698
PARTISAN REVIEW
man cars), an important fresh water port, an immigration headquarters,
the dwelling place of more than two million people, the focus of an area
servicing three million more--and looking no more lively than Coney
Island on a cold winter day. I remembered, thinking of my friend's
greeting and the old chestnut it called to mind, that Philadelphia has
been called the biggest provincial village in the world( rather it
is
a
collection of such villages), and I could not help but feel that an un–
kind fate had come upon the city that was once America's first and
greatest metropolis, as well as its first capital. Was it New York loom–
ing just over the horizon which sent a chill shadow over this city?
One is forced, for explanation, to invent private theories. Do
Philadelphians suffer from a kind of native malady which induces dull–
ness and a certain apathy, a mass vitamin deficiency perhaps, one of the
sort whose need in spiritual nutrition has not yet been established?
Because, though time has indeed darkened this city, there is a dinginess
to it that years alone cannot account for. (Think of the brightness and
color of far, far older European cities.) Your trolley will travel on and
on through a drab, red brick sameness, through noisome slums that have
spread like a creeping fungus. The trolley has no name; all too often it
goes to much the same sort of place it has come from. To live here is
like imperceptibly sinking in quicksand; it requires all one's energies
to remain stationary.
As far back as 1903 Lincoln Steffens gave Philadelphia its most
familiar characterization - "corrupt and contented" - and few have
bothered to quarrel with the term since. Professor Cornelius Weygandt
perhaps, and it is proudly that he writes, "The true Philadelphian is a
Republican by birthright . . . and would no more think of changing
his party than he would his religion." And it is undoubtedly at the
"Republican" kind of Philadelphia we must look to blame for much of
the current state of affairs. For corruption of the kind Steffens meant
has, year by year, increased the mouldiness of the city. The Republicans
got a stranglehold on City Hall around the time it was built (an
architectural mistake that can never be rectified) in the 1870's, and
not even the popularity of Roosevelt could get them to release it. The
ward-heelers and the "true blue-bloods" formed an unholy alliance in
the time of Senator Penrose: the Pennsylvania Railroad is in the brother–
hood somewhere, and so are the notorious Pews of the Sun Oil Com–
pany. The only satisfaction left to them is that they remain in control
of a diseased and shoddy city, one that has degenerated into material
for a series of bad vaudeville jokes. Struthers Burt has also reported
that Philadelphia mothers used to have their children add
to
their
