Early in his book Atlantic Crossings (1998), the historian Daniel Rodgers draws a distinction between two ways in which early-twentieth-century policymakers harnessed the economic potential of the state: social politics, or “de-commodification,” and promotionalism, or economic development. These two projects sometimes merged, Rodgers notes, but their goals were “quite distinct. Promotionalism's aim was to thicken and expand markets. The goal of social politics was to control and constrain them” (p. 30). This conceptual framing sustained the greatest work ever produced on the early-twentieth-century American welfare state. Yet it leaves some important phenomena unexplained. Public parks represent a decommodification of space; they exist because of a decision to take land out of the market and set it aside for everyone's use. But they also boost the property values of surrounding areas. One prominent New Dealer, voicing the decommodificationist logic in the mid-1930s, pointed out that Central Park produces not profits, but rather human enjoyment. Except Central Park does produce profits—just ask the property owners on Fifth Avenue.

Daniel Amsterdam's new book, The Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen's Campaign for a Civic Welfare State, helps us to make sense of the complex relationship between decommodification and private accumulation in twentieth-century American cities. In five deeply researched and tightly drawn chapters, Amsterdam lays out the role that the metropolitan industrial and commercial leaders of the 1920s played in driving “social spending in American cities to unprecedented heights” (p. 1).

It will not come as news to many historians that the 1920s were an era of soaring government spending; nor will it be a surprise that businessmen supported social programs in the early twentieth century when those programs helped them solve collective-action problems. But Amsterdam traces, with greater detail and acuity than any previous scholar, what kinds of social programs businessmen supported, and why, and with what consequences. Especially welcome for historians of American business, he places business politics within the broader civic structure, documenting businessmen's shifting attitudes on public expenditure and debt and showing how business leaders used the state, not only to externalize costs, but also to address broader issues confronting advanced industrial capitalism: the need to compete for status and investment in an increasingly national economy, the need to prepare the labor force for “the increasingly hierarchical world of work,” and the need to secure “social and national solidarity” in cosmopolitan cities where class tensions were running extraordinarily high (p. 60).

Key to Amsterdam's account is a distinction between “social welfare” and “civic welfare.” The former, in Amsterdam's formulation, involves safety-net and regulatory programs meant to mitigate the harshest parts of the capitalist economy; the latter involves a set of local goods and services—public schools, parks, libraries, museums, parkways, and aid to the development of decentralized single-family residential neighborhoods. Urban businessmen, Amsterdam writes, supported the latter while opposing the former. They believed that civic institutions would “mold local residents into good citizens” and good workers while also building their cities’ national standing, thereby helping to attract business and investment (p. 4). Civic welfare, in short, offered a way of addressing the manifest social problems of the post–World War I city without surrendering control over wages and work.

Amsterdam weaves this story through three impeccably chosen case studies. In Detroit, businessmen exercised direct political power over a city dominated by a single, mass-production industry. In Philadelphia, a city with an older, more diverse (and declining) economy, businessmen were forced to negotiate with a powerful political machine. Atlanta represents the New South's admixture of commercial boosterism in the context of formal political disfranchisement. In Detroit, Amsterdam shows, charter reform allowed businessmen to dominate the city council and school board; extra- and quasi-governmental groups led by the business community drew up a host of ambitious public projects, which the city government happily supported. In Philadelphia, a split within the Republican machine allowed businessmen to win influence—the Vare organization sought supremacy in city politics by agreeing to the businessmen's public-investment program. In Atlanta, boosterism coexisted with a deeply ingrained (and institutionalized) antitax culture, which meant that businessmen needed allies to get their bond issues through—and so business-driven public investment in Atlanta required alliances with women's groups and African Americans. Coalitional politics meant that African Americans actually wielded greater power in Atlanta, where the vast majority could not vote, than in the formally democratic northern cities. But, Amsterdam notes, Atlanta still spent considerably less than Philadelphia and Detroit—which he rightly ascribes to the fact that it had disenfranchised a third of its population.

Were businessmen really the decisive factor in driving 1920s public investment? The present reviewer came to this work skeptical that business mobilization was the dominant causal force; I leave basically convinced, at least regarding these three cities. Still, one wonders if the social work profession, the settlement house movement, and the women's movement did not play a larger role than Amsterdam assigns them. And perhaps above all, one wonders about structural constraints: perhaps the most important thing about the 1920s was simply the fact that there was far more money to spend, thanks to soaring property values, hothouse metropolitan development, and the revolution in municipal finance that had occurred in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

More broadly, we are left with the challenge of placing this history within the broader history of metropolitan statebuilding and political economy. The businessmen of the 1920s drew upon the ideas and programs of Rodgers's social reformers even as they redefined those ideas. They also made the urban New Deal possible: a good part of the Works Progress Administration's work involved completing, maintaining, and augmenting projects started in the 1920s. In that way, the businessmen of the 1920s contributed to a process that, when it met up with the rise of fiscal federalism and the democratic mobilizations of the 1930s, ended up building more capable and autonomous state agencies. As the Robert Moseses succeeded the James Couzenses, businessmen would be forced, at least for a while, to exercise power in other ways.

But only for a while. The period that resonates most powerfully with Amsterdam's history is the era that began in the 1970s, when businesspeople rose to far greater prominence in the area of social welfare—in the form of public-private partnerships, an expanded role for philanthropy in education, social impact bonds, and the like. Historians are now researching these topics with a vengeance. One of the challenges they confront is the task of assessing change and continuity—a problem evident, among other places, in a queasiness over the term “neoliberalism” and the effort to trace institutions such as public-private partnerships across the 1970s divide. These unresolved questions testify to the importance of treating the “neoliberal” turn with real historical depth. On that front, as on many others, Amsterdam has made a vital contribution.