, and better infrastructure, but all too often voters are unwilling to pay the taxes needed to fund these initiatives. In Roaring Metropolis, Amsterdam has chosen three cities that spent large sums of borrowed money on civic welfare because debt financing in the 1920s was not a problem. After the brief economic downturn at the beginning of the decade, the economy performed well, and each of the three cities experienced rapid population growth. But, as Amsterdam writes in the epilogue, the debt incurred in the 1920s became a crushing burden when the economy imploded in the 1930s.
Roaring Metropolis is a great success because it tells a fascinating story very effectively, it links historical events to present day challenges, and it discusses three cities that appear to be representative of the experiences of a wide range of American cities. There is little to find fault with in the book, though economic historians may be frustrated by one of its quirks. Amsterdam cites figures throughout the book, but he only occasionally puts them into terms that an economist might find useful. For example, he typically quotes figures in levels (instead of discussing things in, say, per capita terms), and he rarely converts nominal values into real values. These are minor quibbles, though. Roaring Metropolis is a terrific read, and I highly recommend it to any urban economic historian who wants a better understanding of urban political economy in the 1910s and 1920s.
Fred Smith’s most recent paper, “What’s Manhattan Worth?” (co-authored with Jason Barr of Rutgers University), appeared on the program at the 2016 American Economic Association Annual Meeting.
Copyright (c) 2016 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (October 2016). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://eh.net/book-reviews/
Subject(s): Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
Urban and Regional History
Geographic Area(s): North America
Time Period(s): 20th Century: Pre WWII
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