Author: Ken Finkel

Sergeant Fred Lloyd became an instant American wartime legend in September 1918, when he singlehandedly cleared an entire German-occupied village by walking the streets “pumping and firing” an army-issue, 12-gauge, Winchester Model 97 shotgun.

Stateside, the shotgun had been the firearm of choice for game hunting. On the battlefields of World War I, it earned the nickname “trench sweeper.” Germans considered the weapon so lethal they filed a diplomatic protest, charging it caused “unnecessary suffering,” that its use violated the Hague Convention.

After the war, American police put the shotgun to work on city streets, claiming it outperformed the submachine gun.

Philadelphia police had already adopted the motorcycle as a crime fighting tool. In 1915, the department argued that a “Flying Squadron” of 200 officers on motorcycles “would be equivalent to 1,000 footmen …more effective than men on horseback” and less costly. When they added shotgun-wielding sharpshooters in sidecars to the mix, urban policing would take an aggressive turn.

“A new era in the development of the Philadelphia Police forces is scheduled to begin today,” reported Richard J. Beamish in the Inquirer of December 23, 1920. “Philadelphia’s Christmas presents for motor bandits are ready: 150 armed motorcycles, most of them with sidecars, a stack of sawed-off shotguns, each pumping six shells of buck shot in rapid succession. A battalion of intensively trained motorcycle and automobile drivers whose daring and sharpshooting will make them deadly foes to bandits.” A handpicked, photogenic “squad of ‘bandit hunters’” would overcome getaway cars going as fast as 80 miles per hour. With their “sawed-offs,” police were “guaranteed to blow the tire from a motor car or end the career of a fugitive robber.”

For sheer effectiveness, but also for the optics of power, shotguns became the go-to weapon. In 1954, Police Commissioner Gibbons’ “shotgun squad” aimed “a stepped-up war on violent crimes, especially those committed by ‘hop-heads,’” referring to drug users. Every squad car in the detective division had at least two men with sawed-off shot guns, not stowed away, but on full display.

“Shotgun Squads Patrol the Streets” read the headline.

It was only a matter of time before the shotgun became a symbol of police power in a racially divided city.

According to the The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, the police department, then 95 percent white, “fielded ‘shotgun squads’ of officers patrolling in cars with sawed-off shotguns leaning out the windows in a show of force” in African-American neighborhoods. On repeated occasions, in the 1950s, Police Commissioner Thomas J. Gibbons “ordered mass arrests of hundreds of young black men.”

“Of the thirty-two people shot and killed by police between 1950 and 1960, twenty-eight—87.5 percent—were black, even though blacks made up 22 percent of the city population.”

As a symbol of power, the shotgun would be brought by police and brought up by protestors. During the 1964 campaign for the integration of Girard College marchers “announced their readiness to physically resist police violence,” wrote Matthew J. Countryman in Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia. “To the tune of ‘We Shall Overcome,’ the protesters sang ‘We Shall Overrun.’ One favorite chant promised violent revenge on the police: ‘Jingle Bells / shotgun shells / Freedom all the way / Oh, what fun it is / To blow a bluecoat man away.’ Another began ‘Cecil’s got a shotgun,’” referring to leader of the protests, civil rights activist and later City Councilman, Cecil B. Moore.

Two years later, police Commissioner Frank Rizzo “organized four squads of shotgun-toting cops to raid offices and an apartment associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) heavily armed police backed by 1000 uniformed officers raided four buildings.”

Rizzo’s men would arrive in bulletproof vests carrying sawed-off shotguns.

(Sources: Tom Laemlein, “The Trouble with Trench Guns,” The American Rifleman, January 23, 2018;  Glenn H. Utter Guns and Contemporary Society: The Past, Present, and Future of Firearms and Firearm Policy (ABC-CLIO, December 1, 2015); “’Flying Squadron’” is Potter’s Plan,” The Inquirer, March 5, 1915;  “New Police Plan Before Council’s Committee Today,” by Richard J. Beamish, The Inquirer, December 1, 1920; “Bureau of Police Ready for Bandits,” The Inquirer, December 23, 1920; “Philadelphia’s ‘Bandit Chasers’ and their ‘sawed-offs,’” The Inquirer, August 8, 1922; “City’s War on Crime Calls for Frontal Attack,” The Inquirer, September 20, 1954; “Gibbons Places Top Police on 24-Hour Crime Vigil – Shotgun Squads Patrol the Streets,” The Inquirer, November 21, 1954; Matthew J. Countryman, Up South:  Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Jake Blumbgart, “The Brutal Legacy of Frank Rizzo, the Most Notorious Cop in Philadelphia History,”  Vice.com, October 22, 2015.)

In his “Midnight Soliloquy in the Market House of Philadelphia,” Philip Freneau observed:

The market house, like the grave, is a place of perfect equality. None think of themselves too mighty to be seen here, nor are there any so mean as to be excluded. Here you may see (at the proper hour) the whig and the tory – the Churchman and the Quaker – the Methodist and the Presbyterian—the moderate man and the violent—the timorous and the brave—the modest and the impudent—the chaste and the lewd, the philosopher and the simpleton – the blooming lass of fifteen, and the withered matron of sixty—the man worth two pence, and he of a hundred thousand pounds—the huxter with a paper of pins, and the merchant who deals in the produce of both the Indies—the silly politician who has schemed and written himself blind for the service of his country, and the author who wears a fine coat, and is paid to profusion for writing nothing at all!

That was 1782. More than a century and a quarter later, expressions of democratic market life continued to thrive in Philadelphia.

“The curbstone market was a busy scene this morning. Well-gowned women rubbed elbows with the poor housewife in shawl and wrapper, and many of the former learned a few points from the poor woman’s method of buying. While there are no marble counters and spotlessly clad attendants, the curb merchants are dressed for work in hand, and are courteous, too, for they want the same customers to come back again and bring their neighbors.”

Apparently, the customer and the neighbors were returning in Philadelphia, and everywhere else. The curbstone market had evolved into the most universal, democratic food distribution institution.

“Many cities in America and Europe have set aside streets for open air or curbstone markets,” wrote Clyde Lyndon King in 1913. “Vienna has 40 such open markets; Antwerp, 19. The rental for wagon space, as a rule is nominal…whether in Atchison, Kansas, San Antonio, Texas, [or in] Buffalo, New York.” In Cleveland, Ohio, “two and a half miles of streets…are lined by 1300 farmers and 400 hucksters. Both Baltimore and Montreal attract 1500 wagons each market day by their curbstone markets.”

“The pushcart, the vender’s wagon and the open air farmers’ markets offer the cheapest possible store at adaptable locations, and thus should give avenues for food distribution at minimum costs. While there can be no doubt that the covered market will be the better in the long run, yet the open air curbstone market offers a good temporary method of attracting farmers and of giving consumers an opportunity to buy directly.”

The promise of “’producer to consumer’ has always had an alluring sound, wrote an editor of the Inquirer in 1918, “but somehow it has never been effected in a practical and workable manner.”

“Multiply the Curb Markets,” read another editorial. “We have long talked of the advantages of the from ‘farms to table’ idea, and now is the time to prove that it is something more than a beautiful theory.”

All the more appealing when the cost of food supplies at the market halls grew to 50 percent of a workingperson’s paycheck. As food costs rose, editors of the Evening Ledger assigned a reporter to conduct a comparison between “the style and convenience” of shopping in the market halls and the convenience of the curbstone market.

Consider the head of cabbage, urged the report. It may be “bought for five cents, if a woman picks it up from a basket and carries it home.” But the price “is greatly increased … if it is sent home in the dealer’s fancy automobile and delivered in a fancy wooden box by a uniformed messenger.” In order “to economize and get down to simplicity in buying,” the shopper “cannot find a better place than the curbstone market. … Here can be found everything in the produce line, devoid of frills, at low prices.”

During the First World War the situation became even more dire for “the salaried man whose pay envelope is no larger, but whose expenses have been soaring skyward for several years. The curbstone market should be a blessing to such persons and the [curbstone market] experiment will be watched with unusual interest.”

“Curbstone Market Solves Cost of Living Problem” read the headline featuring the reporter’s comparison of prices with those at the Reading Terminal market. The reporter found 17 foods where the shopper “could save $1.20 by patronizing the curbstone market instead of the Terminal Market. Deducting 10 cents for carfare for those who live beyond walking distance from the curbstone market the saving would be $1.10 on each trip…” Assuming three marketing trips per week, the savings would be $3.30 every week, significant savings for families dependent on factory worker wages of $11 per week.

During the First World War the situation became even more dire for “the salaried man whose pay envelope is no larger, but whose expenses have been soaring skyward for several years. The curbstone market should be a blessing to such persons and the [curbstone market] experiment will be watched with unusual interest.”

[Sources: Clyde Lyndon King, Municipal Markets, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 50, Reducing the Cost of Food Distribution (Nov., 1913), pp. 102-117; Candice L. Harrison, The Contest of Exchange: Space, Power, and Politics in Philadelphia’s Public Markets, 1770-1859 (Dissertation in History, Emory University, 2008) PDF; “Curbstone Market Solves Cost of Living Problem,” The Evening Ledger [Philadelphia] October 9, 1914; “Support the Curbstone Markets” Inquirer, August 23, 1918; “Multiply the Curb Markets, Inquirer, September 4, 1918; “More Curb Markets May be Founded,” Inquirer, May 16, 1919.]

The corner store.

Ahem. Let me start again.

The amazing, agile, ubiquitous corner store! We’re been thinking about them for a couple of posts now: It’s 1901: Time to go Grocery Shopping in North Philadelphia and Grocery Chains and the Origins of Philadelphia’s Food Deserts. Regular readers know that, once upon a time, there were thousands of them in Philadelphia: grocery stores, butcher shops, barber shops, pharmacies, variety stores, luncheonettes, book stores, record shops and more. The corner store was the glue that held the city’s neighborhoods together.

In her thesis “Philadelphia Corner Stores: Their History, Use, and Preservation” Lynn Miriam Alpert pointed out how this vernacular urban genre stands “in stark contrast to the concentrations of commercial structures in shopping districts,” and yet is still part and parcel of the city’s rowhouse neighborhoods. Alpert relays that the corner store played an essential role in the employment of women. (In San Francisco at the start of the 20^th century, “ninety percent of female grocers lived at the same address as their stores, allowing them to remain at home while also earning a living.”) And we learn that despite the fact that “Philadelphia’s historic row house neighborhoods have undergone intense changes since their creation,” corner stores still play “an active role in the vibrance and vitality” of their communities. They served as economic drivers.

Indeed. The Bodega Association of the United States confirms that in 2002 alone, the small grocery stores in New York City “generated annual sales of over $7 billion and provided over 65,000 jobs with an annual payroll estimated at $750 million.” And when undocumented workers are factored in, “the actual number of jobs and the aggregate payroll may be closer to twice the official figures.”

When we consider the story of immigration in urban America, the corner store was and remains an essential and compelling feature in the community. According to Fernando Mateo, the neighborhood store faced the onslaught of competition brought on by the supermarket, survived, and to this day serves as a gathering spot, a place “where people get together and go over their daily news, and…become part of their communities.”

The story of the modest corner store in Philadelphia is part and parcel of a robust, inclusive narrative. Yet, with all of our collective interest in place, in food, in identity and in the life and character of our communities, there is no corner store museum.

Maybe it’s time to change that.

I mean, what better way would there be to connect community and memory?

1). Southwest Corner or Gratz and York Streets, Ed Bonnem Prime Meats, May 4, 1905

2). Southwest Corner 7th and Porter Streets, April 6, 1960

3.) Northwest Corner, 17th Street and Washington Avenue, February 7, 1917

4.) Southwest Corner, 25th and Kimball Streets, May 3, 1916

5.) Northeast Corner, Cumberland and Marshall Streets, La Vencedora Groceries, November 9, 1960

6.)  Trenton and Susquehanna Avenues, May 11, 1900

7.) Kimball Street and Grays Ferry Avenue, July 30, 1924

8.) 47th Street and Woodland Avenue, Luncheonette, March 28, 1951

9.) 43rd and Pine Streets. The Great Atlantic Pacific Tea Company, August 21, 1924

10.) Southeast Corner of Spruce and Camac Streets, Camac Food Market, March 2, 1959

11.) Northwest Corner, 8th and Moore Streets. Milano’s Groceries, November 25, 1949

12.) Southeast Corner of Thompson and Lefevre Streets, July 14, 1930

In the 1920s, the average working-class family spent about one-third of its budget on groceries. “Most households spent more to put dinner on the table than for their rent or their mortgage.”

And where “food was hugely expensive, relative to wages” neighborhood grocery stores delivered “only moderate amounts of nutrition” according to Marc Levinson. “Only token stocks of fresh fruits and vegetables” were offered. “Fresh fish and poultry were rarities.”

“The poorest third of American households consumed a sorely inadequate daily intake of vitamins and minerals, because there was little of either in the food that their neighborhood shops had for sale.”

And yet grocery stores were everywhere—on nearly every corner.

Last time we learned that by 1911, Philadelphia had more than 5,700 grocery stores, or one for every fifty-four families. By 1929, a national survey documented exactly how widespread the corner grocery actually was. There were 585,980 of them across the United States, “one for every fifty-one American families.”

Behind their wooden counters and “shelves of food …tended by store managers in dark vests, male store clerks in white aprons, and female clerks wearing long skirts and white blouses” was a world where the corporate managers determined what Americans would have to eat and from whom they purchased it. More and more, this tended to be from one or another of the expanding grocery chain stores.

Not that an independent grocer couldn’t make it. “Careful, intelligent grocers with fair credit can and do make good profits if conditions are at all favorable,” economist E. M. Patterson assured readers in 1911. Butter and eggs comprised “about 36 percent of the grocer’s total sales and provided only 10 per cent profit. Flour yielded 16 percent “but ham, bacon and lard less than 5 per cent.” Thing was, the majority of sales provided “gross profit of only about 9 percent” when 15 to 20 percent was needed to stay afloat.

Still, an independent grocer, no matter how dedicated or talented, couldn’t manage their way out of a discount situation created by the chains.  As A & P’s John A. Hartford would later put it: “We would rather sell 200 pounds of butter at 1 cent profit than 100 pounds at 2 cents profit.” It might be “good for consumers, it was bad for the hundreds of thousands of retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers who needed high food prices in order to make a living.”

According to Levinson, independent grocers “were being trampled in the price and premium wars” led by the big chains.

At the start of the 20^th century, the Great Atlantic & Pacific (later A & P) “opened an average of one store every two weeks and developed a network of more than 5,000 wagon routes for “commissioned salespeople driving Great Atlantic & Pacific horse carts” throughout much of the United States.

This market dominance paved the way for the rise of the supermarket after World War II. “While consumer spending on food rose by half between 1945 and 1948, A&P’s sales doubled and its profits trebled. In 1945, chains accounted for 31 percent of grocery sales. Just two years later, their share was 37 percent.”

“The number of supermarkets nationwide, around two thousand in 1941, hit fifty-six hundred in 1948” and the supermarket controlled “one-quarter of all grocery sales.”

The supermarket “was a national phenomenon.” But more to the detriment of places like Philadelphia, “it was a suburban phenomenon.” The city’s aging neighborhoods, with their failed and failing corner grocery stores, were transformed into food deserts.

[Sources: Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011); E. M. Patterson, “The Cost of Distributing Groceries,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 50, (Nov., 1913), pp. 74-82.]

It’s the turn of the 20^th century and I live in a tidy three-story rowhouse on Clarion Street, near Diamond Street. North Philadelphia is such a great place to live. What’s not accessible easily on foot is available by streetcar: schools (including Temple College at Berks Street and the Wagner Free Institute of Science at 17^th and Montgomery). There’s a tremendous variety of houses of worship, parks, cemeteries…you name it—North Philadelphia seems to have it.

Especially convenient are food shopping options. Right next to the Grand Opera House at Broad and Montgomery is the well-stocked Broad Street Market. That’s only a half a mile walk. A bit farther away is the Globe Market on Montgomery between 10^th and Warnock. And if you don’t mind the longer (2.6 mile) round trip, you can’t beat the offerings at the giant Girard Farmers Market down at Girard Avenue between 9^th and Hutchinson, by Reading Railroad’s tracks.

The thing is, though, Clarion Street is nestled between 13^th Street and Park Avenue, less than a block away from a new grocery store, one in Thomas P. Hunter’s Acme Tea Company chain. There are 104 others pretty much like it on neighborhood corners throughout the city. But this one: this is my corner grocery store.

And would you believe it? Only a block farther the east, at 12^th and Diamond, there’s another grocery store, one of the competing chain owned and operated by William Butler. By the time the city photographer got to it in September 1901, Butler’s had opened 73 stores. By 1903 he’d have 101; a few years after that he’d have 117 well-stocked stores all around the city.

It’s part of a massive food-distribution system if you can believe E. M. Patterson from the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. Why is there so much demand for groceries from the corner store?  Patterson explains: “The housewife lacks a large store room and so must buy in small quantities rather than in bulk. A limited supply of cash makes impossible large purchases from a distant point. … Unexpected guests and other emergencies create demands that must be promptly met. A lack of foresight in buying makes a local supply a convenience if not an actual necessity. These reasons and others seem to insure a steady, continued demand for the retail grocer.”

And so, by 1911, Philadelphia would come to have, according to Patterson, an astounding “5,266 retail grocery stores in addition to 257 delicatessen stores that sell some groceries and 2,004 butchers and retail meat dealers, of whom probably 10 per cent or 200 also sold groceries.” The total: 5,723 in a city of more than a million and a half. That’s “one store for every 270 people or one for every 54 families.”

No wonder there seems to be a grocery store on nearly every corner. There just about is.

Take a look at Butler’s bargains, as advertised in the Inquirer from last March: ¼ lb. “very best cooked corned beef” for 3 cents (the price would soon rise to 5 cents); a “large glass of prepared mustard for 4 cents (a penny less than it was last week); 12 “nice crisp pickles” for 2 cents; a pound of the “very best full cream cheese” for a dime. Also for a dime: a bottle of Manzanilla Olives . You like sweet biscuits? Butler’s “fresh Nic-Nacs,” sell for 2 cents a quart. The “best evaporated peaches and apples are 7 cents per pound. And if you try their Crescent Gilt Edge Butter for 18 cents a pound, and are not fully satisfied, Butler’s will happily refund your money.

Let me tell you about their flour! “Butler’s Best Flour is the best and most reliable brand of flour on earth,” they say.  They claim it “makes more, whiter and better bread than any four milled.” If you walk in their door with the advertisement printed in the Inquirer, they’ll sell you a 7 pound bag for 14 cents or a 24 ½ lb. bag for 46 cents—your choice.

Not convinced yet? Purchase a pound of Golden Santos Coffee for 25 cents and you’ll get a free “imported china decorated cup and saucer.” (That’ll keep me coming back until I have a full set.)

But wait! Even closer to home, only half a block from Clarion Street, Acme Tea is selling their “Head Coffee Roaster’s Pet Coffee,” at the bargain price of 20 cents per pound, or 3 pounds for 50 cents. “You are not experimenting when you buy a pound of this coffee,” they assure prospective customers, “we did the experimenting …we know exactly what kind of a flavor suits the majority of coffee drinkers and it’s right here in this blend.”

It seemed like a life and death struggle between the Butler and Hunter chains. They competed hard. They had to if they wanted to stay in business.

And as a well-fed resident of North Philadelphia, I definitely want them to.

[Sources: Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011); E. M. Patterson, “The Cost of Distributing Groceries,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 50, (Nov., 1913), pp. 74-82; Inquirer advertisements for Wm. Butler: March 30, 1900; April 7, 1900; April 23, 1900; June 18, 1903 and advertisements for Acme Tea Company June 18, 1902.

Francis Biddle was one of the few who escaped. While other Philadelphia patricians stayed at or very near home, Biddle migrated to Washington, D.C, where he quickly “achieved a reputation of talking little, thinking fast and acting faster.” As the U. S. Attorney General during the World War II, Biddle acted way too fast when he supervised the relocation and internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans, an act he later regretted.

In Fear of Freedom, published in 1951, Biddle “argued against guilt by association, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, censorship of textbooks and banishment of nonconforming teachers, loyalty oaths for educators, the Federal loyalty program and the vilification of those who stood up to so-called subversive inquiries.”

“Fear is an infection that spreads quickly,” Geoffrey Stone quotes Biddle in Perilous Times, “intolerance is dangerously contagious.”  Biddle knew how political leaders get the public to “confuse panic with patriotism.”

“Any broad based effort to sort out security risks by inquiring into loyalty will inevitably turn into ‘a crusade to enforce conformity’” wrote Biddle, who first learned conformity in Philadelphia, where it came in many strands and hues.

Biddle noted as much in his 1927 novel, The Llanfear Pattern, where characters encountered rowhouse conformity high-society conformity.

West Philadelphia was “dull with the monotony of endless rows of small two-story ‘homes,’ with meaningless porches, miles of flat roofs and chimney pots. Even the University had no charm, no quality, a group of big buildings huddled in the midst of the little houses, without plan or point or any of the soft mellowness which one would have supposed time would have brought to mould the crude lines and bring a softer tone to the gray-green stone surfaces…”

And then there was the conformity of the elites (and their resigned contentment) on the 2100 block of Delancey Place, where newlyweds Carl Llanfear’s and his new European wife, Francesca, would settle in.

That block “lay sleepily on the edge of the residential district, thrust an irregular slatternly arm to the river, straggling down to the tracks along the east bank. DeLancey Place had a charming, uneven character. To the east it dropped the “little,” and became more solid and fashionable, fell back into, stables in the next square, bloomed again, dwindled, skipped the centre of the city, and reappeared as Clinton Street…”

“Francesca, warned by her mother-in-law, was prepared to find the house dirty. But such dirt! It drifted through every crack, roughening surfaces, eating into corners, blowing in particles of soft coal dust from the Baltimore and Ohio tracks along the Schuylkill River, from the coal barges, from the abattoirs and steel mills along the banks; rising in eddying whirls of dried horse manure and dust, which the municipal revolving broom occasionally swept from the centre of the street to the gutter and sidewalk. The more you scrubbed, the faster it seemed to gather. And in moments of discouragement she saw herself forever fighting it, holding it back, as the dykes held the water in Holland, to keep it from engulfing her.

“It became to her the symbol of something careless and slip-shod about the city. She hated that loose, disordered way of living. She had seen too much of it abroad. No tidiness, no exact and certain order; shabby, that was it, shabby and weak. Probably down at-the-heel Southern influence. You couldn’t detect a Southern drawl, but there was a Southern looseness and surrender about the city. No backbone. She would have to be careful. Those things were insidious. At least her home should be neat and regular, well-organized. …

“She liked the house. It was narrow and deep, dropping a story in the back, irregular and broken, three or four steps up here and down there, sudden unexpected landings. It was not a convenient house, no electric light; oil lamps and gas jets, a front basement kitchen and creaking dumb waiter, an aged and decaying brick hot air furnace, a feeble water-pressure which on the third floor occasionally produced a trickle. But it was her first house . . .

“She liked getting it ready, to superintend the cleaning and the airing, to see that the rugs were properly beaten. In the midst of her work she would sit down on the huge sofa in the little sitting-room on the second floor which overlooked the brick yard, with its latched gate and single shabby poplar, and try to picture how her things would look. She hadn’t much but it was all good.

At least until the summertime swelter.

“The cool spell broke in July and Francesca had her first taste of real Philadelphia heat. It was like the blanket of a fog, heavy, humid. It seemed to radiate from the ground and fold about the trees so that their branches hardly stirred, drooping in the airless stupor of the days. She was used to the dry Italian heat, but there was escape from that, and the houses remained cool and ·comfortable. This humidity penetrated everything, and the big dim rooms, shuttered all day, were only a little more tolerable than the heat outside. She would wake from a night of tossing discomfort—usually she slept soundly enough—to a feeling of oppression, as if a weight had settled on her chest, so that she could hardly breathe.”

The only approved place to escape—other than the family home in Chestnut Hill? The Llanfear family summer home in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Again, more conformity. And more contentment.

(Sources: Francis Biddle, The Llanfear Pattern (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1927); Alden Whitman, “Francis Biddle Is Dead at 82; Roosevelt’s Attorney General,” The New York Times, October 5, 1968; Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism, W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.)

“You could be critical of your city and laugh among yourselves at its quaintness, its political corruption, its provincialism, its charming, absurd, easy-going conservatism, its heat and dirt, its faint enthusiasms dying so easily before a stouter longing for pleasure,” wrote Francis Biddle in 1927. “But you mustn’t let an outsider laugh at it. For, after all, Philadelphia was an aristocracy compared to the polyglot barbarity of the new New York; cosmopolitan against the gauche provincialism of Boston; rich in flavor where Washington was thin and spiceless.”

“Of course you didn’t say these things, only felt them,” admitted Biddle in his one and only novel, The Llanfear Pattern. “A member of a patrician Philadelphia family” whose obituary in his New York Times obituary noted a “singular noblesse oblige” that propelled him “into reform politics and ultimately into Roosevelt’s cabinet as Attorney General during World War II.”

In his story of “a large conservative tribe” all of whom yielded “to the inexorable power of the family, a pattern woven through generations of leadership in the worlds of finance, law and society” Biddle dared “to describe Philadelphia as he saw it…a brave thing for a Biddle to do,” according to one reviewer. “Many Philadelphians…will squirm, and many more will delight to see their friends and acquaintances in the pages of this book.”  In either case, Biddle was “considered a traitor to his class.”

The novel follows the young lawyer, Carl Llanfear as he “pits his ambition and enthusiasm against the powerful inertia of the clan,” in a city whose very streets, neighborhoods and public buildings resonate with all that is corrupt and content:

“On a certain March morning of 1910 Carl started early for the office. It was penetratingly cold, and the city was damp and dark beneath a dirty pile of snow, a depressing sight. Here and there a municipal snowplough cleared a way, and groups of sleepy shovellers piled snow into little horse trucks that looked like farm wagons… The city was always unprepared and slow and inadequate. They would be digging for another week, and leave vast ridges grown filthy from the soot and smut to melt through the warm weather, spreading germs, while the voters coughed and sneezed, and contracted tonsillitis and pneumonia, and some died, but all remained indifferent. And always dirty; dusty in summer and littered with papers, dreary with the dreariness of filth and neglect, without pride or beauty.”

‘It was dying, he felt, decaying from river to river, the damp rot of wood like gangrene running from the Schuylkill on the west to the Delaware on the east.”

Carl Llanfear thought about the popular motto: “Philadelphia, city of homes.” He “heard it said that working man were better housed here than anywhere in the world, owned their own houses; unemployment was scarce; taxes were low; people were contented…The homes made the workingman contented. They need to be, thought Carl, to put up with the discomfort of the city, which seemed to be running down like some great industrial plant whose owners were squeezing dividends for the stockholders at the expense of upkeep.”

Maybe, just maybe, there would be a chance for change, for reform.

The day after an election when voters finally turned on  The Organization, Llanfear, a would be reformer, hoped for the start of a revolution. “Men’s consciences were awakening, the door had been opened for the possibility of great things.”

“A splendid city, rising from the ashes of its past, blooming from the ignoble past of [Mayor Samuel Howell] Ashbridge, who had built City Hall, boasting of the fortune he would take out of the contracts, making good his boast. City Hall, symbol of dishonesty and ugliness, squatting over the city’s heart, its immense meaningless bulk blocking traffic where it was thickest, wasting space, shutting out sun and air from the gloomy rooms within; great corridors that every day were littered with the refuse of the crowd; ill-ventilated court-rooms, where the fetid air lay heavy over judge and jury, witnesses, and accused; imitation marble, velvet plush grown dingy with grime, meaningless decorations, carvings of slaves and Cupids where they could not be seen; fly-specked portraits of forgotten nonentities; gilded Venetian ceilings with checker-board patterns; a Philadelphia architect’s dream, perhaps, of the vanished Tuilleries, the costly richness of those old kings, who had probably grafted, too, in their day . . .”

“How could Philadelphians take pride in their city when its business was transacted in such a place? Where dirty human rats — shyster lawyers, ambulance-chasers, jury-fixers, professional bondsmen — scurried about, and the clerks and policemen, employees of the city, swore at the public that paid their salaries, and pushed them about with the insolence of servants who have learned to rob their master.”

“Carl had a feeling that as long as City Hall existed the city would never completely be free to grow up to the dreams of those who loved her.”

(Sources: Francis Biddle, The Llanfear Pattern (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1927); Advertisement for The Llanfear Pattern in The New York Times, October 6, 1927; Samuel Scoville, Jr. An American Forsyte, Forum, (LXXIX; 4) April 1928; “New Books in Brief Review,” The Independent,  Vol. (120; 4052) January 28, 1928; Alden Whitman, “Francis Biddle Is Dead at 82; Roosevelt’s Attorney General,” The New York Times, October 5, 1968.)

Having just celebrated the Eagles Super Bowl win with a procession witnessed by nearly three-quarters of a million, we have to ask: has Philadelphia ever before experienced so sweet a victory?

Then we recall October 21, 1980, when the Phillies beat the Kansas City Royals 4 to 1, winning game 6 of the World Series. How did the city react then, exactly half a century since the Philadelphia Athletics brought home the same title? How did celebrating victory feel back then in this city of underdogs?

Folklorist Henry Glassie was there. And fourteen years later, he shared his impressions with the Philadelphia Almanac and Citizens’ Manual in a piece entitled “1980 Remembered:”

“October air glistens with victory. Shocks of fodder, piles of pumpkins, the traditional assemblies of harvest home stand in the cool air, marking the end of the farmer’s long war with earth. Clear and bright, autumn at its best, is how we recall the city’s day of triumph. It had been a long season, a tense playoff, a hard series, but Greg Gross laid down the perfect bunt, Manny Trillo made the perfect throw, Tug McGraw leapt and patted, and a Whitmanesque babble of humanity overflowed the streets, crowding joyously to let us feel for one day how civic life might be. Divisions dissolved: bankers, bums, secretaries, newsboys, and housewives, we smiled and touched and traded small gifts like kids at an antiwar rally. Packed close, standing, dancing, yelling, we reached toward the trucks moving slowly along the route of the Pope’s flash. On the trucks rode the men whose intensity yielded this bounty. They were not cool. Like heroes loosed from some old epic, they gave completely, Carlton in lonely discipline, Bowa boyishly, McBride bravely, Schmidt with the body that would have won him laurels in any sport in any age. Rose had come from the west to provide the missing link; we unified in the rhythm—Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete—when he set records and watched the man on the field, made for baseball as Eakins was made for painting. But it was, at the heart, Garry Maddox, spread at the plate into an image of concentration, Maddox doubling to center, Maddox moving stealthily to the last catch, Maddox sitting above us now. He should have been wearing embroidered robes of fawn-colored silk and riding a white charger. It was only a truck, only a game, but he was our hero, the prince of a city named Brotherly Love.”

(Source: From the Philadelphia Almanac and Citizens’ Manual for 1995. Edited by Kenneth Finkel. Published by the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1994.)

William Penn admitted Philadelphia was “a holy experiment” about the same time some of his early settlers were conducting a less-than-holy, culinary experiment. They invented scrapple, a folksy staple that, for all its native plainness and inherent modesty, has managed to hold its own for more than three centuries. Scrapple has always been completely real and entirely ours, an endearing strand in the city’s gastronomical genome. Who would argue that Philadelphia’s DNA isn’t partly scrapple?

Top that, Boston baked bean.

Nowhere else in America had a more ancient and authentic food, the “apotheosis of the pig,” claimed newspaperman Louis N. Megargee in 1901. In his column Seen and Heard, Megargee pitted the Boston baked bean and Philadelphia scrapple and found the former wanting in both character and venerability.

Originally little more than a culinary-cul-de-sac, scrapple evolved into a self-sufficient, self-deprecating, completely genuine Philadelphia meme. Earnest 19^th century recipe books enshrined scrapple in literature and lexicon, but  didn’t quite come to terms with the fact that, in the end, scrapple was more metaphor than meal.

William Bunn did.

“The Hon. William M. Bunn is best known as the brightest start in the constellation of orators, wits and raconteurs that illuminate the city of real Brotherly Love,” wrote James McCartney in the introduction to Bunn’s speeches and toasts of 1908. “In all the United States, there is no many on whose brow has been placed oftener the laurel wreath of adoring fame for after-dinner speaking.”

Here are excerpts from Bunn’s toast to scrapple delivered to a gathering at the Hotel Majestic, Broad Street and Girard Avenue:

What’s in a name? Usually, something—sometimes much; occasionally more— sentimentally, everything. Philadelphia, Brotherly Love, for instance. Something in that…Scrappletown and Slowtown— more in them.

Scrappletown— why, I read in a Philadelphia daily…that Philadelphia was consuming 12,000 pounds of scrapple weekly…

Incidentally, will you just ponder on the faith, the unwinking, unthinking blind faith of the thing! Scrappletown takes her scrapple on trust— just as she took her Schuylkill water on trust for so many years.

Scrappletown ! Takes its booze on trust: stands up to the gilded bar of a thousand dollar licensed saloon, calls for straight goods first time, never looks at the blend label on the bottle— takes  it on faith first time. Second time, couldn’t see it if did look. Third time and so on to the limit— well you all know how it is yourselves; you’ve all been there— wouldn’t amount to much if you hadn’t in real worldly experience. And—what is worldly experience? Scrapple. What is booze? Scrapple.

Ever investigate politics? Something singular about the term. A noun of plural form that takes a verb in the singular. The verb is the only thing about it that is singular, though, in Scrappletown.

Scrappletown isn’t a village anymore…

You get politics on the house-top, in the cellar; at the legal bar, and the licensed bar; at the club, office, sociable; in hall and pulpit; in Chinatown, Little Italy, Rittenhouse Square; at weddings and funerals; in stock brokering and philanthropy; you can get into politics for nothing and come out with nothing.  … You can get it raw or hashed or mulched; but in the end, both ends for that matter, it’s all—what? Scrapple!

If there’s anything in this progressive twentieth century with no mystery, no sham, no big odd nonsense about it, it should be and therefore, is society. It is a want to know, you know, society a high art, high jinks, high ball society. A horse show, dog bench, stock board society. An eloping, divorcing society—and out of doors, automobiling society. It sails the ocean blue and climbs the Matterhorn. It spells its one or more middle names in full and hyphenates its patronymics. It remembers its pedigree and forgets its prayers. It scorns those whose forefathers never distinguished themselves and envies those whose forefathers and foremothers did. It aspires to be known abroad. And it is known. … It is scorified, glorified. It is followed, courted, married and divorced— more glory. It shows itself the wide world over. It tires of monotony— goes on the stage— shows itself some more— much more. It marries some more. Not much more to be sure, but enough for glory. With the sparkle and glitter of the footlights on the stage, the rustle and glow of paper and coin in the banks there’s glory enough to be sure; but it’s all scrapple— SCRAPPLE.

Oh, but it’s all great, though. We shine for it, and pine for it; look up to it, crook down to it; adore it, implore it; chase it, embrace it. It skips everywhere, tips everywhere. It doesn’t die. It elopes to Paradise. Maybe St. Peter will need an introduction; but that’s pure speculation.

Oh it’s glorious, all glorious. But it’s all scrapple— scrapple. And isn’t it glory enough to know that this is Scrappletown; and scrapple is the real thing. No doubt but it’s a made up thing, blind, fearfully, and wonderfully made, to be sure; but Philadelphia is plucky; it makes no scrutiny into the mutiny. It takes its medicine like a little man, and asks no questions. What proves to be good for it it clings to. …It’s all mystifying, vexatious. But then it’s all scrapple.

It was in the mind of Scrappletown ‘s immortal bard when he wrote the deathless lines: This world is all a fleeting show / Since Adam ate the apple / Its smiles of Joy, its tears of woe, / Deceitful shine, deceitful flow — / There’s nothing true but — Scrapple.

“A curious thing about Philadelphia,” wrote Edith Elmer Wood in 1919, “is that pigs were permitted to be kept in the thickly settled parts of the city until quite recently. A start was made to do away with this condition, the 40,000 piggeries of a few years ago having been reduced to almost 10,000.

Then, in the Spring of 1917, Health Department officials declared that Philadelphia would be demolishing it’s last remaining piggeries.

Up until the early 20th century, urban spaces required animal agriculture. There’d be no transportation without horses. “Hogs cleaned up household slop,” Vitiello and Brinkley remind us, “chickens scratched at the waste that the pigs left behind. Sheep and goats grazed on the commons… Many urban families kept or boarded dairy cows for a supply of fresh milk. Cattle were driven from ports, and later rail stations, to markets and slaughterhouses throughout the city. Animals were everywhere, as were the nuisances that they created as they bellowed, kicked up dust, dropped manure, and knocked over passersby.”

For the first couple of hundred years, the idea of banning farm animals would have been absurd, impossible even. Keeping them under control was more likely, though always challenging. As early as 1705, city ordinances forbade “cattle and swine from running at large through the streets.” Once caught, the meat from these runaways would be forfeited, shared equally by captor and the almshouse.

In the mid-19^th century, hogs were fattened for market adjacent to a large distillery in the northwest quadrant of what is now Center City (at 23^rd and Summer Streets). Feed consisted of grain mash from the distillery. This symbiotic relationship continued for more than three decades before the increasing number of nearby residents led to a contested closure. Appeals continued until May 1845, when the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania heard the case.

“At the time of the trial, and for a few years previous, the city had been rapidly extending in that direction… Several public institutions of great importance however had…been erected in the immediate neighborhood; and it was the alleged injury inflicted on these, as well as on the dwelling houses lately erected in the vicinity, that formed the principal ground of complaint.”

“The buildings in question were capable of accommodating as many as a thousand hogs…that in the warm weather the stench was so intolerable, as to make it almost impossible to pass through the street, on which the establishment opened, without nausea; and that when the wind was from the northwest, it was perceptible for half a mile towards the heart of the city; that the water of the Schuylkill was infected by the great quantities of filth and ordure which were discharged; that the value of property adjacent was diminished from ten to fifteen per cent., and that the comfort  of the residents thereabout was materially affected by the effluvia.”

The court heard evidence for more than a week.

Piggeries had been there “from time immemorial,” claimed the defense. Moreover, they argued, the distillery “was essential to the city.”

The court agreed with the previous ruling: “Piggeries had to be removed from city limits, no matter how well established or profitable they were.” Citizens “are entitled by right to healthy air, and to a use of the public highways unimpaired by any adjacent nuisance” and “a hog pen in a city is a nuisance.” In fact, “the keeping of pigs in a community like this, whether there be one or a thousand, is indictable.”

Yet, as we read in Vitiello and Brinkley, the “debates between farmer-businessmen and city officials” continued for more than half a century longer. As the city expanded in the late 19^th century, with permission from City Councils, pig farmers continued to thrive just beyond the fringes of the city’s built-up sections.

“Desperate efforts are being made by the pig owners of the First Ward [in South Philadelphia, east of Broad Street] to get from under the eye of the Health Officer and run their pens as of old,” reported the Inquirer in 1886: “the pens had been newly whitewashed and the masses of decaying garbage covered up and out of sight.” Further to the south and west, pigsties “owned by Mr. Rubel…at 31^st and Maiden lane were in very bad condition. … The garbage…was left to fester, and the stench arising from the mass of filth among which the remaining animals were wallowing, exhaled an odor that could not but be highly prejudicial to public health.”

“Pigs Have Got to Go,” editorialized the newspaper as late as 1914, by which time urban expansion guaranteed proximity to piggeries. Yet they remained legal in several areas, including along Maiden Lane. “Modern cities and hog pens cannot be made to go hand in hand,” declared editors, but they fell short of calling for a complete ban.

Not so Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg. His “war upon piggeries” would include a veto of any proposed expansion piggery district. Before long, the city conducted raids on the illegal piggeries of South Philadelphia.

In 1916, John Donohoe, who owned a massive piggery on League Island Road managed to remove his livestock only 15 minutes before a noontime raid by officials from the Bureaus of Health and Sanitation joined by a half dozen mounted police and 25 laborers with orders “to demolish Donohue’s pens.” Freshly unemployed pig farmers and farm hands greeted the raiders “with hoots and jeers.” Meanwhile, owners of the remaining, smaller piggeries read the writing on the wall and dispensed with their stock “as fast as possible.”

Before long, South Philadelphia’s muddy fens were piggery free, from the Neck to Maiden Lane.

(Sources: Edith Elmer Wood, The Housing of the Unskilled Wage Earner; America’s Next Problem (The Macmillian Co., 1919); Catherine Brinkley and Domenic Vitiello, “From Farm to Nuisance: Animal Agriculture and the Rise of Planning Regulation,” Journal of Planning History, 2014, Vol. 13(2) 113-135; “Commonwealth v. Van Sickle, Supreme Court of Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Law Journal, Volume 7 [Walker, 1848] and from The Philadelphia Inquirer: “First Ward Piggeries,” October 27, 1886; “Mayor to War upon Piggeries,” September 7, 1913; “Pigs Have Got to Go,”, March 21, 1914; “Officials Raid Piggery, but Find Swine Gone Owner Prevents Confiscation by Removing Entire Stock,”  September 29,1916.)