PhillyHistory Blog

 

Newspaper accounts from the turn of the 20th century describe the Army-Navy Game as a city-wide event, with hotels and homes bedecked in the blue, yellow, and gray of West Point or the blue and gold of Annapolis, while citizens and tourists alike flooded the streets of Philadelphia carrying badges and pennants to show their allegiance to either academy. The players themselves, accompanied by marching bands and their respective mascots, the Navy Goat and Army Mule, processed through the streets up to Franklin Field, which consistently exceeded its seating capacity. Ticket scalpers were common and by 1934 were charging as much as $75 for choice seats, a blemish on the event that later inspired a Congressional investigation. Traditionally, the Secretary of the Navy and Secretary of War attended as representatives of their respective departments and the game also drew many governors, mayors, and other political notables. In addition, the game was also a significant event on the East Coast social calendar, as special luncheons and dinners, including a Naval Academy alumni dance at the Bellevue-Stratford hotel, surrounded the match and the box seats occupied by socialites and dignitaries were chronicled in the New York Times society pages.

 

Inevitably, Franklin Field struggled to accommodate the sheer number of people who desired to attend the Army-Navy Game and the search for a new location with larger facilities threatened to move the match out of Philadelphia. In 1905, the Army-Navy Game took place at Osborne Field on the campus of Princeton University, but transportation problems involving the local train lines rendered Princeton a less desirable option moving forward. The Army-Navy Game returned to Philadelphia and Franklin Field from 1906-1912 before relocating to the New York Polo Grounds in 1913. The Polo Grounds then became a favored site for the game for the rest of the decade and thereafter the Army-Navy Game was periodically played at other sites as well, including Chicago’s Soldier Field and New York City’s Yankee Stadium. Notably, the variety of venues, which continued into the mid-1930s, was considered more equitable to both sides after representatives from West Point argued that holding the game in Philadelphia every year favored Annapolis, which generally had an easier time commuting to Franklin Field.

 

In 1936, Philadelphia mayor-elect S. Davis Wilson proposed hosting the Army-Navy Game at Municipal Stadium, a 100,000 seat stadium located at the far southern end of South Broad Street that was originally built for the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition. The first Army-Navy Game at Municipal Stadium drew a capacity crowd that included First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Pennsylvania Railroad ran 35 special trains direct to the stadium out of a fleet of 105 locomotives put in service especially for the event. In the years that followed, Municipal Stadium became the favored venue for the Army-Navy Game, which also saw Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Ford in attendance over the years. President Kennedy especially took an active part in the game, conducting the coin toss at the start of each match and parading across the field at halftime. Following President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, officials considered canceling the Army-Navy Game, but the match was eventually held on December 7 at the express request of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. The following year, Municipal Stadium was renamed John F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in honor of the late President and the President’s brother, Bobby Kennedy, attended the Army-Navy Game with his family to mark the occasion.

John F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium continued to host the Army-Navy Game until 1980, at which time it moved to neighboring Veterans Stadium and ultimately to Lincoln Financial Field. By the time the match relocated to Veterans Stadium, the Army-Navy Game had declined in national importance and the crowd of 60,470 who attended the game in 1981 was the lowest crowd recorded since 1943. Still, the Army-Navy Game remains a legendary event in American sports and a notable part of Philadelphia history, as captured so vividly in the collection of photographs now displayed on PhillyHistory.org.

References

“102,000, East’s Largest Football Crowd, Will See Army-Navy Classic Today.” New York Times, November 28, 1936.

“Army-Navy Game.” 26 July 2010. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army%E2%80%93Navy_Game (Accessed 6 August 2010).

“Army-Navy Game History: Rivalry History.” Philadelphia’s Official Army-Navy Website 6 August 2010 http://www.phillylovesarmynavy.com/RIVALRY-HISTORY (Accessed 6 August 2010).

“Army-Navy Game Postponed to November 7; Usual Ceremonies Will be Eliminated.” New York Times, November 27, 1963.

“Army Triumphs Over Navy in Football.” New York Times, November 29, 1903.

“Army Versus Navy: A Dimming of Splendor.” New York Times, November 29, 1975.

 

By and large, the most significant African-American civic celebration in Philadelphia was the 1913 Emancipation Exposition, which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. After Congressional support for a national exposition fell through, activists in Philadelphia received $95,000 in state funding for an exposition at the site of today’s Marconi Plaza at Broad Street and Oregon Avenue. Despite strong criticism from the white community and bureaucratic maneuvers over building permits, African-Americans organized an exposition site that included an Agricultural Hall, an Administration Building featuring an auditorium, dining room, and exhibit space, and an Amusement Building with concert and lecture halls. Crucially, the area in which African-Americans were permitted to stage the exposition was an Italian neighborhood to which they had no historical or contemporary connection and was also the southern-most limit of the city’s residential and commercial development at the time. Nonetheless, 5,000 visitors attended the Exposition’s opening Congress and other festivities throughout its run included an athletics festival and lectures about African-American progress and achievements. The Exposition also included a parade down Girard Avenue that drew an estimated crowd of 25,000 to 50,000 spectators.

The buildings at Broad Street and Oregon Avenue were subsequently demolished after the Exposition, which was largely forgotten and overshadowed by the Sesquicentennial festivities on the same site in 1926. However, inspired by the Exposition’s efforts to memorialize Emancipation as part of the legacy of the Civil War, Richard R. Wright Sr. created National Freedom Day in the 1940s to mark the day that President Lincoln signed the 13th Amendment prohibiting slavery into law.

 

In the latter half of the 20th century, the racial politics of civic celebrations were further exemplified by the Bicentennial festivities and the redevelopment projects that accompanied them. As far back as the 1950s, city officials conceived of the Bicentennial as Philadelphia’s emergence as a viable commercial center and tourist attraction as the city transitioned from its industrial past to a post-industrial future. Hoping to stem the tide of manufacturing losses and the middle-class exodus to the suburbs, reformist Democrats like Richardson Dilworth developed plans for a new transportation infrastructure, including the construction of the Vine Street and Crosstown expressways, multi-level parking garages, pedestrian walkways, and a downtown shopping plaza that would make Philadelphia the nerve center of the region. On the whole, these redevelopment plans favored the city’s central business district and largely neglected neighborhood housing, save for the revitalization of Society Hill. Benefiting from its close proximity to Independence Hall, which was undergoing its own redevelopment with the demolition of areas north of the site to make way for Independence Mall, Society Hill was aesthetically transformed into a historically rich environment of luxury apartments and green spaces. Under the direction of planner Edmund Bacon, other redevelopment projects included the revitalization of spaces along the Delaware River, Walnut and Market Streets, and the area between City Hall and the Ben Franklin Parkway, all culturally rich and historic areas through which Philadelphia would be defined.

 

To critics, redevelopment favored the white middle-class at the expense of African-Americans and other minorities, many of whom were forced out of neighborhoods like Society Hill either by demolition or rising housing costs. To activists like Milton Street, the Bicentennial celebrations, which would be staged in the revitalized Center City district, embodied these injustices and provided a focal point for protest. While Bicentennial planners envisioned a combined international exposition and patriotic spectacle that showcased the downtown area, Street organized a counter-Bicentennial called “People’s ‘76” that would take place in city neighborhoods and emphasize popular participation in the Revolution. Ultimately, neither side’s plans were fully executed, as the idea for an international exposition was scrapped for lack of a feasible site and “People’s ‘76” faltered due to lack of funding and participation. By default, the theme of the city Bicentennial was family entertainment, with a July 4th parade featuring high school bands and cheerleaders and a 50,000 pound, five-story birthday cake at Memorial Hall baked by the Sara Lee Company. For their part, “People’s ‘76” did stage a competing parade on July 4th, which included African-Americans, Native Americans and Puerto Rican nationalists among others and ran through North Philadelphia to highlight its blighted manufacturing and residential districts.

Ultimately, the Bicentennial concentrated and intensified opposition to the city’s redevelopment projects and protests continued in the coming decades under the leadership of Milton Street. From the early days of the new nation to the 20th century, Philadelphia’s civic celebrations were invested with political and social significance that extended far beyond the day’s events and offer fascinating portraits of Philadelphia throughout its history.

References:

Andrew Feffer, “Show Down in Center City: Staging Redevelopment and Citizenship in Bicentennial Philadelphia, 1974-1977,” Journal of Urban History, vol. 30, no. 6 (September 2004): 791-825.

Charlene Mires, “Race, Place, and the Pennsylvania Emancipation Exposition of 1913,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 128, no. 3 (July 2004): 257-278.

Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

Edwin Wolf, Philadelphia: Portrait of an American City (Philadelphia, PA: The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1990).

The celebrations of the 1876 Centennial Exposition followed a similar laissez-faire model, though a shift began in 1880 when Mayor Samuel H. King curtailed the detonation of fireworks and dispatched the city’s newly unified police force to impose order on public holidays. Two years later, city permits were required to stage parades and the focus turned towards large, urban carnivals to bring the city together rather than disparate, neighborhood celebrations. The commemoration of the Bicentennial of Pennsylvania in 1882 was the first such effort, a week-long program of parades, athletic contests, regatta on the Schuylkill River, and historical re-enactments that ended with a mass concert at the Academy of Music. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, many city-wide celebrations followed this trend, including the Centennial of the Constitution (1887), Peace Jubilee at the end of the Spanish-American War (1898), and the National Export Exposition (1899). Additionally, traditional celebrations like Independence Day also became more regimented, with the Philadelphia City Council overseeing events at both Independence Hall and nine other squares throughout the city. Notably, the day’s festivities, which included athletic competitions in Fairmount Park and fireworks over the Girard Avenue Bridge, followed a set schedule and were publicized in souvenir programs distributed across the city.

Without doubt, the high point of these coordinated, city-wide celebrations was Founder’s Week in 1908, which commemorated the 225th anniversary of Philadelphia’s founding. In an effort to elevate the week’s festivities and edify the public, local historian Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer organized a historical pageant that, with floats and live actors, followed the city’s history from “Exploration and Settlement” to “Civil War.” To emphasize artistic achievement and community solidarity, Oberholtzer selected Germantown muralist Violet Oakley to design the 68 floats and allowed ethnic organizations with ties to early settlers, such as Dutch and Germans, to participate only if they used official floats and costumes. On the whole, the pageant, which processed down Broad Street for four miles through Central Philadelphia, presented a truncated view of the city’s history that largely excluded both African-Americans and any ethnic groups beyond the earliest settlers and stressed allegiance to the city above all other ties. Oberholtzer later organized the Historical Pageant Association of Philadelphia with the purpose of producing a pageant every four years, but the Association’s initial 1912 production in Fairmount Park proved less successful, limited both by location and competing Columbus Day festivities. On the whole, pageant attendance was mediocre and the production ultimately produced a $15,000 deficit, a financial failure that dampened enthusiasm for both historical pageants and city-wide celebrations.

In the following decade, other notable public festivities included a downtown parade for World War I troops and the Sesquicentennial International Exposition in 1926, though city elites were now largely absent from the planning process. As popular culture turned towards more commercial, mass entertainment, less emphasis was ultimately placed on the educational value of public festivities, even as celebrations continued to have popular appeal in Philadelphia well into the 20th century.

References:

Scott Bruce, It Happened in Philadelphia (Guilford, CT: Morris Book Publishing, 2008).

David Glassberg, “Public Ritual and Cultural Hierarchy: Philadelphia’s Civic Celebrations at the Turn of the 20th Century,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 107 no. 2 (July 1983): 421-448.

Edwin Wolf, Philadelphia: Portrait of an American City (Philadelphia, PA: The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1990).

 

From that first celebration, Philadelphia’s Independence Day festivities developed into a highly ritualized affair that, over the next few decades, brought the city’s disparate groups together and increasingly equated participation with patriotism. More so than other civic rituals, parades became displays of both common nationhood and civic unity in a city that, despite serving as the nation’s capital until 1800, was still a largely provincial town. In the 1790s, Philadelphia’s city limits merely extended about a mile and a half west of the Delaware River and citizens of different social backgrounds often lived in close proximity. Generally publicized in advance, parades followed published routes that underscored these physical and social realities, as they wound through densely interconnected streets and drew together a broad cross-section of the city’s population. Notably, when Philadelphia celebrated both Independence Day and the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1788, it organized the largest parade yet in the United States, with 5,000 people marching in procession before 17,000 gathered for a celebratory afternoon dinner.

Notably, as public rituals like parades wove into the fabric of civic life, they also became strategic maneuvers by the nation’s first political parties to assert power and lay claim to the nation’s Revolutionary heritage. Throughout the first decades of the republic, the Federalist and Republican parties of Philadelphia marked Independence Day with competing celebrations that voiced their conflicting views on the Revolution’s legacy. While Federalists commemorated independence from Great Britain and emphasized reverence for government, Republicans underscored natural rights and the ongoing fight for liberty, for them exemplified by the French Revolution. By and large, newspaper accounts of these celebrations reflected the newspaper’s political sympathies and Republicans in particular used the holiday to demonstrate their opposition to Federalist policies and their support for French rebels. In 1792, Republicans even went so far as to display both French and American flags at their July 4th festivities and wore Liberty caps modeled after those of the French revolutionary forces.

 

As the commemoration of Independence Day intertwined with politics, both Federalists and Republicans increasingly organized other celebrations that likewise reflected their political beliefs. Naturally, election days were prime opportunities for public gatherings, as voters, politicians, and spectators crowded the streets and victors celebrated with bonfires and parades. In concert with the Society of Cincinnati, Federalists first celebrated Washington’s Birthday in 1789 with a procession of civil and military officers and a reception at Washington’s Presidential residence. After his death, Federalists commemorated Washington’s Birthday with an annual ball against the objections of Republicans, who believed honoring public officials in this way was undemocratic. For their part, Republicans organized public celebrations to commemorate Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration as President, as well as the Louisiana Purchase and, after Federalists divided over supporting John Adams’ re-election, were the only party to organize Independence Day celebrations in Philadelphia. In the early 1800s, the Federalists re-emerged to publicly celebrate Washington’s Birthday once again and in 1814 organized an elaborate procession of 2,000 participants down Arch and Spruce Streets to the Olympic Theatre. Ultimately, as these celebrations show, how and what was commemorated in Philadelphia in the republic’s early years was a snapshot of the city, its people, and its politics, one that would evolve in the coming decades and continue to be reflected in Philadelphia’s civic celebrations.

References:

James R. Heintze. Fourth of July Celebrations Database. American University. Washington, D.C. http://www1.american.edu/heintze/fourth.htm#Beginning.

Albrecht Koschnik, “Political Conflict and Public Contest: Rituals of National Celebration in Philadelphia, 1788-1815,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 118, no. 3 (July 1994): 209-248.

Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

Edwin Wolf, Philadelphia: Portrait of an American City (Philadelphia, PA: The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1990).