Chapter 36
The public must and will be served.
—William Penn
WHENEVER I go to Philadelphia, which is as often as I can, because I like it, I stroll down Chestnut Street and look at Independence Hall. Here, on June 10, 1775, George Washington became commander-in-chief of the American Revolutionary forces; here, on July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was adopted; here, on November 3, 1781, the twenty-four British standards captured at York-town were presented to Congress, and here, on September 17, 1787, the Constitution of the United States, which still rules us all, more or less, was signed. One plaque in the central lobby goes farther back, the “Frame of Government” of William Penn:
GOVERNMENT IS FREE TO THE PEOPLE … AND MORE THAN THIS IS TYRANNY OLIGARCHY AND CONFUSION
Look across Chestnut Street, and travel several hundred years in twenty yards. In the block facing the red brick Hall, I noticed these buildings and signs:
Scottie’s Restaurant—Pure Food—Coca-Cola
Krug’s Parking
Sandwiches Toasted Grilled Large Variety of Desserts
Land Title Bank and Trust Co. Chartered March 10, 1812. Charter Perpetual
Ben Gurk’s. Sandwiches, Platters, Souvenirs.
For Rooms, Read Bulletin Want Ads
Perhaps, for the vigor of its industrialization, its patchwork mixedupness, America pays a large price in the sacrifice of esthetic values. But this line of small shops and offices, nondescript and heterogeneous, is proof just as much as Independence Hall—the birthplace of the United States in all its classic tranquillity and grace—that this is a country still based on personal energies and ambitions and explorations, on freedom and the rights of man.
Some Characteristics of Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania, literally a keystone, one of the two or three most important of all states, one of the four commonwealths, lies like a rectangular wedge, a matrix, linking the Great Lakes and the Atlantic, embracing rivers as lovely as the Susquehanna and mountains like the Appalachians, and above all tying together steel and coal. Pennsylvania is bigger by a third than Hungary, more populous than the Netherlands, and as self-sufficient as any but a handful of nations. It runs a stout and exhilarating gamut from the quiet enchantment of the scenery in Bucks County to the flat ugly black roofs of Pittsburgh, from the aluminum and glass works along the Allegheny to the greatest collection of modern French painting in the world, that of the renowned Dr. Albert Baines near Philadelphia.
To a degree the story of Pennsylvania is the story of iron, coal, and steel. Yet, of its 26 million acres, almost half is forest! This is a Commonwealth almost always thought of as overwhelmingly industrial, but it contains some of the richest agricultural land on earth. Pennsylvania beats and throbs with its Herculean production of locomotives, steel blooms and ingots, printing presses, great boats, electrical machinery, and every variety of textile from rugs to cotton lace. Also you can go out in its woods and shoot, not merely grouse and pheasant, but deer and bear. From two to three hundred bear are killed in Pennsylvania every year on the average, and some 30,000 deer; in one season in 1931, 200,000 deer were shot, just to thin them out.1 Talk about the gargantuan span of America, its variety!
Pennsylvania belonged successively to the Indians, the Netherlands, Sweden, and England, and France claimed part of it for a time. A great man named William Penn arrived in 1682. The story is well known. He obtained a grant for most of what Pennsylvania and Delaware cover today, to settle a debt of £ 16,000 owed his father by Charles II. He wanted to call his vast tract New Wales (indeed Welsh influence was strong in the area for generations; witness such names as Bryn Mawr), but he was overruled, and Pennsylvania became the name. For his immense preserve, Penn agreed to pay the king “Two beaver skins to bee delivered att our said Castle of Windsor, on the first day of January, in every yeare, and also the fifth parte of all Gold and Silver Oare, which shall from time to time happen to be found.“2
Pennsylvania, bulging down the middle with its mountains, is a sharply divided state; Philadelphia in the seaboard orbit, is at one extreme end as everybody knows, and Pittsburgh, close to the Middle West, is at the other, with Harrisburg in between. I asked Senator Edward Martin, when he was governor, how Harrisburg happened to become the capital; he answered amiably, “Darned if I know,” and then suggested that, in prerailway days, canals usually determined the sites of cities. Soft coal is at one end of the state, anthracite at the other; steel is in the Pittsburgh area, and textiles in Philadelphia, though Philadelphia has plenty of heavy industry too, for instance the Baldwin locomotive works and the Budd Company that makes stainless steel trains. One geographical curiosity is the abutment to Lake Erie. Pennsylvania is not a Switzerland; it has its own outlet to an inland sea.
However markedly divided the Keystone State may be geographically, the ideological divisions are not less acute. The gap between conversation at a Main Line dinner party and what you will hear in a bar at Altoona, to say nothing of talk in a miner’s yard near Shenandoah, is as broad as the Rubicon. Also political stratifications are various. You cannot say simply, as you can with New York, that the rural areas are Republican and the cities Democratic, and that politics are a struggle between these balanced forces. The commonwealth is much more complex than that.
Pennsylvania is packed with great cities; it has ten metropolitan districts holding more than 100,000 people, like the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre complex and Allentown-Bethlehem—Easton. It is the home not merely of Independence Hall but of two other of the greatest historical sites in the country, Gettysburg and Pittsburgh Point. In Pennsylvania, Lord Halifax went fox hunting, and one great town, Hershey, lives on chocolate. Beethoven once intended to write a symphony, “The Founding of Pennsylvania.” It is not merely the state of Benjamin Franklin, but of the Whiskey Rebellion, the Molly Maguire riots, and the Homestead Massacre. The first daily newspaper in America was published in Philadelphia, and the first radio station, KDKA, ever to make regular commercial broadcasts is in Pittsburgh, though others have disputed this claim. Pennsylvania has the Saturday Evening Post, and also one of the outstanding educational institutions of the nation, the International Correspondence Schools at Scranton. In Pennsylvania, you will find fascinating things to eat like scrapple; a strong Finnish underlay in some areas; the home of the Conestoga wagon; the Pennsylvania, one of the best run and operated railways in the world; towns with names like Seven Stars; the site of Washington’s first battle (Fort Necessity); and politics at their most dissolute. It is the original oil state, and both Army and Navy threatened during World War II to put its capital out of bounds, because the venereal rate was so high there. It is the state of Kitty Foyle and of both the pretzel and pickle “capitals” of. the world, and another of its cities aside from Philadelphia—York—was once the seat of the national government. It has a supremely good symphony orchestra, the Liberty Bell, mines where children of six worked a twelve-hour day as recently as forty years ago, the greatest linoleum factory in the world, and the birthplace of Daniel Boone.
City of Brotherly Love and Much Else
Philadelphia, the first capital of the United States and its first metropolis, the third biggest city in the country today3 and the twelfth largest in the world, is really something special. Often it is compared to Boston, and it is, like Boston, a kind of casement to American history, with a copious intellectual tradition and social aristocracy. But in many ways it differs substantially from Boston. For one thing it is much bigger; for another it is much more heavily industrialized. Like Boston it has an aroma, a patine, a lacquer of charm and mellowness, but it is more relaxed, and also dowdier. Boston is, as we know, a compound of Yankees and the Irish; Philadelphia is more complex, with interminglings of Pennsylvania Dutch, other Germans, Scots-Irish, and plain British. Most of Boston stood for the Revolution while it was going on; Philadelphia, like New York, was full of Quislings. Boston has an aggressive civic pride; Philadelphia has almost none. Both cities, but for different reasons, have a marked puritanical front; not until the crusades of the late lamented Record was Philadelphia’s “Black Sunday” lightened; there is still no alcohol on Sunday, and movies don’t open till 2 P.M., so that the devout may not be seduced into entertainment until they have gone to church. Both cities have a great nucleus of consolidated wealth, which is slipping away—in Philadelphia faster. Boston is Catholic, Congregationalist, and Unitarian; the leadership in Philadelphia is Quaker or Episcopalian. Boston, as we know, is a Democratic stronghold par excellence; Philadelphia is the only great American city where the political machine is Republican. Finally, Philadelphia, a distinctly smug and self-satisfied city, is jealous of nothing, whereas Boston is jealous of one thing anyway, Cambridge.
Philadelphia, like Boston, despises New York, and is indifferent to it, though Manhattan draws off a good deal of its wealth and talent. “New York is simply an island full of clip joints,” I heard one Philadelphian aver. J. David Stern, former publisher of the Record, who for years was as strong a liberalizing influence as the city had, told me once never to forget that Philadelphia was “the most Chinese city in the United States,” surrounded by its own impenetrable wall, and that “Seattle was much nearer to New York.”
Innocently enough, I asked a group of eminent Philadelphians on one occasion what they thought of Pittsburgh. Answer: “Pittsburgh? Where’s that?” Then came howls of laughter.4 Indeed, Philadelphia is apt to think that anybody beyond the Schuylkill is a red Indian.
In the Philadelphia suburbs, set in an autumnal landscape so ripe and misty that it might have been painted by Constable, in Germantown and Chestnut Hill and along the Main Line, lives an oligarchy more compact, more tightly and more complacently entrenched than any in the United States, with the possible exception of that along the north shore of Long Island. But Long Island, whether in fact or not, gives a seasonal impression, an impression of being a summer refuge, and its more affluent millionaires maintain establishments in town too. The Main Line lives on the Main Line all the year around. It stretches on either side of the right of way of the Pennsylvania Railroad to Paoli, for about forty miles. It is one of the few places in the country where it doesn’t matter on what side of the tracks you are. These are very superior tracks. The aristocracy of Chestnut Hill and Germantown (not strictly on the Main Line) is perhaps more civilized and dignified; I heard one member murmur ironically, “We went slumming for the first time in years last night … dined with people on the Main Line.” The plain fact of the matter is that the Main Line has a deplorable icing of nouveau riche. One of its most conspicuous recent Timons started life as a trolley-car motorman in Indiana. Shades of Drexels, Biddles, Cassatts! What does the whole Main Line believe in most? Privilege.
Main Line or non-Main Line, Philadelphia maintains some remarkable atavisms. There is the City Troop, the pre-Revolutionary regiment which is the escort of every president of the United States who visits the city. It gritted its teeth when Roosevelt came along. There is the Assembly, the rules of which are stricter than those of Buckingham Palace, and which can be compared to nothing in America except, possibly, the St. Cecilia Society in Charleston. Boat racing still survives, and so does cricket. I asked a gentleman who might have stepped out of the ruins of Persepolis why cricket had declined. “Because,” he answered dryly, “America consists today of people who want to be at bat all the time.” Then there are the clubs, like the Sunday Breakfast Club, which of course meets on Wednesday evenings, the Racquet Club (of some 1,100 members perhaps a dozen voted for Roosevelt in 1944), and the Union League (not Union League “club”), where every member must attest that he has never voted for anybody not a Republican, and above all the Philadelphia Club, which admirable institution is the holy of holies, the inner hall of halls. There are stories, doubtless apocryphal, of grim millionaires who died in anguish, after years of bruising their knuckles trying to break through these delicate portals, and never succeeding, and who in revenge punished the entire town by leaving their fortunes elsewhere. Fun to watch in the Philadelphia Club are old gentlemen playing sniff, which appears to be a form of dominoes. An authoritative book on the game is Chew on Sniff.
Once I asked some Philadelphians who was the indisputable grand old man of the community, like Charles Francis Adams in Boston. An embarrassed silence came and then a wrangle. Philadelphia has no single captain of this rank. Several names were mentioned, and all were distinguished enough—Dr. Thomas S. Gates, president of the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Justice Owen J. Roberts, who has not, however, been directly associated with the city for a good many years, and of course former senator George Wharton Pepper. Still feeling for names, I asked what, if anything, descendants of Benjamin Franklin might be doing in Philadelphia these days. One answer was (I report it literally): “We consider Mr. Franklin to have been of a somewhat shady family.”
All over Philadelphia one may hear gems of this kind. A Main Liner in, I believe, one of Philip Barry’s plays says, “We don’t pay any attention to our daughters, but we train good horses, by Gad!” I asked about Gifford Pinchot, Pennsylvania’s late great governor and conservationist, and got the reply, “He offended me as a trout fisherman; the fellow actually fished downstream.” At one dinner party I heard the remark, “The trouble with Stokowski is that he is a damned good musician!” At another I listened to William Penn being referred to affectionately as “Billy,” and learned that Hitler and Mussolini were representatives of the common people and that consequently the common people are to be damned, that of course Roosevelt was “a traitor to his class” (this cliché popped up actually in this form), and that American elections are a farce, since the majority, even if it is only 51 per cent, can overrule the minority. Dave Stern once printed, strictly as satire, a letter purporting to come from a local Croesus urging that the unemployed be sterilized. To his horror, dozens of people took it seriously. At one gathering, with my own ears I heard a frigid snob call the president of the United States “that haberdasher.” In forty-eight states, over thirteen months, in talk with a thousand people, I heard this remark only here.5
Does the aristocracy of Philadelphia live up to its civic obligations? Parts of the city, so frowsy and derelict these days, look like an old man losing his teeth. But municipal decay is a complex phenomenon; no single group has responsibility. The fact that for many years Philadelphia was ruled by a political machine monstrously knavish certainly played a role. The Main Line and the aristocracy are factors largely through their absence, one might say. “The people who own the city,” writes George Sessions Perry, “have abandoned it.”6 This phenomenon is not, of course, peculiar to Philadelphia; we have noted it in Boston and Chicago. In city after city, the ruling class moves out to escape the pressure of urban taxes. The Main Line settled itself in its beautiful homes and formal gardens, continued to make its money in the city, and left it to decay. One theory I heard was that “the automobile has killed Philadelphia,” by making it easier to flee from. “Everybody with $3,000 a year lives in the suburbs.” Of course this is an exaggeration, but it expresses the prevailing mood. Meantime the oligarchy has not had everything its own way financially, by any means. The trustees of Philadelphia, like those of Boston, invested the old family fortunes with extreme conservatism. They did not go in for anything so daredevil as automobiles or banks. The basis of the ancient wealth was real estate; a sound mortgage was venerated in Philadelphia practically on the same level as the Episcopal church. But now, with the city deliquescing, the value of urban mortgages has been drastically reduced, and the Main Line suffers along with everybody else.
In any case Philadelphia is full of troubles. The valuation of real and personal property dropped from almost five billion dollars in 1930 to roughly three billion in 1944, and the city is tax-delinquent by millions. This has, of course, played havoc with revenue, and public works, even in the simplest matters of street repair, consequently suffer. Yet, a proud city that hated the New Deal, Philadelphia flatly refused a 60 million dollar offer from the Public Works Administration during the depression. This spirit carries right on to date. Philadelphia has fifteen times the population of Camden, New Jersey, across the Delaware River; 22 years ago Camden set out to reorganize its approaches to the bridge connecting the two cities, and employed as good engineers as were available. But Philadelphia has still to do the same thing at its end. A subway spur along Locust Street, built at a cost of eight million dollars, was never finished; the tunnel is still there, empty, derelict, without tracks or stations. In 1930, twelve years after World War I, Philadelphia started a campaign to build a veterans’ hospital. Today, two years after World War II, it still hasn’t got one. Some 400,000 veterans of both wars live in the city; for them, 550 hospital beds are available.7 Conditions in Byberry, the hospital for mental diseases, make it a kind of Bedlam, as the reports of Albert Deutsch in PM recently disclosed. On the other hand, Philadelphia is very self-conscious about its pigeons. In order to weed them out, an ordinance was passed recently forbidding the citizenry to feed them.
Finally, water. Philadelphia drinks its own sewage, chlorinated. The City of Brotherly Love is, in fact, the only one of similar rank in the nation where the quality of the drinking water is a compelling problem. Both the Delaware and the Schuylkill are filthy rivers, slimy with industrial and human waste. One expert recently termed the Port of Philadelphia “the largest, vilest, and foulest fresh water port in the world”; its water is so tainted that, literally, it damages the steel walls of ships. Every day, some 350 million gallons of raw sewage pour into the rivers that are the city’s only source of water supply. To create a proper supply, and to avoid the necessity of chlorination which affects the taste of the local water even though making it safe enough, would cost 150 million dollars. The industrial plants upriver would have to change their techniques in getting rid of waste, which is at present simply dumped into the rivers, and so many of them oppose projects for amelioration and reform.
A heavy blow came to Philadelphia in 1946. Wholeheartedly, almost with desperation, the city hoped to be the United Nations capital. The entire community bestirred itself, from top to bottom, to gain this prize which might have served to revivify it and renew its ancient distinction. But though Philadelphia wanted the UN, the UN didn’t want Philadelphia.
Society of Friends
No community of people in America has a more substantial record in good citizenship than the Quakers. This goes all the way back to William Penn himself; Penn’s laws were a hundred years in advance of his time, and the Quaker precepts of diligence, modesty, and firm belief in the fundamental goodness of man worked their way deep into the life of the commonwealth. Came the Revolution, and the Quakers resigned in a body from the legislature rather than support any military action. Then opened what historians call the “Period of Quietism,” and gradually Quaker participation in public affairs diminished. Meantime, however, the faith spread widely. For a time the Friends dominated New Jersey and Delaware as well as Pennsylvania; they held the balance of power in Maryland, and had considerable importance as far afield as Rhode Island and North Carolina.8
Today Pennsylvania is still the citadel of Quakerism, though some other states have more members, for instance Indiana. Mostly the influence of the Friends, in and around Philadelphia, is intangible, an invisible permeation of the atmosphere; Quakers are respected, and a great many old Philadelphia families have Quaker blood. A big source of their power is, too, the fact that many non-Quakers, often without realizing it, have absorbed Quaker characteristics. The frontiers of the sect are not closely defined. Trying to assemble a list of leading Quakers, I asked some important members if, for example, M. W. Clement, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was a Friend. Nobody knew.
More directly, Quaker influence is spread by its splendid schools. Swarthmore and Haverford are both Quaker institutions, though you don’t have to be a Quaker to attend either; Bryn Mawr was founded by Quakers, though it is not a Quaker college today. Then, among secondary schools, the role is profound in the community of the George School, the William Penn Charter School, and the Germantown Friends School. To several of these the upper level of Philadelphia citizenry, whether Friends or not, send their children, and have done so for generations.
Strawbridge & Clothier (one of the big local department stores) is Quaker owned, and the Provident Trust Company is a Quaker bank. In most other long-established Philadelphia banks, for instance the Girard Trust or the Corn Exchange, there will be a Quaker or two on the board of directors; this is also true of the big insurance companies, like that which still maintains the honored name “Pennsylvania Company for Insurances on Lives and Granting Annuities.” Despite all this, the main weight of Quaker influence is cultural. The president of the Philadelphia board of education is a Friend; so is the president of the art museum, and so are several leading professors at the university. The leader of the Quaker community itself is the venerable Rufus M. Jones, honorary chairman of the American Friends Service Committee.
The Quakers were long divided amongst themselves; the “orthodox” or Arch Street Friends made one wing, and the Hicksites or Race Street Friends the other. The theology of this is not our concern; more than a hundred years ago a man named Elias Hicks led a revolt against what he thought was the increasingly formal theology of rich Quakers in the towns. But now this fissure, after much hard-headed pondering, has at last been healed.
Quakers still maintain unchanged a good many of their original characteristics, though of course they no longer wear broad-brimmed hats or otherwise dress differently from their neighbors. Alcohol and tobacco are in theory proscribed, and good Quakers say “thee” and “thou.” There is no tithe as in the Mormon church, and no collections; the ministry is unpaid, and all financial support comes from voluntary contributions. The meeting houses have no altar or formal service, and the organization is democratic to an extreme degree. For instance the faith has no official head, and issues are settled by discussion and compromise, never by formal vote or even by raising of hands. A subject will be aired, pro and con; nothing is accepted save by unanimous consent. This makes progress sure, if slow.
Politics of the Pennsylvanians
I don’t like Joe Pew’s brand of politics.
—Wendell Willkie
As of the time I did my research in Pennsylvania, the dominant political personalities were three men named Joe—Joe Pew, Joe Grundy, and Joe Guffey. In 1946, however, Senator Guffey, a strong New Dealer, was beaten for re-election by the Republican governor, General Martin, and the three Joes became two, with Pew and Grundy at the top of the heap again.
Pennsylvania probably has the most confused and internecine politics of any state, and it is one of the most difficult in the union to administer. When I asked who or what ran it, one answer was, “Nobody—it just runs”; another was “Everybody—pulling it by the nose,” and a third was the simple word, “Corruption!” Pennsylvania has public men as ambitious as Brewster, as reactionary as Bridges, as stubbornly prejudiced as Taft, and who leave spoors almost like that of McKellar. Above all it is a big-money state, and its politics ring with cash. For a generation or more, almost as Republican as Vermont, it was the most “dependable” big Republican state in the union; hence most of the more volcanic struggles took place within the GOP itself, which led to intricate and stormy splits and fusions, often with the Republican command biting itself in half.
The names flicker in and out of history: Matthew S. Quay, the first statewide boss, who like William S. Vare was refused a seat in the Senate “even when it was controlled by his own party,” so dubious was his reputation;9 the late Senator Boies Penrose, who ate himself to death, and whose statue faces the capitol at Harrisburg today, in significant symbolism; the coal masters like Frick and the iron masters, oil masters, railway masters; in a different category eruptive romantic youngsters like William C. Bullitt, who was beaten recently for the Philadelphia mayoralty by an unholy coalition between tycoons and Communists; ancient and glacial magnates like Andrew W. Mellon, “the meanest man in the world,” and odd characters who sat next to him in the Cabinet like “Puddler Jim” Davis, former secretary of labor and ruler of the Loyal Order of Moose.
The main background element in all this is that Pennsylvania was built substantially by manufacturers; the manufacturing class in turn based its existence on a high tariff, and was ferociously Republican. For years, the bosses were able to dominate affairs by the simple expedient of going to the great manufacturers, and threatening to raise taxes if campaign contributions were not forthcoming. Or, as it developed, the manufacturers themselves entered politics freely, and gave without the necessity of being asked or threatened, in order to implement their own control. Political and industrial bossism merged.
Then came Roosevelt. He was beaten by Hoover in 1932, but he carried Pennsylvania the other three times he ran. In 1934, Guffey became the state’s first Democratic senator in more than fifty years, and the next year George H. Earle, a close friend of Bullitt’s and Dave Stern’s, became the first Democratic governor since the turn of the century. This was revolution. Earle, a notably picturesque character to put it very mildly, forced through laws—amid the most violent hurly-burly—restricting child labor, establishing the forty-four-hour week for women, and enlarging the scope of workmen’s compensation, unemployment relief, and the like. Pittsburgh went Democratic too, for the first time in its history. Later Earle’s regime collapsed, to the tune of wholesale scandal among underlings, but the mayor of Pittsburgh today is David L. Lawrence, who was secretary of the commonwealth under Earle and who is still state chairman of the Democratic party.
The magnates had, of course, gone too far. Until Earle, the big “interests” had had everything their own way; above all they were able to write their own tax bills. The immense, beneficent force of Roosevelt carried into Pennsylvania, but it did not last, if only for the reason that the statewide Democratic organization, can never be as strong as the Republican, because it does not control Philadelphia. In 1946 came the inevitable reaction, and the resurgent Republicans swept the state almost clean. Yet, since 1932,-much ancient ice has been broken. Nobody can predict what will happen next. Chester County, along the Main Line, used to go Republican by twenty to one. Now it goes Republican by two to one, or less. One of the grand old men of Philadelphia told me, “But it wasn’t just the war. It wasn’t just Roosevelt. This country is changing. People change.”
Money is still, however, the biggest factor in Pennsylvania politics. The following is from a speech by Senator Guffey, made on the Senate floor on March 8, 1945:
The Republican leaders in Pennsylvania are preparing to buy or steal the election of 1946. For that purpose they have accumulated a corruption fund of $875,000 for which they do not expect to account. This corruption fund was distributed by the Pews and the other oily fat cats … as part of the 1944 campaign fund but has been held over for future use …
In that election [of 1944] the various Republican state organizations have reported expenditures to a total of $2,367,539.12. These figures are admittedly incomplete … I mention these facts primarily to remind the Senate and the country … of the multimillionaires, the fat cats, who seek to buy political power by spending money on politics. Just to make the point clear, it would seem that the 1,835,048 votes they garnered for Governor Dewey … cost them almost $2 a vote.
The various Democratic committees in Pennsylvania spent a total of $520,000 in 1944, to which I will add the $92,000 spent by the Political Action Committee, making a total of $612,000 … This was used to produce a total vote for Roosevelt of 1,940,479 or little more than 30 cents per vote. If we had had more money I do not know what we could have done with it unless we had used it to corrupt the voters.
What I want to know is why the Republicans needed $2 a voter to lose the election while the Democratic party needed only 30 cents a voter to win.
The dean of Pennsylvania bosses, Joseph Ridgway Grundy, a Quaker, a bachelor (like Guffey), an amateur historian, and a wealthy Bristol textile manufacturer, is over eighty. He is in the grand line, coming down from Penrose. For many years he was president of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association; he led the fight against reform of the child labor laws; his contribution to American history may be judged from the fact that, more than any other man, he was responsible for the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill, which was a major provoking cause of the world economic crisis of the 1930’s and the subsequent depression. Mr. Grundy is still interested in the tariff. He wrote the tariff plank at the 1944 Republican convention.10 Like most bosses, Grundy does not run for office often. In 1930, he was appointed to fill a Senate vacancy; but in those days there was a mile-deep and disorderly schism between the state organization and his machine, and he was badly beaten by the one-time iron worker, James J. Davis.11
Joseph Newton Pew Jr. is a comparative newcomer to the Pennsylvania scene; he did not enter as a major actor until the middle 1930’s. What Pew is is Mr. Money Bags. He and Grundy work together, and more or less divide their functions; Grundy is a chieftain on the state level, Pew in Philadelphia. Pew is also a very wealthy man, the vice president of and a large stockholder in the Sun Oil Company, one of the richest corporations in the country. Also he has big shipping interests and is a publisher of considerable power, through his agricultural journals the Pathfinder and Farm Journal, which have a very substantial national circulation. Pew is about sixty. He voted for Roosevelt,12 horresco referens, in 1932; then he went to Washington to help draft the petroleum code under NRA; this experience disillusioned him, and he became a perfervid Roosevelt hater. For a decade in fact Mr. Pew was one of the fiercest anti-Roosevelt crusaders in the country. He thinks of himself as saving the nation from FDR even now.
Many Pennsylvania men of affairs are inclined to minimize Pew, I found. They dismiss him as a mere plutocrat. He really thinks, as he said once, that only I per cent of the country is fit to rule, and that they should. Some people say that he is not a “real” boss, because his influence is so totally negative. But after all he has been the chief mechanism for keeping the Republican party in the state alive financially. People say that “he has even less imagination than Bob Taft,” that, despite his services, he is a dead weight on leadership, and that he treats Philadelphia like a corporation in bankruptcy.
A federal law forbids any individual from giving more than $5,000 in campaign contributions to any group. Mr. Pew has, I am perfectly sure, never broken any law, and would not do so. Nevertheless his campaign contributions to the party in the past ten years are estimated at more than a million dollars. He is the chief Republican angel of modern times. How is such largesse legally distributed? First, contributions may be given in the name of relatives or friends; second, they may not be gifts at all, but loans. If a loan should happen not to be repaid that is, of course, a matter for private settlement. No law is broken. The Republican City Committee in Philadelphia is supposed to be in debt to Pew for a very considerable sum, which serves, naturally, to keep it in perpetual fief to the creditor. But nobody has broken any law.
The Philadelphia Record printed a report in 1944 that Clinton Anderson, at present secretary of agriculture and at that time a member of a Congressional Committee investigating contributions, had proof, in the form of four canceled checks, that scurrilous post cards attacking the late Sidney Hillman had been paid for by persons close to Pew, in the office of the Pathfinder. Pew bitterly “resented and repudiated” the charge, and denied categorically that he had anything whatever to do with the affair. John W. Owens in the Baltimore Sun, one of the most irreproachable political reporters in the country, had previously charged that Pew, or members of the Pew family, had given varying sums to such a strange (but maybe not so strange) miscellany of organizations as the Liberty League, the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, the Sentinels of the Republic, and the Farmers Independence Council, which last had fought the social security laws, child labor reform, and agricultural relief. Mr. Owens also stated that the Pew family had contributed more than $300,000 to the Landon campaign, and that its contributions to the Willkie funds (though Pew had frantically opposed Willkie at the Philadelphia convention), amounted to $113,000, spread through ten states. New Jersey got $16,000 and Missouri $14,000. Vermont and South Dakota (safe!) had to be content with $1,000 each.
Turn now to Harrisburg and the legislature. I heard one former governor say calmly that “it was 80 per cent honest.” What the biggest lobby is depends on which is threatened most. But trades between various special interests and the lawmakers cannot be performed so crudely now as heretofore. One famous device was “the pinch bill.” This was a threat to write legislation militating against some group of manufacturers, or any other group, which was then called upon to buy off the projected legislation. Another device was a promise by legislators, favorable to the interests of some special group, to initiate legislation against this group, in order to gain the support of do-gooders who were opposing it. Then, a few days before the session closed, when it was too late to begin anew, the bill would be mysteriously withdrawn and killed.
Finally, Philadelphia. Here we must go back to the immortal Penrose and even before: Bryce was writing about Philadelphia corruption fifty years ago. Penrose, an extremely clever and able man (but not clever enough to avoid being photographed once emerging from a fancy house, which was a minor embarrassment during one election), had machines both in city and county, so that if he lost in one, he could recoup through the other. Then he cultivated what contemporary Philadelphians call the “weak liberals”; in fact he set up a so-called “independent” liberal committee all his own, in order to control this wing of the vote too. Old citizens of the town and political connoisseurs despise the degeneration that followed Penrose; they consider it beneath Philadelphia’s dignity that a subsequent ring of bosses, the Vares, based their operations on the city’s garbage collections, and worked in similar unbecoming media.
Another Penrose device was the staggering of elections. They are still carefully arranged so that, most of the time anyway, the local polls do not coincide with the national vote. For instance a slate of county officers like coroner, controller, and some magistrates, comes up in, say, 1945. Governor, members of the legislature, and half the senate, however, do not come up till 1946. Then in 1947 it is the turn of the mayor of Philadelphia, district attorney, recorder of deeds, and the like. By the time the presidential election rolls along, when the vote is sure to be much bigger and when the Democrats would have more chance, most Republicans are safely in. The Democrats, of course, if they get the opportunity, make use of this arrangement exactly as do the Republicans.
The vote of municipal officeholders themselves, though small, is another important item. There are some 21,000 citizens in the employ of Philadelphia, from firemen to the janitors who, it seems, crowd every inch of the City Hall without keeping it clean, and one of their duties is not only to vote themselves, but to get out the vote of others. Promotions in several categories depend on a nod from the precinct committeemen, and most of the division leaders, ward heelers and so on, are of course deeply imbedded in the public payroll. In the old days, as in most great cities, terrific sanctions could be taken against anybody who strayed from the machine, or defied it. In a flash the sanitation department could find your plumbing unsatisfactory, and rip your bathroom out before your very eyes.
1 As interesting as any specialized publication I know is the monthly Pennsylvania Game News. It contains sentences like “Raccoons may be hunted at night, with a noon-to-noon daily limit,” and “Traps must not be placed closer than 15 feet from the waterline of any established beaver house.” The State Game Commission has an elaborate “predator control” system to protect important fur-bearing animals like minks. Bounties were paid in a recent season for 8,032 gray foxes and 16,509 weasels.
2 Pennsylvania in the American Guide Series, pp. 22–24.
3 But the next census may well put Los Angeles and Detroit ahead.
4 Later I repeated this to a stanch citizen of Pittsburgh, who replied, “Philadelphians? Oh, them!”
5 Philadelphia has an admirable Jewish community, it might be added, philanthropic, civic minded, able. Consider Rosenwalds, Gimbels, Masbaums, Wolfs, Fleishers, Felses. One historic colony of seven Jewish families lived for years on what was called “Jews Hill.” Some of these turned Christian however.
6 In his lively Cities of America series, Saturday Evening Post, September 14, 1946.
7 Philadelphia Record, October 14, 1945.
8 This is the more remarkable in that the Friends, unlike the Mormons whom they resemble in some respects, were never direct colonizers; they never went into politics or worldly affairs as an organization.
9 Cf. The Big Bosses, by Charles Van Devander, p. 135.
10 According to PM, May 13, 1946.
11 Mr. Davis must be one of the greatest joiners in American annals. Not only does he run the Moose, but he is a member of the Masons, Mystic Shrine, Grotto, Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias. Elks, Eagles, Foresters, Protected Home Circle, Knights of the Golden Eagle, Woodmen of the World, and Maccabees. See Van Devander, op. cit., p. 142.
12 According to Potomacus in the New Republic, May 8, 1944.