Roaring Metropolis. Daniel Amsterdam
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but only temporarily. During the administration of Mayor John E. Reyburn—a machine politician who took office in 1907—the city constructed the western tip of the downtown parkway and began purchasing land for the proposed parks along Pennypack Creek and Cobbs Creek. The Reyburn administration also completed large portions of the Northeastern Boulevard—a project that proved to be a boon to Reyburn’s political allies. A number of machine politicians bought property in the path of the proposed roadway as well as in surrounding areas. They then sold the land needed to build the street back to the city for a sizable profit and watched the values of their remaining property rise as the boulevard was constructed. Political power broker “Sunny Jim” McNichol owned the contracting firm that built the road in exchange for $1.4 million in public funds. In antimachine circles, the project became known as the “McNichol Boodlevard.”41
After Reyburn left office, however, friction between the city’s bosses and reformers once again stymied progress on these and other projects. In 1911, independents successfully exploited a power struggle between the two main factions of the Republican machine and elected as mayor longtime independent reformer and manufacturer Rudolph Blankenburg. Even so, machine politicians continued to dominate the city council. The result was gridlock. Blankenburg attempted to squeeze graft out of the city’s political system, while city councilmen allied with the machine clung to the status quo and tried to keep Blankenburg’s legislative achievements to a minimum. Bickering over how the city awarded public contracts held up construction on the downtown parkway for the entirety of Blankenburg’s four-year term. Similar dynamics hampered progress on the art museum project. Hewing to strict budgetary principles, Blankenburg refused to appropriate funds for the building early in his tenure. When he finally bowed to public pressure and did so, the city council suddenly turned against the proposal in an attempt to humiliate the mayor. Major appropriations for the museum failed to make it into the city’s budget until Blankenburg’s third year in office. Architectural challenges then brought further delays. Quarrels between Blankenburg and the city council also slowed work on the proposed library, so much so that in 1915—the third year of Blankenburg’s term—the popular preacher Billy Sunday was able to hold a revival on the empty lot where the library was slated to stand.42
The machine returned to power in full force under Blankenburg’s successor, Mayor Thomas B. Smith. In characteristic machine fashion, Smith funneled money from the city’s treasury to his political allies through contracts on public projects, including the downtown parkway. Just a month before the end of World War I, the parkway finally opened to traffic. The commitment of the city’s most powerful politicians and its wealthiest citizens had easily swept aside resistance among business owners and working-class Philadelphians displaced by the project. The vehicles that christened the new roadway traveled on pavement that “Sunny Jim” McNichol’s construction company had helped to lay just before McNichol died. But they also drove down a street wholly unadorned by the civic structures that local business leaders had hoped to build. Despite progress, the Tacony, Pennypack, and Cobbs Creek park and parkway projects remained unfinished as the nation transitioned from war to peace.43
Independent reformers’ fight against boss rule reaped a similarly disappointing harvest—a fact that had major consequences for business leaders’ political activism in the years that followed. In 1917, another rift developed between the two main wings of Philadelphia’s Republican machine—one controlled by the Vare brothers and the other by Boies Penrose (who ruled on his own after his partner “Sunny Jim” McNichol passed away). The fissure stemmed from a municipal primary in the city’s Fifth Ward, an area in the heart of what was once colonial Philadelphia. Tensions mounted in the lead-up to the election, as policemen allied with the Vares repeatedly harassed supporters of Penrose’s candidate, James A. Carey. As voters cast their ballots, Vare underlings in the city’s police department arrested over two dozen Carey backers and closed a number of polls. When Carey and two colleagues went to check on reports of foul play, a group of Vare-hired thugs accosted them. The Vare henchmen eventually opened fire and killed a police officer who had tried to intervene.44
The outcry that followed the killing suggested that local sentiment had turned sharply against the Vares. In an attempt to capitalize on public outrage, independent reformers established a new political party—the Town Meeting Party—and ran candidates in the November general election against the Vares’ Republican slate. In a rare move, Penrose urged his supporters to vote for the Town Meeting Party’s antimachine candidates. But even murder and Penrose’s endorsement could not bring independent reformers a decisive victory. The Vares survived the 1917 election, yet so did the fledgling partnership between Penrose and the city’s independent reformers. Within a year, Penrose and independents—including leaders of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce—had begun to plot a major reformation of the city charter and with it the Vares’ demise.45
In designing the new charter, independents especially sought to change the composition of Philadelphia’s city council, which at the time was a bicameral body with 146 members elected from the city’s forty-eight wards. Unlike their counterparts in Detroit, municipal reformers in Philadelphia did not attempt to replace the existing city council with one elected entirely at large. Their newfound ally Penrose would have rejected such a proposal since his power was in part ward based. Still, reformers hoped that the new council would feature at least some at-large representation to dilute ward politicians’ strength. They also wanted to reform Philadelphia’s civil service system. Under existing law the mayor had the power to appoint the city’s three-member civil service commission. Mayors allied with the Republican machine regularly turned the commission into a patronage mill. Independents wanted the city council to appoint a single civil service commissioner by a two-thirds vote. They also proposed bringing the sizable county government (whose jurisdiction was coterminus with the city itself) under civil service law in order to cut a major source of machine patronage.46
Yet the legislative process and the whims of Boies Penrose whittled down each one of these proposals. Pennsylvania governor William C. Sproul came out early against anything but token at-large representation in the city council, most likely to mollify machine politicians in the state legislature who opposed abolishing ward power. When a revised charter became law in June 1919, it made no provision for at-large members in the new council. Instead, it provided for a single-chamber body with twenty-one members drawn from the city’s eight senatorial districts. The new system apportioned a council member to each district plus another for every twenty thousand voters within a given district’s boundaries.47
Legislative wrangling also weakened the civil service reforms that independents had initially proposed. Instead of one civil service commissioner appointed by two-thirds of the city council, as reformers had advocated, the final law left the city’s existing three-member commission intact. The new charter gave the city council rather than the mayor the power to appoint the commissioners, as reformers had wanted, but by majority rather than supermajority vote. Meanwhile, rural legislators, some of them aligned with Penrose, balked at bringing Philadelphia County under civil service regulations. Many of them were products of county patronage systems and feared that changing the laws that governed Philadelphia would open the floodgates for statewide reform. Once enacted, the new charter brought an additional fifteen thousand city jobs into the civil service system, but county jobs remained unregulated. This loophole left thousands of positions open to patronage appointment, including in the county courts as well as in the offices of the county commissioners, county coroner, the register of wills, and the recorder of deeds. As independents had wanted, the new charter outlawed politicking among the city’s police and firemen (a reaction to the murder in the Fifth-Ward primary). But the political activities of other public employees remained largely unregulated, including campaign contributions. Thus, political bosses could continue one of their most lucrative practices under the new charter: filling their war chests with mandatory donations from Philadelphians whom they had placed in patronage posts.48
Independents were more successful in implementing some of the administrative and procedural reforms that they sought. The new charter abolished a number of antiquated public commissions and replaced them with new municipal departments featuring clearer lines of authority. Independents also succeeded in revising the city’s budget-making process. Still, it is difficult to imagine that independents