PHILADELPHIA AND PENNSYLVANIA
Penn’s Privatism
The governments of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia were devised by William Penn himself in his 1682 Frame of Government. Penn disliked government intensely: “Meddle not with government; never speak of it, let others say and do what they please … I have said little to you about distributing justice, or being just in power or government, for I should desire you should never be concerned therein” (Baltzell, 1979, p. 369). Quakers perceived government as tyranny and the source of religious persecution. Moreover, if any belief had gotten them in consistent trouble back in England, it was their volatile and innate rebellion against imposed authority. Quakers by nature questioned order and tradition; refused deference to elites; rejected formal religion and church hierarchies; and proclaimed salvation could only be found through individual study and revelation. Authority was unnecessary—left alone humans were all good and equal before God. Pennsylvania, accordingly, was initially set up to provide as little “governance” as conditions permitted.
So government, no matter the level, was secondary, intended to be weak and limited. Penn’s colony-level government was framed to be the weakest of all. State government as created by Penn proved unwilling to defend itself when attacked by Native Indians (who were being displaced by Scots-Irish and Germans). Unsurprisingly, Penn’s initial government framework collapsed in his lifetime; he was forced to import non-Quakers to run the colony’s affairs—and they failed as well. Government power, such as was permitted, was dispersed to a semi-autonomous county. While intended to be the principal operating unit of government, county powers and governance simply were not up to the task. County and municipal governments were infused with many separately elected administrative offices that fragmented executive and legislative authority.
Penn originally recreated the classic medieval agricultural village in Pennsylvania. Individual farms extended outward from the village center-periphery. For the first 20 years or so, the colony/state government surveyed and platted land accordingly: Germantown, Newtown and Bucks County reflected the medieval vision. Planned commercial centers were envisioned as “county seats” whose purpose was both commercial and administrative. Philadelphia, Bristol, Chester and New Castle were examples of these early planned centers. As other settlers (non-Quaker) moved into more rural areas, however, Penn’s hodge-podge system broke down.
Settlers moving into the western hinterlands, beyond Penn’s effective control, established diverse homesteads more resembling Southern-style scattered communities than his planned medieval village. The farther from Philadelphia these planned centers were, the more they functioned as strong central units of government with their own hinterland; York, Reading, Carlisle, Easton, Bedford and Sunbury are examples.
Following yet another governance model, Gettysburg, Chambersburg and Lebanon were established by a private city-builder (Russo, 2001, pp. 16–17). City-building by private speculators prevailed in the mountain areas of Pennsylvania, expressed in towns or boroughs that served as county seat. Bellefonte, for example, was founded by speculator Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord around a spring and an iron ore mine:1 “During the course of the eighteenth century Pennsylvania became blanketed with clustered settlements” (Russo, 2001, p. 17). Quakers were followed by German and then Scots-Irish immigrants; Pennsylvania degenerated into America’s first version of aggressive sprawl—a style of city-building personified by one of its most famous residents, the pioneer Daniel Boone, “who set out on his wanderings westward from Pennsylvania, where his Quaker ancestors … had settled” (Baltzell, 1979, p. 121). Boone didn’t stop until he reached Kentucky and founded Boonesborough.
Weak and fragmented state/local governments produced a politics that was more radical, volatile, individualistic and anti-authoritarian than anywhere else in America. Philadelphia’s economic privatism coexisted wonderfully with democracy. Through the American Revolution until the establishment of the Republic in 1789, Philadelphia and Pennsylvania could charitably be described “as the most vital participatory democracy in the world … [with] cosmopolitan contentious citizens [who] destroyed institutions, overturned traditions, subverted received authority, [and] rejected established elites” (Scharf and Wescott, 1884, p. 318)—near anarchy prevailed. Pennsylvania went through three state constitutions in 20 years (contrasted with Massachusetts which approved a 1780 state constitution still in effect today).2 Still, Henry Adams described Philadelphia/Pennsylvania in rather positive terms:
The only true democratic community … Pennsylvania contained no hierarchy like New England, no great families like New York, no oligarchy like the planters of Virginia and South Carolina … Pennsylvania became the ideal American State, easy, tolerant and contented … With twenty different religious creeds … and a strong Quaker element made it humane … To politics the Pennsylvanians did not take kindly. Perhaps their democracy was so deep an instinct that they knew not what to do with political power when they gained it. (Adams, 1961, pp. 82–3)
The net effect of all this was a distinctive Mid-Atlantic style of decentralized, weak and fragmented governance. Its city-building was driven by private investment and investment/business elites. The irony is that Penn’s unintended Privatism attracted settlers who, if they did not agree with it, could tolerate it and make profits from it. The withdrawal from governance by wealthy Quaker elites following their Inner Light or pursuing private profit created a vacuum, soon filled—mostly by Philadelphia’s commercial elites who evolved into a version of Privatism later made famous by urban historian Sam Bass Warner.
Warner’s Private City
Warner’s Philadelphia was a community of individuals seeking jobs and profit for themselves and their families. Provision of public goods was afforded little priority— the role of the state government in municipal affairs or in the provision of public goods was noticeably absent. Business and government were separate worlds, with the weakened/decentralized latter facilitating the expansion and prosperity of the former.
[Philadelphia’s citizens] depended for their wages, employment, and general prosperity upon the aggregate successes and failures of thousands of individual enterprises, not upon community action … the physical forms of … [Philadelphia], their lots, houses, factories, and streets have been the outcome of a real estate market of profit-seeking builders, land speculators and large investors. Finally, the tradition of privatism has meant that the local politics of [Philadelphia] have depended … on the changing focus of men’s private economic activities. The tradition assumed that there would be no major conflict between private interest … and the public welfare. The modes of eighteenth century town life encouraged this expectation that if each man would look to his own prosperity the entire town would prosper. (Warner, 1968, p. xii)
Warner’s Philadelphia’s governance, as had Penn’s, rested on a system of committees in which each committee performed a specific municipal function, loosely under mayoral council control. The independence of multiple policy-making committees facilitated dominance by commercial businessman (made possible by the withdrawal of wealthy Quaker elites):
The wealthy presided over a municipal regime of little government. Both in form and function the town’s government advertised the lack of concern for public management of the community. The municipal corporation of Philadelphia, copied from the forms of an old English borough, counted for little. Its only important functions were the management of the markets and the holding of the Recorder’s Court. A closed corporation, [the municipal government] choosing its members by co-option, it had become a club of wealthy merchants … the town was hardly governed at all … ineffective police … streets went unpaved, the public wharves little repaired … no public schools, no public water, and at best a thin charity. (Warner, 1968, p. 10)3
Biases and limitations in Philadelphia policy-making became more apparent as the city developed into an industrial city. Warner’s case study of Philadelphia’s water works revealed three phases of Philadelphia’s municipal history. Initially, municipal governance was left to business elites, relying on consensus decision-making tempered by a “good for the community” filter. As the industrial city grew, problems become divisive, consensus fractured, and the city was unable to govern effectively. Warner concludes policy-making by business elites was managed with great difficulty and considerable inequality. Business elites, no matter the historical phase, pursued low-tax solutions rather than long-term community-wide policies.
Was this Privatism Thing Successful?
Whatever its limitations, however, Philadelphia’s Privatism attracted more than its fair share of future population growth. Philadelphia developed a more innovative, diversified and prosperous industrial economic base—its focus on chemicals and machine tools, for example, was every bit as pioneering as New England’s textile mills. An obvious example of Philadelphia’s entrepreneurism and its commercial elite is Benjamin Franklin, who left Boston for Philadelphia, made his fortune, retired in his forties and became a world-famous scientist and statesman. Between 1791 and 1800 Philadelphia was the nation’s capital, home to George Washington’s second term and most of John Adams’s presidency. The National Bank was headquartered in Philadelphia. Canals and railroads constructed by Philadelphia’s business leadership ensured its competitive position in the American hierarchy of cities throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In such an open policy system, Philadelphia’s Privatist economic development approach evidently worked—and worked brilliantly—although politically nineteenth-century Philadelphia and Pennsylvania developed a series of political machines, distinct from NYC’s Tammany, that lasted to almost 1950. Penn’s weak system of governance reflected a political culture Woodard describes as:the most American of [his 11] nations … welcomed people from many nations … pluralistic and [focused] on the middle class … where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate even apathetic … Midlanders believe society should be organized to benefit ordinary people, but they are extremely skeptical of top-down governmental intervention. (Woodard, 2011, pp. 6–7) Midlanders brought their culture to Middle America: central Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, the Dakotas, Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska—even Chicago and St. Louis. Interestingly, all save Illinois, voted for Trump in 2016.
Ron W. Coan 