“Business Interests”

“Business Interests” names neither a single company nor a formal organization. In Wes Jordan’s account, it is a political euphemism for Atlanta’s prominent white people, especially those whose wealth gives them access to the city’s leaders and influence over its development. The phrase compresses an economic constituency into a seemingly neutral label; the novel makes its racial and political implications visible by showing how money, public contracts, votes, and symbolic endorsements connect that constituency to the wider city.

Meaning and Social Presence

Wes Jordan’s explanation of what makes politics addictive turns the term into a measure of social rank. People rise when he enters a room, seek him out in public, and make exceptional efforts to help him; he says that the prominent white people called the Business Interests participate in this same performance of deference. Political power is therefore visible not only in legislation or campaign finance but in the bodily choreography of who stands, who waits, and who receives attention. Roger White, listening to Wes, recognizes that Charlie Croker has made him experience a similar kind of influence by responding to his political approach.

That social presence has a material counterpart. In the controversy over Fareek Fanon, Roger’s understanding of the label is blunt: it is synonymous with rich white people. Wes can invoke Croker as a representative of that constituency because Croker is both a major real-estate developer and the creator of Croker Global Corporation. The phrase offers a respectable collective name for an elite whose economic prominence can be converted into political symbolism.

Money, Organization, and Electoral Power

Wes’s account of campaigning shows why wealth alone does not win a citywide election: money must be joined to organization. He recalls rejecting a campaign check for $20,000 from a gay-rights organization because accepting it would have required him to endorse its agenda. The episode shows a candidate weighing a contribution against the political commitments attached to it. After his refusal, a weekly newspaper denounced him, and he concluded that a candidate could not prevail on the merits alone; money and neighborhood-level organization were indispensable.

The harder edge of that system appears in the closing days of a campaign, when operators offer to deliver votes from particular neighborhoods for cash. Wes describes a candidate being pressed to pay $10,000 up front, without negotiating or even expecting respectful treatment. A campaign needs intermediaries who know which local operators can actually mobilize voters and who can communicate with them. Once a decision is made, someone other than the candidate delivers sums that may reach $20,000, $30,000, or $40,000 in cash. The arrangement is verbal, and the campaign has no control or recourse after the money changes hands.

Wes says that an operator who can deliver calls potential voters early on election morning and urges them to come out and vote; the operator keeps roughly half the payment or more. Roger asks whether the practice is illegal, and Wes agrees that it is vote-buying. In his description, a candidate should set aside at least half a million dollars for cash distributed to voters, while a million dollars would improve the odds of success. He then links that scale of electoral spending to Andre Fleet, naming Fleet in response to the question of who stands to have a million dollars in get-out-the-vote money. The account presents cash mobilization as a separate but related mechanism of political power: finance must pass through local networks before it can become votes.

The Atlanta Way and Public Development

Wes explains the Atlanta Way through the image of a baseball being unraveled. Beneath its white covering and long winding of string, he says, lies a small black core: the roughly 280,000 Black residents of South Atlanta, whose votes control the city. Around that core are millions of white residents in North Atlanta and the surrounding counties. In this account, city politics depends on how the larger white population and the Black voting base are brought into a workable relationship.

The airport expansion under Mayor Maynard provides Wes’s example of that bargain. Maynard gathered the Business Interests around a billion-dollar project, then announced that 30 percent of the work would go to minority contractors. Wes describes the white business leaders as initially recoiling, but then accepting the prospect of the remaining $700 million. Maynard later took pride in the project’s creation of twenty-five Black millionaires. The example frames public development as both an economic opportunity for established business and a means of distributing a share of its benefits to minority contractors. In Wes’s telling, the arrangement is not incidental to the Atlanta Way; it is one of the ways political and economic interests are reconciled.

Croker as Representative and the Public Reversal

The term acquires particular force when Wes introduces Croker at a press conference in support of Fareek Fanon. Wes presents Croker as one of Atlanta’s outstanding business leaders and invokes his success as a developer alongside his former career as a Georgia Tech football star. By placing the white business leader beside Fareek, Wes seeks to make Croker’s presence stand for a wider constituency: the Business Interests, or at least a signal that they are not united against the young man.

Croker later reveals that his appearance was part of an exchange. Roger White had promised that Croker’s troubles with the bank could be made to disappear if he met Fareek and publicly praised him at the press conference. Croker admits that he initially agreed to offer harmless-sounding flattery, but describes the act as contemptible and says that he had been eager to please. At the podium, he also refuses to claim knowledge of whether Fareek committed the alleged assault: he distinguishes his judgment of Fareek’s arrogance from proof of the accusation. His disclosure breaks the intended performance of business support by exposing the debt-relief bargain behind it.

Wes subsequently explains the political consequences in terms of fairness, individual rights, and public calm rather than a verdict on guilt or innocence. He says that Croker’s turn against Fareek made it appear that the Business Interests were committed to unfairness and injustice, while Wes could claim the role of Fareek’s defender in public life. In this way the phrase operates on two levels: it identifies a powerful white constituency, and it supplies a public image that politicians can enlist, contest, or discredit. Croker’s disclosure makes the distance between that image and the private transaction impossible to ignore.