While Widener and the city’s utility interests backed the political machine, other segments of Philadelphia’s business community led the opposition. No single industry dominated Philadelphia’s economy as automobile manufacturing did Detroit’s. Rather, Philadelphia’s factories produced an exceptional assortment of goods, everything from textiles, leather products, and cigars to ships, streetcars, and train engines—an eclectic bounty that led local boosters to brag that their hometown was “the workshop of the world.”33
The ranks of the city’s antimachine “independent” reformers reflected this economic diversity. In 1905, independents established a new political organization, the Committee of Seventy. Its members included owners and top managers of firms that produced machine tools, locomotives, gas fixtures, soaps, and dyes, as well as bankers and merchants who dealt in coal, wool, and other dry goods. Prominent doctors and other professionals also joined the group. Lawyers, most of them well-off, signed up in especially large numbers. In 1911, a similar collection of businessmen and elite professionals united behind the successful mayoral candidacy of independent reformer and manufacturer Rudolph Blankenburg. When independents organized to revise the city charter in 1919, some of the most successful businessmen in the city backed the cause. They included Alba Johnson, president of the city’s mammoth Baldwin Locomotive Works; William Disston, vice president of another of Philadelphia’s largest factories; Coleman Sellers Jr., a major manufacturer of machine tools; Samuel Fels, a wealthy soap manufacturer; and Ernest Trigg, a factory executive and a director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Trigg was also president of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce—a stronghold of antimachine Republicans that helped spearhead the fight for charter reform along with the Committee of Seventy.34
Sharply divided over the question of machine rule, Philadelphia’s commercial and industrial leaders nonetheless managed to unify behind a number of policy goals. Easily the most ambitious was a sweeping, City Beautiful–inspired plan to expand the city’s park system and to construct a network of parkways to increase access to green space throughout the city. Integral to this project was the completion of a downtown boulevard, inspired by the Champs-Élysées in Paris, that would connect the center of the city to Philadelphia’s exceptionally large Fairmount Park. Supporters of the downtown parkway hoped to line the roadway with a series of grand monuments and civic structures, including new homes for the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the city’s Free Library. A number of local organizations joined forces in support of these plans. Elite businessmen led many of them, including executives of the Pennsylvania Railroad; the owner of one of the city’s principal department stores; and a partner in Baldwin Locomotives as well as Peter Widener, his lawyer, John Johnson, and Widener’s preferred banker and arguably the most influential financier in Philadelphia, E. T. Stotesbury. In 1904, these businessmen and the civic groups that they helped to run—such as the Fairmount Park Art Association, the City Parks Association of Philadelphia, and the Parkway Association—joined with a number of other local organizations to found a new umbrella group: Organizations Allied for the Acquisition of a Comprehensive Park System (OAACPS). The Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and other commercial organizations joined OAACPS, as did the city’s leading organization of elite women, the Philadelphia Civic Club.35
Figure 3. Plans for Philadelphia’s downtown parkway, first in 1908 (on the left) and then, as the plans evolved, in 1917 (on the right). Paul Philippe Cret Collection, The Athenaeum of Philadelphia.
A handful of municipal departments and public commissions also appeared on OAACPS’s roster, most notably the Fairmount Park Commission, a body that Peter Widener and his inner circle controlled. The judges of Philadelphia’s court of common pleas—many of whom were closely tied to the Republican machine—appointed the members of the park commission and habitually named Philadelphians tied to the city’s utility interests. From this perch, Widener and his close allies directed the planning of the proposed downtown parkway and the civic buildings that they hoped would line it. Widener was especially committed to constructing new buildings for the city’s Free Library and art museum. He was a trustee of the library and wanted the new museum to house his extensive art collection along with those of his closest business associates, John Johnson and William Elkins. Completing the new buildings and the downtown parkway would entail the demolition of acres upon acres of existing structures, including working-class homes and a number of factories. Businessmen whose property was slated for removal tended to oppose the plan, but most of the city’s business community embraced it.36
Figure 4. The intended site of the downtown parkway. The parkway was designed to cut diagonally from where the photograph is taken, through a stretch of structures that would have to be demolished, pass just to the left of the domed building, and end near the edge of the Schuylkill River, just before the river widens and the photograph begins to go out of focus. Courtesy of PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Records.
In addition to the downtown parkway, members of OAACPS backed a much more extensive set of proposals authored by a leading advocate of City Beautiful planning, Andrew Wright Crawford. In 1903, Crawford—in collaboration with the well-known architect Frank Miles Day—published a multivolume treatise that called for the construction of the downtown parkway and a set of new parks that would run alongside Tacony and Pennypack Creeks in Northeast Philadelphia and Cobbs Creek in the city’s southwest. Crawford’s report also endorsed a plan that city officials had already proposed for a new parkway running through the city’s largely undeveloped north. The Northeastern Boulevard, as it was commonly called, promised to encourage residential settlement throughout the area and to provide access to the parks that Crawford wanted the city to build there. Crawford also advocated building new parks and parkways in South Philadelphia and on the western bank of the Schuylkill River, one of the city’s two principal waterways.37
It was an ambitious vision. And as the extensive membership of OAACPS suggests, it was a relatively popular one, at least in corporate and professional circles. Nonetheless, the path toward realizing OAACPS’s plans would be far from smooth.38
In 1905, Iz Durham was preparing to retire. To secure his and his allies’ financial future, Durham concocted an intricate plan to bring millions of dollars into the city’s coffers—money that local lawmakers would then funnel back to Durham and his machine associates through city contracts. To get the funds, Durham turned to one of the city’s leading utility firms, the United Gas Improvement Company (UGI). Durham proposed to cancel UGI’s existing short-term lease on the city’s gasworks, which UGI paid for annually, and replace it with a long-term, seventy-five-year lease that the gas company would pay off in a lump sum of $25 million. By some estimates, this was $100 to $125 million less than UGI would have paid under its existing contract. Independent reformers’ immediately drew attention to the scam.39
To counter the charges of his detractors, Durham contended that the city desperately needed the $25 million from UGI. But the city’s existing budget contradicted his claim, so Durham and his allies resolved to make his assertion true. Soon after the gas controversy began, Durham and his allies on the city council introduced legislation providing for the downtown parkway, the Northeastern Boulevard, the park and parkway along Cobbs Creek, and a number of Crawford’s and OOACPS’s proposals for South Philadelphia.
But Durham’s attempt to inflate the city budget simply fed the opposition. In May 1905, in front of a gallery filled with protestors, city councilmen allied with Durham passed bills providing for the park and parkway projects and soon thereafter approved the new gas lease. Local manufacturers opposed to machine rule reportedly gave their workers time off to protest the so-called gas steal. As public anger continued to mount, Durham and the city council abandoned all of the measures.40
Crawford’s