{"id":12025,"date":"2018-02-18T14:12:15","date_gmt":"2018-02-18T19:12:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=12025"},"modified":"2018-02-25T22:38:00","modified_gmt":"2018-02-26T03:38:00","slug":"as-long-as-city-hall-existed-the-city-would-never-completely-be-free-to-grow-up-to-the-dreams-of-those-who-loved-her","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2018\/02\/as-long-as-city-hall-existed-the-city-would-never-completely-be-free-to-grow-up-to-the-dreams-of-those-who-loved-her\/","title":{"rendered":"“As long as City Hall existed the city would never completely be free to grow up to the dreams of those who loved her.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
City Hall from Arch Street, April 1910 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cYou 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,\u201d wrote Francis Biddle in 1927. \u201cBut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course you didn’t say these things, only felt them,\u201d admitted Biddle in his one and only novel, The Llanfear Pattern<\/em>. \u201cA member of a patrician Philadelphia family\u201d whose obituary in his New York Times<\/em> obituary noted a \u201csingular noblesse oblige<\/em>\u201d that propelled him \u201cinto reform politics and ultimately into Roosevelt\u2019s cabinet as Attorney General during World War II.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his story of \u201ca large conservative tribe\u201d all of whom yielded \u201cto the inexorable power of the family, a pattern woven through generations of leadership in the worlds of finance, law and society\u201d Biddle dared \u201cto describe Philadelphia as he saw it\u2026a brave thing for a Biddle to do,\u201d according to one reviewer. \u201cMany Philadelphians\u2026will squirm, and many more will delight to see their friends and acquaintances in the pages of this book.\u201d\u00a0 In either case, Biddle was \u201cconsidered a traitor to his class.\u201d<\/p>\n

The novel follows the young lawyer, Carl Llanfear as he \u201cpits his ambition and enthusiasm against the powerful inertia of the clan,\u201d in a city whose very streets, neighborhoods and public buildings resonate with all that is corrupt and content:<\/p>\n

\u201cOn 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\u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Northeast Corner – City Hall, 1900 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u2018It 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carl Llanfear thought about the popular motto: “Philadelphia, city of homes.\u201d He \u201cheard 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\u2026The 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.”<\/p>\n

Maybe, just maybe, there would be a chance for change, for reform.<\/p>\n

The day after an election when voters finally turned on\u00a0 The Organization<\/a>, Llanfear, a would be reformer, hoped for the start of a revolution. \u201cMen’s consciences were awakening, the door had been opened for the possibility of great things.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Northeast Corner – City Hall, January 27, 1919 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cA splendid city, rising from the ashes of its past, blooming from the ignoble past of [Mayor Samuel Howell] Ashbridge<\/a>, 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 . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow could Philadelphians take pride in their city when its business was transacted in such a place? Where dirty human rats \u2014 shyster lawyers, ambulance-chasers, jury-fixers, professional bondsmen \u2014 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.”<\/p>\n

“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.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Sources: Francis Biddle, The Llanfear Pattern<\/em> (New York: Charles Scriber\u2019s Sons, 1927); Advertisement for The Llanfear Pattern<\/em> in The New York Times<\/em>, October 6, 1927; Samuel Scoville, Jr.\u00a0An American Forsyte, Forum<\/em>, (LXXIX; 4) April 1928; \u201cNew Books in Brief Review,\u201d The Independent,<\/em> \u00a0Vol.\u00a0(120; 4052) January 28, 1928; Alden Whitman, \u201cFrancis Biddle Is Dead at 82; Roosevelt\u2019s Attorney General,\u201d<\/a> The New York Times<\/em>, October 5, 1968.)<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou 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,\u201d wrote Francis Biddle in 1927. \u201cBut you mustn’t let an outsider laugh at it. For, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}