CROSS-COUNTRY
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prayers, "And, 0 dear God, please bless the PRR, the Girard Trust
Company, and the Republican Party." It would seem that, up until
this most recent election, when reform elements won some minor
municipal seats, it was a remarkably efficacious prayer.
But it is also true that now and then someone in Philadelphia will
seem to obtain a dose of the peculiar missing vitamin. A publisher,
J.
David Stern, was infused with it during New Deal days and he made
The Philadelphia Record
into a forceful newspaper, only to fight the
strike of its employees by ceasing publication. And of late there has been
Richardson Dilworth, a lawyer who began crusading for a change in
municipal political habits when he ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 1947
and who succeeded when he tried for the office of city treasurer in the
relatively unimportant 1949 elections. He whipped up street corner
rallies as one of his techniques, and from the twenty minute talks he
delivered nightly to the good-sized crowds (for something in his clean–
cut appearance and sincere manner appealed to them) I was able to
get a quick summary of the local scandals Philadelphians know nearly
as well as they know the names of the players on the local ball clubs.
Here they were again: the "drones" in City Hall who padded the
city payrolls while spending leisurely afternoons at the Camden race
track on the other side of the Delaware; the machine politicians who
have organized numbers and slot machine rackets on a ward to ward
basis; the water tax racket (reduced bills to manufacturers in return for
"gifts" to the collectors) ; the need for the
22,000
municipal employees
to kick back to the Republican campaign fund in order to keep their
jobs. It wasn't necessary for Dilworth to repeat himself at each meet–
ing; the list of these scandals offered him a seemingly endless variety
of material. The homeliest and perhaps most effective touch was the
one about the firemen having to supply their own toilet paper for the
firehouses. The crowds listened to them like children hearing a story
told many times before: Dilworth's appeal resulted more, it was said,
from his entertainment value (there is a masochistic satisfaction to be
gained from hearing one's home place derided) than from
his
edifying
ability.
The reform elements were actually helped by the Republican
newspapers, which showed no hesitation in spreading the scandals over
its pages. With the folding of the
Record
the opposition voice was lost,
and the
Bulletin
and the
Inquirer
(afternoon and morning papers
respectively-nearly everyone reads both of them) felt called upon to fill
the need for it by means of their own columns. What has been called
