700
PARTISAN REVIEW
the homogeneous quality of the city is shared by its newspapers, for
they almost never contradict each other. A third paper called
The
Daily News
exists. It it made up largely of syndicated columns and
the U. S. Treasury Report- thus gaining much of its circulation from
numbers players.
Dilworth's darts did manage to stir the huge Republican jellyfish,
enough to cause it to put up a purer slate of candidates than usual, and
for the machine bosses (Sheriff Austin Meehan is the most notorious
of these, though hardly a rival to the colorful Yare brothers of the
twenties) to sling all the mud they could dig up at the crusading
lawyer. The Sheriff enabled Dilworth to reach his high point of enter–
tainment value when he challenged him to a debate in the sacrosanct
A~ademy
of Music. The hall was packed and' the largest radio and
television audience in the city's history learned about a divorce action
Dilworth had been involved in during the prohibition era.
However, a newspaperman told me, "civic indignation reached its
peak around that time." That it was civic indignation which caused the
defeat of the machine in November is clear enough, mild-mannered
though it may be. It is perhaps in response to it that a rather note–
worthy phenomenon has come into being in Philadelphia:
planning.
Even the officials seem to notice that while the city's progress is
certainly slow it is not at all sure, and so two planning organizations
were formed to draft plans and make recommendations for municipal
improvement. One is called The Redevelopment Authority; the other
The City Planning Commission. A third and unofficial organization,
The Citizen's Council of City Planning, now exists, evidently to check
on the planning being done by the other two.
The progress reports put out by these planning outfits make in–
teresting reading, though I should think that any Philadelphian who
read them with care would make plans, were it possible, to move
clsewhere. One learns, through the Redevelopment Authority report, of
th(, immense blight that has fallen upon many of the city areas. Pilot
plans show ten of these areas selected for reclamation, and the report
states about them: "The city has definitely selected certain territories as
the likeliest spots in which to commence real work." It is, of course, a
typically Philadelphian kind of sentence: you see the anonymous
author's awareness of past indecisions and failures (note the use of the
word
definitely
and the rather pathetic need to qualify
work
with
real) ;
you see him trying to assume the mask of certainty as he treads out
into the unknown; and a native stuffiness shows up in the choice of
