Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State by Daniel Amsterdam (review)

Popular and academic discourses about business–government relations in the United States have long revolved around a forced and historically inaccurate binary: Business interests “oppose” governmental regulations, whereas reformers wish to “constrain” the operations of free enterprise. Although scholars have challenged such a narrow and bipolar framing for decades, the notion persists, too frequently dominating public discussions of issues from education and infrastructure to welfare, taxation, and social justice.

In Roaring Metropolis, Amsterdam joins a burgeoning community of scholars who challenge and subvert that duality by combining compelling historical research with a sophisticated understanding of the complex nature of “businessmen” as historical actors. This deeply researched book explores the pivotal role that economic elites played in urban policy making during the decade following World War I. Through precise case studies of Atlanta, Detroit, and Philadelphia, Amsterdam exposes how business leaders “turned to government-sponsored social policy” to build what he describes as a “civic welfare state” (1). Distinct from traditional conceptions of the “social welfare state”—which involved “policies that threatened to interfere with employers’ ability to determine workers’ wages, hours, working conditions, and fringe benefits”—the civic welfare state focused on such local public initiatives as parks, schools, museums, and public health (3). Thus, rather than stress business leaders’ rejection of the modern state, Amsterdam convincingly argues that business leaders in the 1920s worked to redirect social policy, most dramatically through their support of municipal bonds. By focusing their attention on civic functions, these elites managed to use the government to “address a host of urban social problems,” while avoiding the fundamental problems of poverty and economic inequality (178).

Amsterdam’s focus on the civic activities of key business leaders and organizations, including local chambers of commerce and elected officials, departs from earlier scholarship that highlights business leaders’ embrace of “welfare capitalism” as an alternative to heavy-handed government regulation. He acknowledges the strategic significance of “the provision of fringe benefits like pensions, stock options, sick pay, and other programs . . . that in part promised to increase workers’ economic security” (144). Yet his careful attention to on-the-ground lobbying and political strategizing by local industrial elites in his three chosen cities shows that business leaders conceived of the public sphere, as much as the private confines of their companies, as an appropriate and fruitful ground for social policy. Business–government relations on the local level, he shows, can best be seen as “an opportunistic amalgam—a mixture that melded private and public action in sometimes mutually reinforcing ways” (145).

From the perspective of interdisciplinary methodology, Amsterdam succeeds in retaining the historians’ keen eye for detail and nuance while skillfully deploying analytical frameworks from sociology and political science. In particular, he analyzes the social welfare state through the Marxian-informed prism of efforts to “decommodify” labor, thus establishing an effective contrast between the “civic” welfare state of the 1920s and the structural anti-poverty policies that would emerge under the New Deal order (181).

Most significantly, Amsterdam deploys a methodology that successfully situates “the businessman” at the center of the story. His analytical framing continues the vital work of historians to reject the tendency, too common among many social scientists, to see economic elites as uncomplicated profit-maximizers whose interests, preferences, and strategies can be easily inserted into models of social and political behavior. By deeply engaging with the men behind the models, Amsterdam uncovers often conflicting impulses, such as concerns about working-class radicalism juxtaposed with the problems of urban poverty and vice, that belie the image of business leaders as straight-forward opponents of government-led social progress. Such a focus not only provides a clearer vision of the “business-friendly strain of reformism” that flourished in American cities during the 1920s (13). It also provides a valuable lesson for today’s activists who wish to redress the problems of economic insecurity by stressing the importance of understanding the complex vision of social policy that...