Philadelphia Commentary

Mark Twain Sees Philadelphia in 1853

2005-08-22T14:52:00.000-04:00

Mark Twain Sees Philadelphia in 1853

On his first visit to Philadelphia, Mark Twain was a very young man.
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IAuctions n 1853, a very young Mark Twain made his first visit to Philadelphia. His comments follow:

"The old State House in Chestnut Street, is an object of great interest to the stranger; and though it has often been repaired, the old model and appearance are still preserved. It is a substantial brick edifice, and its original cost was L5,600 ($28,000). In the east room of the first story the mighty Declaration of Independence was passed by Congress, July 4th, 1776.

<auctions> "When a stranger enters this room for the first time, an unaccountable feeling of awe and reverence comes over him, and every memento of the past his eye rests upon whispers that he is treading upon sacred ground. Yes, everything in that old hall reminds him that he stands where mighty men have stood; he gazes around him, almost expecting to see a Franklin or an Adams rise before him. In this room is to be seen the old "Independence Bell", which called the people together to hear the Declaration read, and also a rude bench, on which Washington, Franklin, and Bishop White

"It is hard to get tired of Philadelphia<auctions> , for amusements are not scarce. We have what is called a 'free-and-easy,' at the saloons on Saturday nights. At a free-and easy, a chairman is appointed, who calls on any of the assembled company for a song or a recitation, and as there are plenty of singers and spouters, one may laugh himself to fits at a very small expense. Ole Bull, Jullien, and Sontag have flourished and gone, and left the two fat women, one weighing 764, and the other 769 pounds, to "astonish the natives." I stepped in to see one of these the other evening, and was disappointed. She is a pretty extensive piece of meat, but not much to brag about; however, I suppose she would bring a fair price in the Cannibal Islands. She is a married woman! If I were her husband, I think I could yield with becoming fortitude to the dispensations of Providence, if He, in his infinite goodness, should see fit to take her away! With this human being of the elephant species, there is also a "Swiss Warbler"--bah! I earnestly hope he may live to see his native land for the first time."

Keywords: Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens, Philadelphia Circus, Ole Bull, Pennsylvania Statehouse, pre-Civil War Philadelphia

Franklin's Public Pledge to Braddock

2005-08-22T12:44:00.000-04:00

Chapter XVI, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin:

The pacifist Quaker legislature was paralyzed with indecision when General Braddock brought troops from England to defend the western frontier, but lacked horses and wagons. Franklin risked debtors prison by personally pledging to repay local farmers whose wagons were soon lost at Fort Duquesne.
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Ihappened to say I thought it was a pity they had not been landed rather in Pennsylvania, as in that country almost every farmer had his waggon. The general eagerly laid hold of my words, and said, "Then you, sir, who are a man of interest there, can probably procure them for us; and I beg you will undertake it." I ask'd what terms were to be offer'd the owners of the waggons; and I was desir'd to put on paper the terms that appeared to me necessary. This I did, and they were agreed to, and a commission and instructions accordingly prepar'd immediately. What those terms were will appear in the advertisement I publish'd as soon as I arriv'd at Lancaster, which being, from the great and sudden effect it produc'd, a piece of some curiosity, I shall insert it at length, as follows:

"ADVERTISEMENT.
"LANCASTER, April 26, 1755.

"Whereas, one hundred and fifty waggons, with four horses to each waggon, and fifteen hundred saddle or pack horses, are wanted for the service of his majesty's forces now about to rendezvous at Will's Creek, and his excellency General Braddock having been pleased to empower me to contract for the hire of the same, I hereby give notice that I shall attend for that purpose at Lancaster from this day to next Wednesday evening, and at York from next Thursday morning till Friday evening, where I shall be ready to agree for waggons and teams, or single horses, on the following terms, viz.: I. That there shall be paid for each waggon, with four good horses and a driver, fifteen shillings per diem; and for each able horse with a pack-saddle, or other saddle and furniture, two shillings per diem; and for each able horse without a saddle, eighteen pence per diem. 2. That the pay commence from the time of their joining the forces at Will's Creek, which must be on or before the 20th of May ensuing, and that a reasonable allowance be paid over and above for the time necessary for their travelling to Will's Creek and home again after their discharge. 3. Each waggon and team, and every saddle or pack horse, is to be valued by indifferent persons chosen between me and the owner; and in case of the loss of any waggon, team, or other horse in the service, the price according to such valuation is to be allowed and paid. 4. Seven days' pay is to be advanced and paid in hand by me to the owner of each waggon and team, or horse, at the time of contracting, if required, and the remainder to be paid by General Braddock, or by the paymaster of the army, at the time of their discharge, or from time to time, as it shall be demanded. 5. No drivers of waggons, or persons taking care of the hired horses, are on any account to be called upon to do the duty of soldiers, or be otherwise employed than in conducting or taking care of their carriages or horses. 6. All oats, Indian corn, or other forage that waggons or horses bring to the camp, more than is necessary for the subsistence of the horses, is to be taken for the use of the army, and a reasonable price paid for the same.

"Note.--My son, William Franklin, is empowered to enter into like contracts with any person in Cumberland county. "B. FRANKLIN."

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To the inhabitants of the Counties of Lancaster, York and Cumberland.

"Friends and Countrymen,

"Being occasionally at the camp at Frederic a few days since, I found the general and officers extremely exasperated on account of their not being supplied with horses and carriages, which had been expected from this province, as most able to furnish them; but, through the dissensions between our governor and Assembly, money had not been provided, nor any steps taken for that purpose.

"It was proposed to send an armed force immediately into these counties, to seize as many of the best carriages and horses as should be wanted, and compel as many persons into the service as would be necessary to drive and take care of them.

"I apprehended that the progress of British soldiers through these counties on such an occasion, especially considering the temper they are in, and their resentment against us, would be attended with many and great inconveniences to the inhabitants, and therefore more willingly took the trouble of trying first what might be done by fair and equitable means. The people of these back counties have lately complained to the Assembly that a sufficient currency was wanting; you have an opportunity of receiving and dividing among you a very considerable sum; for, if the service of this expedition should continue, as it is more than probable it will, for one hundred and twenty days, the hire of these waggons and horses will amount to upward of thirty thousand pounds, which will be paid you in silver and gold of the king's money.

"The service will be light and easy, for the army will scarce march above twelve miles per day, and the waggons and baggage-horses, as they carry those things that are absolutely necessary to the welfare of the army, must march with the army, and no faster; and are, for the army's sake, always placed where they can be most secure, whether in a march or in a camp.

"If you are really, as I believe you are, good and loyal subjects to his majesty, you may now do a most acceptable service, and make it easy to yourselves; for three or four of such as can not separately spare from the business of their plantations a waggon and four horses and a driver, may do it together, one furnishing the waggon, another one or two horses, and another the driver, and divide the pay proportionately between you; but if you do not this service to your king and country voluntarily, when such good pay and reasonable terms are offered to you, your loyalty will be strongly suspected. The king's business must be done; so many brave troops, come so far for your defense, must not stand idle through your backwardness to do what may be reasonably expected from you; waggons and horses must be had; violent measures will probably be used, and you will be left to seek for a recompense where you can find it, and your case, perhaps, be little pitied or regarded.

"I have no particular interest in this affair, as, except the satisfaction of endeavoring to do good, I shall have only my labour for my pains. If this method of obtaining the waggons and horses is not likely to succeed, I am obliged to send word to the general in fourteen days; and I suppose Sir John St. Clair, the hussar, with a body of soldiers, will immediately enter the province for the purpose, which I shall be sorry to hear, because I am very sincerely and truly your friend and well-wisher, B. FRANKLIN."

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Ireceived of the general about eight hundred pounds, to be disbursed in advance-money to the waggon owners, etc.; but, that sum being insufficient, I advanc'd upward of two hundred pounds more, and in two weeks the one hundred and fifty waggons, with two hundred and fifty-nine carrying horses, were on their march for the camp. The advertisement promised payment according to the valuation, in case any waggon or horse should be lost. The owners, however, alleging they did not know General Braddock, or what dependence might be had on his promise, insisted on my bond for the performance, which I accordingly gave them.

--Chapter XVI, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Life On The River (3)

2005-04-28T13:37:00.000-04:00

Life on the River (3)

Until just a few decades ago, Philadelphia life was life along the river, with the gentry building houses upriver from the port. They were surrounded by abundant fishing, hunting, and all the sports of horsemanship.
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All over Europe the scene is repeated: a market town and seaport at the mouth of a river, with many miles of old castles overlooking the banks of the river in the hinterland. The seaports had to be protected against pirates, the hinterland against marauding brigands. But the flow of commerce was that the baronies upriver fed the seaport, and the seaports carried on trade with other river-organized economies. From time to time, someone like Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Bismarck or Hitler would try to unify the various river economies, usually unsuccessfully. In fact, the same pattern was seen along thePacific Coast of South America, until the Incas figured out how to go along the mountain ridge in the far interior, and then come down the rivers from the sparsely populated areas to the maritime settlements at the mouth of the river, whose defenses were planned for enemies from the sea. Philadelphia followed the standard commercial pattern, but without fortresses and castles.

Because of the vagaries King Charles II, and underneath that, because of marshes and their mosquito-borne diseases, the Delaware Bay was settled fairly late in colonial times -- and entirely Quaker. The Dutch were interested in trade rather than settlement, the Dutch were too few, their sovereign too indifferent, and William Penn took care of the Indians. So the English settlers had no one to fight except other Englishmen, once the French stab at Inca strategy was put down in 1753. After 1783, or perhaps 1812, the world left us alone. The Delaware Bay and River are essentially free of fortresses, Philadelphia has no castles. The peaceful sixty miles of upper Delaware Bay became lined with big farmhouses, or big Federalist and Victorian mansions. For a century, from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, and even for a time after that, the history of this peaceful pond reads like a novel by Jane Austen.

<auctions>As a playground for menfolk, it would be hard to improve on Victorian Delaware Bay. The river was full of fish, notably shad. In the fall, the migrating ducks and geese made for marvelous hunting. In the countryside behind the riverfront houses were all the sports having to do with horses; fox hunting, racing, horses shows. The kids could putter around in small sailboats, the adult sailors could sail a yacht to Europe if they wanted to. After John Fitch invented the Steamboat, it was possible to take a daily commute to the best male game of all -- trading, investing and gambling in the financial and commercial center of Philadelphia.

Marion Willis Rivinus and Katherine Hansell Biddle wrote a little book in 1973 called Lights Along the Delaware which tells the river story from the female point of view. The woman of the house was sort of the mayor of a little city, organizing the staff, supervising the garden, educating the children, planning the household, and organizing the dinners and social events. Educated and trained to the role, she knew what to do and enjoyed doing it. Jane Austen wrote the handbook. And while the menfolk were essential members of the cast, women were the managing directors. The men were off with their horses, or sailboats, or fishing rods, or their faraway big-deal mergers and acquisitions. True, it was not a notably intellectual community, there were no Edith Whartons, Abigail Adams or Emily Dickinson. You might find some of that in Germantown, perhaps. The professions, law and medicine, lured the more studious members away from Society, but the international diplomatic circle was seen as appropriate goal for any truly graceful and accomplished graduates of this environment.

As the riverbank was gradually destroyed by railroads and expressways, only a few mansions like Andalusia remain in good repair. Curiously, what endures best are the clubs. The fishing club variously called the Fish House, the Castle, the Colony in Schuylkill, or the Schuylkill Fishing Company of the State in Schuylkill, has moved as many times as the name has changed. Started in 1732, it is the oldest continuously existing men's club in the world. It moved to the Delaware River from the Schuylkill when the Fairmount dam was built, and to its present location at Devon, the estate of William B. Chamberlain in 1937. New members do the cooking, cleaning and serving, older members tell stories. When the river pollution is finally controlled, they may go back to catching the fish as well as cooking them. There's the Philadelphia Gun Club, which before 1890 was the Holiday Shooting Club of Riverton NJ. And then there's the Gloucester (NJ) Fox Hunt, which during the Revolution turned into First Troop, City Cavalry and after escorting George Washington to the battles of Boston Harbor, has been an active fighting unit of the National Guard (most recently in Bosnia) as well as a devoted center of male horsemanship between wars. The Farmer's Club, the Agricultural Society, and the Horticultural Society all reflect the rural interests that once predominated just behind the riverfront estates, nevertheless still thriving after 150 years of suburbia, exurbia and urban revival.

Although the riverfront industrial slums which destroyed the American branch of Jane Austen's gracious living manner are themselves declining and seem about to go away, it would take a real visionary to imagine how the Grand Life on the River will ever return. The banks of the Delaware are much lower than the bank of the Hudson, for example. They make a great place to put high-speed rail lines and even higher speed interstate highways. The patroons of Hyde Park, West Point and Poughkeepsie are much higher up a cliff, and can overlook the river without much noticing an occasional whoosh. The mansions along the Delaware have to look right at the tracks. Except for a few places like Bristol which have been isolated on the river side of the tracks and highway, it's not easy to see how you would get from here to there, or when.

Keywords: Riverbank life, Delaware River, Rivinus, Biddle, duck hunting, horsemanship,

Â© George Ross Fisher, M.D., 2004

Litchfield County, Extended (1771-1775)

2005-04-28T13:30:00.000-04:00

Litchfield County, Extended (1771-1775)

Connecticut occupied Pennsylvania territory for four years, and successfully beat back an attempt to evict them. The impending American Revolution caused the other colonies to put a stop to the fighting.
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For four years, the settlers considered the apparently peaceful Wyoming Valley to be part of Litchfield County, Connecticut, and its main little town was called Westmoreland. However, the high-living, non-Quaker sons of William Penn were ill content to let matters remain that way. Their response was to sell large tracts of land in the area, on condition the purchasers could conquer and hold it. The main purchasers were Scotch-Irish from Lancaster County, and the main speculators were prominent Philadelphians with names like Francis, Tilghman, Shippen, Allen, Morris and Biddle. This speculative land sale was to be the source of trouble for decades, because it conflicted with titles to the same land issued by the Susquehanna Company.

The predictable trouble surfaced in 1775, with the Second Pennamite War. Under the command of a man named Plunkett, 700 Pennsylvania soldiers marched to liberate Wyoming, and were soundly defeated by the Connecticut soldiery under the command of Zebulon Butler. There might have been further fighting in this expanded war, except for the other eleven colonies applying great pressure on these two colonies fighting each other with potential jeopardy to the united rebellion against British rule. While the Penn family were definitely royalist in their sympathies, their colonial property put them in an awkward position with their Scotch-Irish allies, who were in all colonies the main leaders in the rebellion. The effect was to isolate the Connecticut invaders, even though they were the victors in the fighting.

Keywords: Litchfield, Wyoming Valley, Westmoreland, Plunkett, Zebulon Butler, Lancaster County, Susquehanna Company,

Third Pennamite War (1784)

2005-04-07T15:11:00.000-04:00

The Third Pennamite War (1784)

Connecticut and Pennsylvania stopped fighting during the Revolution, but then promptly resumed hostilities. The Decision of Trenton gave the prize to Pennsylvania, whose legislature promptly abused the helpless remaining Connecticut settlers.
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<auctions>And so, after the Revolution was finally over, there was a third war between Pennsylvanians and the Connecticut born settlers of the Wyoming Valley. This time, the disputes were focused on, not the land grants of King Charles but the 1771 land sales by Penn family, most of which conflicted with land sales to the Connecticut settlers by the Susquehanna Company. The Connecticut settlers felt they had paid for the land in good faith, and had certainly suffered to defend it against the common enemy. The Pennsylvanians were composed of speculators (mostly in Philadelphia) and settlers (mostly Scotch-Irish from Lancaster County). Between them, these two groups easily controlled the votes in the Pennsylvania Assembly, leading to some outrageous political behavior which conferred legal justification on disgraceful vigilante behavior. For example, once the American Revolution was finally over (1783) the Decision of Trenton had given clear control to Pennsylvania, so its Assembly appointed two ruffians named Patterson and Armstrong to be commissioners in the Wyoming Valley. These two promptly gave the settlers six months to leave the land, and using a slight show of resistance as sufficient pretext, burned the buildings and scattered the inhabitants, killing a number of them. One of the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation was thus promptly demonstrated, as well as the ensuing importance of a little-understood provision of the new (1787) Constitution . No state may now interfere in the provisions of private contracts. Those with nostalgia for states rights must overcome a heavy burden of history about what state legislatures were capable of doing in this and similar matters, in the days before the federal government was empowered to stop it.

<auctions>A flood soon wiped out most of the landmarks in the Wyoming Valley, and it had to be resurveyed. Patterson, whose official letters to the Assembly denounced the Connecticut settlers as banditti, perjurers, ruffians, and a despicable herd, boasted that he had restored, to what he called his constituents, "the chief part of all the lands". The scattered settlers nevertheless began to trickle back to the Valley, and Patterson had several of them whipped with ramrods. As the settlers became more numerous, Armstrong marched a small army up from Lancaster. He pledged to the settlers on his honor as a gentleman that if both sides disarmed, he would restore order. As soon as the Connecticut group had surrendered their weapons, they were imprisoned; Patterson's soldiers were not disarmed at all, and assisted the process of marching the Connecticut settlers, chained together, to prison in Easton and Sunbury. To its everlasting credit, the decent element of Pennsylvania were incensed by this disgraceful behavior; the prisoners somehow mysteriously were allowed to escape, and the Assembly was cowed by the general outrage into recalling Patterson and Armstrong. Finally, the indignation spread to New York and Massachusetts, where a strong movement developed to carve out a new state in Pennsylvania's Northeast, to put a stop to dissention which threatened the unity of the whole nation. That was a credible threat, and the Pennsylvania Assemby appeared to back down, giving titles to the settlers in what was called the "Confirmimg Act of 1787". Unfortunately, in what has since become almost a tradition in the Pennsylvania legislature, the law was intentionally unconstitutional. Among other things, it gave some settlers land in compensation that belonged to other settlers, violating the provision in the new Constitution against "private takings", once again displaying the superiority of the Constitution over the Articles of Confederation. It is quite clear that the legislators knew very well that after a protracted period of litigation, the courts would eventually strike this provision down, so it was safe to offer it as a compromise and take credit for being reasonable.

It is useful to remember that the Pennsylvania legislature and the Founding Fathers were meeting in the same building at 6th and Chestnut Streets, sometimes at the same moment. Books really need to be written to dramatize the contrast between the motivations and behavior of the sly, duplicious Assembly, and the other group of men living in nearby rooming houses who had pledged their lives and sacred honor to establish and preserve democracy. To remember this curious contrast is to help understand Benjamin Franklin's disdainful remarks about parliaments and legislatures in general, not merely this one of which he had once been Majority Leader. The deliberations of the Constitutional Convention were kept secret, allowing Franklin the latitude to point out the serious weaknesses of real-life parliamentary process, and supplying hideous examples, just next door, of what he was talking about.

Keywords: Decision of Trenton,Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Constitutional protections, sanctity of contracts, private takings, Patterson, Armstrong,

The Proprietorships of William Penn

2005-04-07T14:35:00.000-04:00

The Proprietorships of William Penn

William Penn owned Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware; he was the proprietor. Although the Revolutionary War mostly ended that, the proprietorship still owns all unclaimed land in New Jersey.
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William Penn became interested in the Colonies when he acquired New Jersey as an investor, mainly concerned with selling real estate. When he later received Pennsylvania and Delaware from the King of England ( Charles II,the Stuart King) restored with the help of his Admiral father), he owned them and ruled them outright. But by then his main future intention was to found a refuge for Quakers and other religious dissenters, so he became the real estate Prioprietor, after merely satisfying himself about the government and other arrangements in a general way. At least half the original 13 colonies were proprietorships, but the terms of their grants had a lot of variation. Penn's intention for the proprietorship was to sell off as much of the property as possible, sort of benignly watching the process unfold in the parts he had sold. There were two unforeseen flaws in the idea; the first was that his sons and heirs would revert to the Anglican faith and have little interest in his holy experiment except for the revenue it would return. The second flaw was to fail to see that religious toleration might lead to the Quakers becoming outnumbered in their own refuge. Eventually, there does come a time in the real estate sell-off process when you have sold more than you retain. At that point, it is no longer yours.

In land value, although perhaps not in land area, that point had been reached by the middle of the eighteenth century, and it led to a famous battle between the Penn descendants and <auctions>Benjamin Franklin. The Penn family saw no reason to pay taxes to the new buyers on the land they hadn't yet sold, or obey laws created by the people to whom they had sold land. Franklin took the part of the settlers and immigrants, who resented paying taxes and fighting Indians on behalf of someone who still owned vast stretches of land within the colony. Both sides had a certain amount of justice in their positions, both sides appealed to the King. The Penns knew the King better, so Franklin lost. That was mostly what Franklin was doing in London in the years before the Revolution, and eventually it took the Revolutionary war to resolve the issue. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania did resolve the issue with fairness and generosity. To quote Sydney G. Fisher, writing in The Quaker Colonies, "When the people could have confiscated everything in Pennsylvania belonging to the proprietary family, they not only left them in possession of a large part of their land, but paid them handsomely for the part that was taken." The matter is generally considered to have been finally settled by the Confirming Act of 1787.

In New Jersey, on the other hand, the proprietorship still exists. The land between the North River (Hudson) and the South River (Delaware) was divided into two proprietorships by a line drawn between the waterfalls at Trenton and Egg Harbor. The southern segment was called the Proprietorship of West Jersey and retained a more strongly Quaker character than the Proprietorship of East Jersey, a fact that might well have led the two segments to take opposite sides of the 1860 Civil War except that it was the northern half that sympathized with slavery and the Southern confederacy, while the Proprietorship of West Jersey was mostly where the anti-slavery movement began, with a Quaker named John Woolman. The issue of taxing and legislating the unsold land of the Proprietorship was not a source of controversy in New Jersey at the time of the Revolution, but it hadn't been forgotten, either. A couple of the stockholders of the proprietorship were members of the Constitutional Convention. When the time came that the other delegates urgently needed New Jersey's vote to ratify the new constitution, the problem was "explained" to the other states. The outcome was that the proprietorship tacitly agreed to be taxed and regulated like any other property, but the ownership rights were tacitly respected as persisting under the new Constitution. So even today, when the ocean creates a new strip of beach, or a farmer abandons some land on the other side of a turnpike, it belongs to the Proprietorship. It belongs to a little group of stockholders who meet once a year in Burlington or Salem, under a tree, and who actually pay themselves annual dividends.

In Delaware, things are a little fuzzier. Delaware was once part of Pennsylvania, as the lower three counties. John Dickinson was once Governor of both states, but they have had two legislatures since 1700. The last time the proprietorship matter came up, so far as real estate lawyers can remember, was in the sandy beaches of Cape Henlopen; things were smoothed out by making the disputed land into a state park.

Keywords: William Penn, Proprietorship of West Jersey, Proprietorship of East Jersey, Proprietorship of Pennsylvania, Proprietorship of Delaware,

The Life and Death of Cities

2005-04-07T14:12:00.000-04:00

The Life and Death of Cities

Author Jane Jacobs makes an attractive case against globalization, but she's probably wrong.
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An elderly lady named Jane Jacobs, born in Scranton and living in Toronto, developed the theory that the root of all economic expansion is the replacement of imported goods with local products. The arresting example she gives is that of Venice, which she feels was the beginning of Western European industrialization, initially as an outgrowth of the Crusaders bringing back ideas from Constantinople. It was dangerous and expensive to import things from Constantinople, so even locally-made shoddy imitations could find a profitable local market. The do-it-yourself idea spread up the Po valley, around the Alps, down the Rhine, and so on. Each area gradually developed a thriving local industry of manufactures which were protected in price by the extra costs of importing them from more traditional centers. You become prosperous by becoming self-sufficient, getting rid of imported goods, right? And cities decline when people have too much money, find local manufacture is pollution-prone and too much trouble, and go back to importing goods as members of the rentier class.

But notice that current trends are all the other way. Let us have global free trade, and free the victimized consumer from the high prices which local merchants hope to extract from trade barriers. Lower prices then leave disposable income, which is available for investment, and consequently leads to a prosperous economy. Whatever the destructive local effects in cities, states, or nations, a thriving world economy makes everyone better off, not least because it puts a stop to nationalistic wars. That's the case for globalism, and Jane Jacobs makes the case against it.

If you love your city, it goes hard to think globally. Cities are perhaps better seen as points of equilibrium, like coral reefs and oceanic barrier islands, places where balanced forces of creation and destruction momentarily maintain an urban concentration which will disappear when the overwhelming irresistible forces of the economy change their balances.

Creating a new urban center may be a project too large for concerned citizens in a small town to be able to achieve; exploiting happenstance is what they must pray for. But if you want to maintain an existing city, keep it from decaying, you will shift your focus from subway lines and zoning laws, to giving more thought to the forces which make a city viable. Like crime prevention, education, taxes, and public spirit. If Philadelphia is destined to be destroyed, let it be by creative destruction, which is irresistible, rather than abandonment, which is your own doing.

Keywords: Jane Jacobs, city growth, globalization, Venice, imports, local products,

The Houses in the Park

2005-04-07T14:07:00.000-04:00

The Houses in the Park

William Penn intended his city to stretch from river to river, with the gentry living in mansions along the Schuylkill. Briefly it was so; the mansions are on display in Fairmount Park.

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<auctions>Fairmount Park is said to be the largest park (7000+ acres) within the limits of an American city, and in fact may be just a little bigger than the city can afford to maintain. It was established in the middle of the 19th Century by the efforts of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia as an attempt to prevent the industrial revolution from polluting Philadelphia's Schuylkill River and the water works . It has long constituted a symbolic interval between center city and the suburbs. Since the construction of the river drives and later the expressway, the commute along the river amidst trees and parkland has made entrance to town a pleasant experience. If the town planners had been able to foresee automobile commuting, they might have anticipated that the sun would be in the driver's eyes coming East during morning rush hour, and in his eyes as he went home toward the West in the evening. Driving safety might thus have been impaired by the tendency of this glare to direct attention to the park rather than straight ahead, but nevertheless redoubles the effect of the park views as a daily aesthetic experience. Even the pollution idea had its ambiguous side, since animals increase the bacterial runoff from their grazing areas, and the original houses in the park had many pastures. Whatever the effect downstream, the high ground had less malaria and less typhoid than swampy lowlands, so many of the original houses were useful summer retreats for city dwellers.

The park is governed by the Park Commission, and at one time had its own police force, the fourth largest police force in the state. Started in 1868, the Park Guards changed their name to the Park Police and then became part of the Philadelphia Police in 1972. The original 28 officers had grown to 525, had their own police academy and a proud tradition. It seems very likely that some deep and dirty politics were played in this shift of authority, and it might be a fair guess that some bitterness still survives in the circles who know and care about these things. Our present concern, however, is with the houses in the park.

There are seven of them, kept up and maintained by the <auctions>Philadelphia Museum of Art. Guided tours are provided by the museum, but since funds are limited only three of the houses are open year round. The others are equally worth a visit, but unfortunately are closed during the height of the spring flowering season. Two of the year round houses represent the two extremes of Philadelphia culture, since Mount Pleasant was owned by a buccaneer ("privateer") named McPherson who lived at the height of 18th Century elegance, while Cedar Grove was originally a Quaker farmhouse of the greatest simplicity consistent with honest comfort, a style which persisted relatively unchanged until late in the 19th Century. Benedict Arnold and Peggy Shippen looked at Mount Pleasant with an eye to purchase, but never lived there because they were called away by national events. With the addition of modern plumbing and air conditioning, Mount Pleasant would be an elegant place to live, even today. McPherson had to sell the place to pay his debts, whereas the Wister and Morris decendants of Cedar Grove still populate the Social Register in large numbers. The two houses completely typify the underlying philosophies of the two leading Philadelphia classes of leadership. One group measures itself by how much it spends, the other group measures itself by how much it has left.

Keywords: Fairmount Park mansions, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Lemon Hill, Mount Pleasant, Cedar Grove, Philadelphia Water Works,McPherson, Wister, Morris, Benedict Arnold, Peggy Shippen,

The Franklin Inn

2005-04-07T11:40:00.000-04:00

The Franklin Inn

Philadelphia's literary club is hidden away in the theater district, on a street paved with wooden blocks.

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Camac Street is a little alley running parallel to 12th and 13th Streets, and in their day the little houses there have had some pretty colorful occupants. The three blocks between Walnut and Pine Streets became known as the street of clubs, although during Prohibition they had related activities, and before that housed other adventuresome occupations. In a sense, this section of Camac Street is in the heart of the theater district, with the Forrest and Walnut Theaters around the corner on Walnut Street, and several other theaters plus the Academy of Music nearby on Broad Street. On the corner of Camac and Locust was once the Princeton Club, now an elegant French Restaurant, and just across Locust Street from it was once the Celebrity Club. The Celebrity club was once owned by the famous dancer Lillian Reis, about whom much has been written in a circumspect tone, because she once successfully sued the Saturday Evening Post for a million dollars for defaming her good name.

Camac between Locust and Walnut is paved with wooden blocks instead of cobblestones, because horses’ hooves make less noise that way. The unpleasant fact of this usage is that horses tend to wet down the street, and in hot weather you know they have been there. Along this section of narrow street, where you can hardly notice it until you are right in front, is the Franklin Inn. The famous architect William Washburn has inspected the basement and bearing walls, and reports that the present Inn building is really a collection of several -- no more than six -- buildings. Inside, it looks like an 18th Century coffee house; most members would be pleased to hear the remark that it looks like Dr. Samuel Johnson’s famous conversational club in London. The walls are covered with pictures of famous former members, a great many of them cartoon caricatures by other members. There are also hundreds or even thousands of books in glass bookcases. This is a literary society, over a century old, and its membership committee used to require a prospective member to offer one of his books for inspection, and now merely urges donations of books by the author-members. Since almost any Philadelphia writer of any stature was a member of this club, its library represents a collection of just about everything Philadelphia produced during the 20th Century. Ross & Perry, Publishers is currently in the process of bringing out a book containing the entire catalogue produced by David Holmes, bound in Ben Franklin’s personal colors, which happen to be gold and maroon, just like the club tie.

The club was founded by S. Weir Mitchell, who lived and practiced Medicine nearby. Mitchell had a famous feud with Jefferson Medical College two blocks away, and that probably accounts for his writing a rule that books on medical topics were not acceptable offerings from a prospective member of the club. So there.

The club has daily lunch, with argument, at long tables, and weekly roundtable discussions with an invited speaker. Once a month there is an evening speaker at a club dinner, with the rule that the speaker must be a member of the club. Once a year, on Benjamin Franklin’s birthday, the club holds an annual meeting and formal dinner. At that dinner, the custom has been for members to give toasts to three people, all doctors, including Dr. Franklin, Dr.S.Weir Mitchell the founder, and Dr. J. William White who endowed the dinner. Some sample toasts follow:

A Toast to Doctor Franklin

Benjamin Franklin’s formal education ended with the second grade, but he can be recognized as one of the best educated people of his age. He liked to be called Doctor Franklin, although he had no medical training. He was given an honorary degree of Master of Arts by Harvard and Yale, and an honorary doctorate by St.Andrew and Oxford. In our day, an honorary degree is something colleges give to wealthy alumni, or visiting politicians, or some celebrity who will fill the seats at an otherwise boring commencement ceremony. Proper academicians have been known to sniff at such degrees and decline them as diluting the meaning of "earned" degrees. No thesis, no tuition payments, no research on the professor’s favorite topic, no teaching of the professor’s courses for him. Annoyingly, people with honorary degrees don’t give a fig for tenure.

And then, there is another level of academic aristocracy. Physicians, the real doctors, don’t want you confused by people who only have a Ph.D. Franklin even turned that one on its head. At that time, colleges were mostly concerned with educating young men to be clergymen, and philosophy was their term for what we now call science. He invented bifocal glasses. He invented the rubber catheter. He founded the first hospital in the country, the Pennsylvania Hospital, and he donated the books for it to create the first medical library in the country. Until the Civil war, that particular library was the largest medical library in America. He founded the University of Pennsylvania which still doesn’t have a divinity school, although it has a school of Religious Studies, placing religion on a level with archeology. Franklin wrote extensively about the gout, the causes of lead poisoning and the origins of the common cold. It would be hard to find anyone with either an M.D. degree or a PhD. degree, then or now, who displayed such impressive scientific medical credentials, without earning -- any credentials at all.

A toast to Doctor Franklin.

A Toast To J. William White, MD

J. William White left a legacy to the Franklin Inn, the income from which was to pay for an annual dinner, with all the trimmings. Good as its word, the Inn holds the J. William White dinner every year on Benjamin Franklin’s birthday, although inflation and fluctuations of the stock market require it to make a modest charge for attendance. White also created the J. William White Professorshipin Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, a chair which was once occupied by Jonathan Rhoads.

These trust-fund memorials do little to convey the wild and glamorous image of Bill White. White was a member of the First City Troops, and fought the last known honest-to-goodness duel on Philadelphia’s field of honor. The right and wrong of the argument are in dispute, but the details boiled down to White at the critical moment raising his gun to the sky and firing at the stars. That it was not a meaningless gesture was then brought out by his opponent taking slow and deadly aim -- and then missing him.

White was an academic in the sense that he was the first, unpaid, Professor of Physical Culture at the University of Pennsylvania. Active in the Mask and Wig Club, he was chief surgeon at Philadelphia General Hospital, chief surgeon to the Philadelphia Police, and chief surgeon to the Pennsylvania RailRoad. He was Chairman of the Fairmount Park Commission, and numerous other positions where political contact was more important than surgical skill. When World War I came along, he was off to France with the University of Pennsylvania Hospital Unit, writing two books about the starving Beligians and the need for America to save Europe. As one might expect, he was a great friend of Theodore Roosevelt, and although his friendship with Henry James suggests greater literary talent, Roosevelt published more than thirty books. What emerges from the history of Bill White is flamboyance and lots and lots of unfettered energy. He might feel a little out of place at one of his endowed dinners today, but he was probably always a little out of place in any company -- and didn’t care a whit.

A toast to Bill White.

A Toast To Silas Weir Mitchell, MD

Silas Weir Mitchell lived to be an old man during the Nineteenth Century, when it was unusual to get very old. He was an important part of both the Philadelphia medical scene, and the literary one. He became known as the Father of American Neurology as a published studies of nerve injuries caused by the Civil War. He published about 150 scientific papers, including famous investigations of the neurological effects of rattlesnake venom. His most famous medical treatment was the "rest cure" for hysteria, while his most enduring scientific discovery was the phenomenon of causalgia. He despised Freud, and psychonanalysis. No doubt the feeling was mutual, but the passage of time has tended to favor Mitchell more than Freud. The central role of sex is the essence of Freud’s viewpoint, while Mitchell’s is summarized in the remark that, "those who do not know sick women, do not know women."

Mitchell’s second career was literary, publishing 12 novels and 5 books of poetry. He is honored as the founder of the Franklin Inn Club, for a century home to every important literary figure in Philadelphia. It is striking that he selected Benjamin Franklin as the guiding star of the Inn, since Franklin similarly was eminent in both science and culture, and an ornament to conversation and society. In a pacifist Quaker City, both men approved of combat, and his novel about Hugh Wynne stresses that his hero was a "Free Quaker, meaning one who fought in the Revolution. Because of his strong Republican views, he was never made a professor at the local medical school.

Mitchell’s patient Andrew Carnegie donated the funds to build a new building for the College of Physicians when Mitchell was its President. When Mitchell was president of the Franklin Inn, Carnegie wrote him, asking for suggestions about donating a small sum, say five or ten million, and asking where it should go. That was the Inn’s big chance, all right, but somehow it failed the test. Mitchell suggested that the money be given to raise the salaries of college professors, thus demonstrating a certain lack of foresight about the future direction of college tuitions.

A toast to Silas Weir Mitchell.

Keywords: Franklin Inn, Camac Street, wooden block paving, S. Weir Mitchell, S. William White MD,

© George Ross Fisher, M.D., 2004

The First Pennamite War (1769-1771

2005-04-07T11:34:00.000-04:00

The First Pennamite War (1769-1771)

The Penn family called the sheriff (named Jennings) to evict Connecticut poachers from their land, and then a glamorous adventurer named Ogden burned their cabins. The fifth time this happened, it was almost too bad about Ogden.

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Things seemed peaceful in the Wyoming Valley for half a dozen years after the massacre, so Connecticut settlers slowly drifted back. This time, the people who didn't like poachers were the Proprietors of Pennsylvania. The Penns were no longer Quakers, did not control the State Government, and in fact were often in conflict with the Pennsylvania Quakers who had bought their land. They had to act as private citizens in their effort to expel the Connecticut poachers, which in this case meant calling Sheriff Jennings to evict them. Since everyone on the frontier in those days was armed and ready to fight, Jennings brought along a band of soldiers, led by Captain Amos Ogden.

On five different occasions, with escalating casualties, Jennings would arrest the settlers and take them before a judge in Easton, while Ogden stayed behind and burned the cabins and farm buildings to the ground, following which a somewhat larger group of Connecticut Yankees would return to the Wyoming Valley. By 1771, the Connecticut squatters had grown too numerous to be intimidated easily, and were militarily organized under an effective soldier, Zebulon Butler. Butler's men surrounded the handful of Pennsylvania soldiers in a fort under Ogden. At that point, Ogden briefly became a hero.

Seeing that reinforcements would be necessary, Ogden stripped naked, wrapped his clothes in a bundle around some sticks, and tied his hat on top. Tying a rope to the bundle, he floated down the river while the Connecticut sharpshooters peppered his hat with holes. Luckily, their aim was excellent, and Ogden escaped without being hit by a stray bullet. Off to Philadelphia for reinforcements.

Unfortunately, when Ogden and two hundred soldiers returned, Zebulon Butler ambushed them. In those days of honorable combat, Ogden was set free in recognition of his derring-do, but only on condition that he promised never to return. The Connecticut group was thus left in possession of the valley, and can fairly be said to have won the first war.

Keywords: Pennamite War, Sheriff Jennings, Amos Ogden, escapes, Wyoming Valley, Connecticut, Pennsylvania,

The Final Capture of Philadelphia (6)

2005-04-07T11:29:00.000-04:00

The Final Capture of Philadelphia (6)

The British fleet dropped General Howe off at the head of the Chesapeake, planning to rejoin and resupply him by coming up the Delaware. But for six weeks the British couldn't subdue Forts Mifflin and Mercer, either by land or by sea, and had a close call before they finally did.

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<auctions>Philadelphia had only 25,000 inhabitants during the Revolutionary War, and nearly that many British soldiers of Sir William Howe poured into town, Victorious. Victorious, except fro being cut off from their supplies on the warships in the Chesapeake. Men o'war soon sailed up Delaware, but found the narrow channel between Fort Mifflin and Fort Mercer in New Jersey blocked by strange contraptions called chevaux-de-frise. These instruments consisted of heavy timbers sunk to the bottom of the river, containing massive iron prongs that reached almost to the surface but pointing downriver. They were an effective blocks to wooden vessels, and almost impossible to dislodge. The general arrangement was: Fort Mercer on the top of the New Jersey cliff called Red Bank (now National Park), overlooking the blockaded channel. On the other side of the ship channel was Fort Mifflin on a island. The second channel between Fort Mifflin's island and the Pennsylvania shore was quite shallow, allowing special gun barges and galleys to come down and attack larger vessels, then to be able to escape pursuit. The Americans had two years to perfect this defense, and it was formidable. Only one or two large sailing vessels could maneuver near it downriver, and at least the Pennsylvania side was difficult to attack across the mud flats.

<auctions>When Howe was considering how to attack Philadelphia as he sailed Southward past the mouth of the Delaware, he had decided it was hopeless for his fleet to attack this barrier if it was defending by an army, and the plan had been to defeat Washington, first However, in the event, Washington's Army was essentially intact, and from Valley Forge was able to interfere with supplies from the Chesapeake or lower Delaware Bay, and still send reinforcements to the river defense. The communication line on the West side was essentially what is now the Blue Route, the third side of a triangle from Conshohocken to Fort Mifflin. The bend in the Delaware made two sides of this triangle, and turbulence created by the river bend threw up mud island which made the channel particularly narrow. These islands have since been filed in for the airport, the stadiums and the Naval yard, so the battleground is today a little hard to make out, just is also true of Bunker Hill, North Church, etc in Boston Harbor.

Four or five hundred Americans were in each of the two forts, and eventually most of them were wiped out, at least half of them by starvation and exposure as much as cannon and musket fire. They had British on both sides of them, heavy guns bombarding them, attack for weeks. The British kept at it, because to fail would have meant the loss, by starvation and snipers, of the entire British expeditionary force in Philadelphia contingent of Hessians under von Donop was sent to Haddonfield and down the King's Highway to attack Fort Mercer from the rear. In a moment famous in Haddonfield, a runner named <auctions>Jonas Cattell sneaked out of the town and ran to Fort Mercer to tell the troops to turn their guns around for an attack from the rear, while the Quakers in the little town entered the Hessians in a very friendly way. There was more to it than that, with some heavy fighting in the open, but von Donop and most of his troops were casualties. Later on, a second assault by a different contingent did level the Fort. If not, there would have been a third of a fourth assault, because a river passage simply had to be forced. Before the repeated assault were over, Fort Mifflin had been bombarded into rubble. But what really carried the day for the British was the realization that if small Americans boats could sneak down the channel on the Pennsylvania side of Mifflin; then British small boats could go the other way, too. Although the river blockage was eventually broken, it took six weeks after the battle of Germantown, and meanwhile the heroic defense did a great deal to rally the sympathies of what had been considered maybe a Loyalist city, and partly loyalist state of New Jersey. Before the winter was over, Howe had to go back to London to explain himself, being replaced by General Clinton, who was much less cleaver and much more provocative as a conqueror. The first two years control by minority of hotheads. For the remaining five years of the war, the British concept was no longer liberation, but subjugation. The realization gradually spread, through both England and America, that war had been lost.

Keywords: Fort Mifflin, Fort Mercer, von Donop, chevaux-de-frise,

The Decision of Trenton (1782) Under the Articles of Confederation

2005-04-07T11:21:00.000-04:00

The Decision of Trenton (1782) Under the Articles of Confederation

The 1782 Decision of Trenton simply awarded the Wyoming Valley to Pennsylvania. Strong suspicions exist that other secret decisions were never made public. Like awarding the Western Reserve of Ohio to Connecticut.

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<auctions>As the Revolution was drawing to an end, it became time to settle the inter-state grievance of Pennsylvania and Connecticut. If they were all going to be United States citizens, it didn't matter much whether the residents of Wilke-Barre (as it was now known) were governed by the laws of Connecticut or Pennsylvania. But bloody grievances die hard, and slowly. The genteel debates envisioned by the Articles of Confederation were not not equal to settling blood feuds, but they tried. The two states selected judges to represent them, in a negotiated settlement which took place on neutral ground, Trenton, New Jersey. After protracted testimony and prolonged secret deliberation, the judges emerged with a very brief and unexplained decision: Wyoming Valley belonged to Pennsylvania. Period.

Almost every scholar of this subject is convinced that the unwritten decision contained two other provisions. Connecticut was given a piece of Ohio, Western Reserve. And the Pennsylvania representatives privately assured the group that the Pennsylvania Legislature would in time recognize the land titles of the Connecticut settlers who were actually resident on the land. Unfortunately, it is hard if not impossible to enforce an agreement that is secret, and the Connecticut claim to Ohio was eventually eliminated, while the Pennsylvania promise to recognize the land titles of people whose ancestors killed your ancestors, was much delayed, watered down, and resented.

http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/pa/luzerne/1893hist/ch6.htm

Trenton, New Jersey

Keywords: Decision of Trenton, Articles of Confederation, Wyoming Valley, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Western Reserve,

The Battle of Germantown: Oct. 3, 1777

2005-04-07T11:14:00.000-04:00

The Battle of Germantown: Oct. 3, 1777

As long as the Delaware River was blocked at Fort Mifflin, the British army may have won the Battle of the Brandywine, but it still had no supplies from the British fleet and was adrift in enemy territory. Washington thought there was still a chance to save Philadelphia, and attacked Howe's forces from three directions in Germantown. The plan turned out to be too ambitious, Washington lost; but at least Howe learned to be much more cautious.

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After its brief commotion from the unwelcome reverberations of the French and Indian War, Germantown settled down to a period of colonial prosperity and quiet vigorous growth. Most of the surviving hundred historical houses of the area date from this period, and it might even be contended that the starting of the Union School had been a beneficial stimulus.

Almost two decades passed. What we now call the American Revolution started rumbling in far-off Lexington and Concord, soon moved to New York and New Jersey. General William Howe, the illegitimate uncle of King George III, then decided to occupy the largest city in the colonies, tried to get his brother's Navy up the Delaware but hesitated to persist in a naval attack on the chain barrier blocking the river. He sustained a defeat trying to outflank the New Jersey fort at Red Bank (now a National Park), and did not like the land based artillery at Fort Mifflin and heaven knows where else along the twisting shaggy river. The British gave up on that approach, sent the navy down to Norfolk and back up the Chesapeake, landed the troops at the head of the Elk River. Washington was soon defeated at the Battle of the Brandywine Creek trying to head him off. So Howe invested Philadelphia, organizing his main defensive position in the center of Germantown. His headquarters were in Stenton and Morris House, General James Agnew was at Grumblethorpe The Center of British defense was at set up at Market Square where where Germantown Avenue crosses Schoolhouse Lane. With Washington holed up in Valley Forge, that should take care of that. Raggety rebels were unlikely to attack a prepared hilltop position with a river on either side, defended by a large number of British regulars.

Washington did not look at things that way, at all. He had watched General Braddock conduct an arrogant suicide mission in the woods near Ft. Duqesne, and also knew the British didn't like to get too many yards away from their navy. His plan was to attack frontally down the Skippack Pike with the troops under his direct command, while Armstrong would come down Ridge Avenue and up from the side. General Greene would attack along Limekiln Road, while General Smallwood and Foreman would come down Old York Road. In the foggy morning of October 3, the main body of American troops reached Benjamin Chew's massive stone house, now occupied by determined British troops, and General Knox decided this was too strong a pocket to leave behind in his rear. Precious time was lost with an artillery bombardment, and unfortunately the flanking troops down the lateral roads were late or did not arrive at all. Forward movement stopped, then the British counter attacked. Washington was therefore forced to retreat, but he did so in good order. The battle was over, the British had won again.

But maybe not. <auctions>Washington had not routed the British Army, or forced them to leave Philadelphia. They did leave the following year, however, and there was meanwhile no great desertion from the Colonial cause. Washington's troops suffered terrible privation and discouragement at Valley Forge, but the crowned heads of Europe didn't know that. For reasons of their own, the French and German monarchs were pondering whether the American rebellion was worth supporting, or whether it would soon collapse in a round of public hangings. From their perspective, the Americans didn't have to win, in fact it might be useful if they didn't. But if they were spirited and determined, led by a man who was courageous and resolute, their damage to the British interests might be worth what it would cost to support them. The Battle of Germantown can thus be reasonably argued to have been a victory for Washington, even if he had to retreat in an orderly withdrawal.

In Germantown itself, the process of turning a defeat into a victory soon began, with alienation of the German inhabitants against the inevitably destructive experiences of a British military occupation. Germantown would never again see itself as the capitol city of a large German hinterland. It was on its way to becoming part of the city of Philadelphia.

Keywords:Battle of Germantown, Chew Mansion, Washington, Howe,

Sullivan’s March

2005-04-07T11:02:00.000-04:00

Sullivan’s March

With Washington beleagured at Valley Forge, an Indian massacre of the nearby Wyoming Valley was a serious threat from the rear. General Sullivan was sent to exterminate the Iroquois, and proved utterly ruthless.

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<auctions>George Washington had plenty of other problems to contend with in 1778, but this was too much. He singled out General John Sullivan, a celebrated Indian fighter from New Hampshire, gave him four thousand troops, and told him to eliminate this Indian threat from the rear. From long experience, Sullivan knew what to do, and did it without remorse. Ignoring skirmishes and ambushed sentries, he marched his troops from the scene of the massacre straight into the heart of Iroquois homeland, destroying every source of food or Indian settlement he could find. He was not interested in winning battles, he was determined to starve the Indians into extinction, once and for all. After these two slaughters, a white one in Wyoming, and a red one in upstate New York, the entire frontier was a scene of devastation. Not much was heard of Indian fighting on the frontier for the rest of the Revolutionary War.

Keywords: General John Sullivan, Wyoming massacre, Sullivan's March, Valley Forge,

Philadelphia in 1658

2005-04-07T10:33:00.000-04:00

Philadelphia in 1658
The Annalist John Watson reflects on the earliest scenes in Philadelphia.
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<auctions>"But of all the settlers prior to Penn, I feel most interested to notice the name of Jurian Hartsfielder, because he took up all of Campington, 350 acres, as early as March 1676, nearly six years before Penn's colony came. He settled under a patent from Governor Andros. What a pioneer, to push on to such a frontier post! But how melancholy to think, that a man, possessing the freehold of what is now cut up into thousands of Northern Liberty lots, should have left no fame, nor any wealth, to any posterity of his name. But the chief pioneer must have been Warner, who, as early as the year 1658, had the hardihood to locate and settle the place, now Warner's Willow Grove, on the north side of the Lancaster Road, two miles from the city bridge. What an isolated existence in the midst of savage beasts and men must such a family have then experienced! What a difference between the relative comforts and household conveniences of that day and this! Yea, what changes did he witness, even in the long interval of a quarter of a century before the arrival of Penn's colony! To such a place let the antiquary now go to contemplate the localities so peculiarly unique!"

--John F. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the Olden Time

Keywords: John Watson, Warner's Willow Grove, Jurian Hartsfielder, Governor Andros, Campington, Northern Liberties,

The Origins of Haddonfield

2005-04-06T17:40:00.000-04:00

The Origins of Haddonfield

Haddonfield was founded by a 19 year-old Quaker girl in 1701, when it was still a fairly dangerous place to be. She has over 140 direct descendants, and forty of them still live in the town. Some famous scenes from the Revolutionary War took place here.
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<auctions>Haddonfield, New Jersey is named after a teenaged Quaker girl who came to the proprietorship of West Jersey in 1701 to look after some land which her father had bought from William Penn. Geographically, the land was on what later came to be called the Cooper River, and it must have been a scary place among the woods and Indians for a single girl to set up housekeeping. It was related in the"Tales of a Wayside Inn" that Elizabeth proposed to another young Quaker named John Estaugh. Because no children resulted, she sent to her sister in Ireland to send one of her kids, who proved unsatisfactory. So the kid was sent back, and Ebenezer Hopkins was sent in his place. Thus we have Hopkins pond, and lots of Hopkins in the neighborhood. Eventually, the first dinosaur skeleton was discovered in the blue clay around Hopkins Pond, and now can be seen in the American Museum of Natural History , so you know for sure that Haddonfield is an old place. Eventually, the Kings Highway was built from Philadelphia to New York (actually Salem to Burlington at first) and it crosses the Cooper Creek near the old firehouse in Haddonfield, which claims to house the oldest volunteer fire company in America, but not without some argument about what was first, what was oldest, and what is continuous. Haddonfield is, in short, where the Kings Highway crosses the Cooper, about seven miles East of City Hall in Philadelphia. The presence of the Delaware River in between makes a powerful difference, since at the same distance to the West of City Hall is the crowded shopping and transportation hub at 69th and Market Street. Fifty years ago, Haddonfield was a little country town surrounded by pastures, and seventy years ago the streets were mostly unpaved. The isolation of Haddonfield was created by the river, and ended by building the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in 1926. If you go way back to the Revolutionary War, the river created a military barrier, and many famous patriots like Marquis de Lafayette, Dolley Madison, Anthony Wayne and others met in comparative safety from the British in the Indian King Tavern. In a famous escapade, "Mad" Anthony Wayne drove some cattle from South Jersey around Haddonfield to the waterfalls at Trenton, and then over the back roads to Washington's encampment at Valley Forge. In retaliation, the British under Banastre Tarleton rode in to nearby Salem County and massacred the farmers at Hancock's Bridge who had provided the cattle. At another time, the Hessians were dispatched through Haddonfield to come upon the Delaware River fortifications at Red Bluff from the rear. Unfortunately for them, they encamped in Haddonfield overnight, and a runner took off through the woods to warn the rebels at Red Bluff to turn their cannons around to face the attack from the rear, which was therefore repulsed with great losses. These stories are told with great relish, but my mother in law found out some background truths. Seeking to join the Daughters of the Revolution in Haddonfield, she was privately told that the really preferable ladies' club was the Colonial Dames. Quaker Haddonfield, you see, had been mostly Tory.

A local boy named <auctions>Alfred Driscoll became Governor of New Jersey, but before he did that he was mayor of Haddonfield. He had gone to Princeton and wanted to know why Haddonfield couldn't look like Princeton. All it seemed to take was a few zoning ordinances, and today it might fairly be claimed that Haddonfield is at least as charming and beautiful as Princeton, maybe nicer. At the very least, it has less auto traffic. Al Driscoll went on to be CEO of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical corporation, and everyone agrees he was the world's nicest guy. The other necessary component ofbeautiful colonial Haddonfield was a fierce old lady who was married to a lawyer. Any infraction of Al's zoning ordinances was met with instant attack, legal, verbal, and physical. A streetside hot dog vendor set up his cart on Kings Highway at one time, and the lady came out and kicked it over. If you didn't think she meant business, there was always her lawyer husband to explain things to you. She probably carried things a little too far, and one resident was driven to the point of painting his whole house a brilliant lavender, just to demonstrate the concept of freedom. Now that she and her husband are gone, the town continues to be authentic and pretty, probably because dozens of other citizens stand quietly ready to employ some of her techniques if the need arises.

Keywords: Haddonfield, Elizabeth Haddon, John Estaugh, Governor Driscoll, Joan Aitken, Mad Anthony Wayne,

The Missouri Compromise

2005-04-06T17:27:00.000-04:00

The Missouri Compromise

Pennsylvania's contribution to this bargain between the slave-holding South and abolitionist North was that William Bingham owned much of what was to become the state of Maine. That gave the free states two new senators to balance two slave-holding senators for Missouri.
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Louisiana Purchase took place in 1804. Napoleon<auctions> insisted on payment in gold, which the United States government didn't have. William Bingham of 3rd and Spruce Street graciously supplied the necessary gold as a loan, eventually repaid around the time of the Civil War, long after Bingham had died. It's an interesting question whether Nicholas Biddle might have been involved in the financing of the Louisiana Purchase, too. He was part of the American diplomatic mission in France and definitely had a hand in the details of the treaty. Philadelphia was a pretty small town at that time, so it seems certain he knew Bingham, although his own future banking career was not yet visible.

By fifteen years after the purchase, settlers from the South had poured into what is now Missouri, taking their slaves along with them, and petitioning to be admitted as a state. While slave owners had every right to do so, anti-slavery forces in the North were distressed to see slavery spreading into the new western territories, and particularly upset to see two new pro-slavery Senators from Missouri upset the deadlock that kept either side from advancing its cause by statute. <auctions>Henry Clay of Kentucky proposed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had three main components. Missouri would be admitted as a slave state, but -- slavery in the new territories would otherwise not be permitted north of the southern boundary of Missouri in the future, and the voting balance in the Senate would be preserved by carving out a new state of Maine from Massachusetts.

<auctions>The Maine part brings us back to Philadelphia and William Bingham, because the Bingham estate largely owned the land that would become the new State of Maine. To go back a little, Massachusetts had earlier sold off three million acres to General Henry Knox, later Washington's Secretary of War, in order to pay its Revolutionary War debts. Knox was not wealthy, and soon found the purchase was more than he could manage. William Bingham was always looking for good investments, and acquired the land for $250,000, or ten cents an acre. Just about everything Bingham touched soon turned to gold, but Maine proved to be one of his more mediocre investments. As farmland, it was pretty poor.

Not only was Maine cold, it had been scraped down to rock by the earlier glaciers. Bingham's gamble was that settlers would be forced to go North instead of West by uncertainty about the Indians. The managers of his estate switched attention from farming to lumbering, and eventually made out reasonably well, but it wasn't what Bingham had hoped for. Ohio had the topsoil that had been scraped from Maine,George Washington owned 5,000 acres of Kentucky,and 33,000 elsewhere. Aaron Burr had dreams of a Western empire of his own, Andrew Jackson was willing to move Indians tribes thousands of miles if they got in the way. Bingham had essentially stepped on his own toes, and the Louisiana Purchase offered such cheap fertile farmland that the West made Maine look pretty unattractive to settlers. Meanwhile he was betting against many of the political leaders of the country. Oh, well, you can't win 'em all.

Keywords: Missouri Compromise, Maine, William Bingham, slavery,

The Franklin Inn

2005-04-06T17:20:00.000-04:00

The Franklin Inn
Founded by S. Weir Mitchell as a literary society, this little club hidden on Camac Street has been the center of Philadelphia's literary life.
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Camac Street is a little alley running parallel to 12th and 13th Streets, and in their day the little houses there have had some pretty colorful occupants. The three blocks between Walnut and Pine Streets became known as the street of clubs, although during Prohibition they had related activities, and before that housed other adventuresome occupations. In a sense, this section of Camac Street is in the heart of the theater district, with the Forrest and Walnut Theaters around the corner on Walnut Street, and several other theaters plus the Academy of Music nearby on Broad Street. On the corner of Camac and Locust was once the Princeton Club, now an elegant French Restaurant, and just across Locust Street from it was once the Celebrity Club. The Celebrity club was once owned by the famous dancer Lillian Reis, about whom much has been written in a circumspect tone, because she once successfully sued the Saturday Evening Post for a million dollars for defaming her good name.

Camac between Locust and Walnut is paved with wooden blocks instead of cobblestones, because horses' hooves make less noise that way. The unpleasant fact of this usage is that horses tend to wet down the street, and in hot weather you know they have been there. Along this section of narrow street, where you can hardly notice it until you are right in front, is the Franklin Inn. The famous architect William Washburn has inspected the basement and bearing walls, and reports that the present Inn building is really a collection of several -- no more than six -- buildings. Inside, it looks like an 18th Century coffee house; most members would be pleased to hear the remark that it looks like Dr. Samuel Johnson's famous conversational club in London. The walls are covered with pictures of famous former members, a great many of them cartoon caricatures by other members. There are also hundreds or even thousands of books in glass bookcases. This is a literary society, over a century old, and its membership committee used to require a prospective member to offer one of his books for inspection, and now merely urges donations of books by the author-members. Since almost any Philadelphia writer of any stature was a member of this club, its library represents a collection of just about everything Philadelphia produced during the 20th Century. Ross & Perry, Publishers has brought out a book containing the entire catalogue produced by David Holmes, bound in Ben Franklin's personal colors, which happen to be gold and maroon, just like the club tie.

The club was founded by S. Weir Mitchell, who lived and practiced Medicine nearby. Mitchell had a famous feud with Jefferson Medical College two blocks away, and that probably accounts for his writing a rule that books on medical topics were not acceptable offerings from a prospective member of the club. So there.

The club has daily lunch, with argument, at long tables, and weekly roundtable discussions with an invited speaker. Once a month there is an evening speaker at a club dinner, with the rule that the speaker must be a member of the club. Once a year, on Benjamin Franklin's birthday, the club holds an annual meeting and formal dinner. At that dinner, the custom has been for members to give toasts to three people, all doctors, including Dr. Franklin, Dr.S.Weir Mitchell the founder, and Dr. J. William White who endowed the dinner. Some sample toasts follow:

A Toast to Doctor Franklin

Benjamin Franklin's formal education ended with the second grade, but he can be recognized as one of the best educated people of his age. He liked to be called Doctor Franklin, although he had no medical training. He was given an honorary degree of Master of Arts by Harvard and Yale, and an honorary doctorate by St.Andrew and Oxford. In our day, an honorary degree is something colleges give to wealthy alumni, or visiting politicians, or some celebrity who will fill the seats at an otherwise boring commencement ceremony. Proper academicians have been known to sniff at such degrees and decline them as diluting the meaning of "earned" degrees. No thesis, no tuition payments, no research on the professor's favorite topic, no teaching of the professor's courses for him. Annoyingly, people with honorary degrees don't give a fig for tenure.

And then, there is another level of academic aristocracy. Physicians, the real doctors, don't want you confused by people who only have a Ph.D. Franklin even turned that one on its head. At that time, colleges were mostly concerned with educating young men to be clergymen, and philosophy was their term for what we now call science. He invented bifocal glasses. He invented the rubber catheter. He founded the first hospital in the country, the Pennsylvania Hospital, and he donated the books for it to create the first medical library in the country. Until the Civil war, that particular library was the largest medical library in America. He founded the University of Pennsylvania which still doesn't have a divinity school, although it has a school of Religious Studies, placing religion on a level with archeology. Franklin wrote extensively about the gout, the causes of lead poisoning and the origins of the common cold. It would be hard to find anyone with either an M.D. degree or a PhD. degree, then or now, who displayed such impressive scientific medical credentials, without earning -- any credentials at all.

A toast to Doctor Franklin.

A Toast To J. William White, MD

J. William White left a legacy to the Franklin Inn, the income from which was to pay for an annual dinner, with all the trimmings. Good as its word, the Inn holds the J. William White dinner every year on Benjamin Franklin's birthday, although inflation and fluctuations of the stock market require it to make a modest charge for attendance. White also created the J. William White professorship in Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, a chair which was once occupied by Jonathan Rhoads.

These trust-fund memorials do little to convey the wild and glamorous image of Bill White. White was a member of the First City Troops, and fought the last known honest-to-goodness duel on Philadelphia's field of honor. The right and wrong of the argument are in dispute, but the details boiled down to White at the critical moment raising his gun to the sky and firing at the stars. That it was not a meaningless gesture was then brought out by his opponent taking slow and deadly aim -- and then missing him.

White was an academic in the sense that he was the first, unpaid, Professor of Physical Culture at the University of Pennsylvania. Active in the Mask and Wig Club, he was chief surgeon at Philadelphia General Hospital, chief surgeon to the Philadelphia Police, and chief surgeon to the Pennsylvania RailRoad. He was Chairman of the Fairmount Park Commission, and numerous other positions where political contact was more important than surgical skill. When World War I came along, he was off to France with the University of Pennsylvania Hospital Unit, writing two books about the starving Beligians and the need for America to save Europe. As one might expect, he was a great friend of Theodore Roosevelt, and although his friendship with Henry James suggests greater literary talent, Roosevelt published more than thirty books. What emerges from the history of Bill White is flamboyance and lots and lots of unfettered energy. He might feel a little out of place at one of his endowed dinners today, but he was probably always a little out of place in any company -- and didn't care a whit.

A toast to Bill White.

A Toast To Silas Weir Mitchell, MD

Silas Weir Mitchell lived to be an old man during the Nineteenth Century, when it was unusual to get very old. He was an important part of both the Philadelphia medical scene, and the literary one. He became known as the Father of American Neurology after publishing studies of nerve injuries caused by the Civil War. He published about 150 scientific papers, including famous investigations of the neurological effects of rattlesnake venom. His most famous medical treatment was the "rest cure" for hysteria, while his most enduring scientific discovery was the phenomenon of causalgia. He despised Freud, and psychonanalysis. No doubt the feeling was mutual, but the passage of time has tended to favor Mitchell more than Freud. The central role of sex is the essence of Freud's viewpoint, while Mitchell's is summarized in the remark that, "those who do not know sick women, do not know women."

Mitchell's second career was literary, publishing 12 novels and 5 books of poetry. He is honored as the founder of the Franklin Inn Club, for a century home to every important literary figure in Philadelphia. It is striking that he selected Benjamin Franklin as the guiding star of the Inn, since Franklin similarly was eminent in both science and culture, and an ornament to conversation and society. In a pacifist Quaker City, both men approved of combat, and his novel about Hugh Wynne stresses that his hero was a "Free" Quaker, meaning one who fought in the Revolution. Because of his strong Republican political views, he was never made a professor at the local medical school.

Mitchell's patient Andrew Carnegie donated the funds to build a new building for the College of Physicians when Mitchell was its President. When Mitchell was president of the Franklin Inn, Carnegie wrote him, asking for suggestions about donating a small sum, say five or ten million, asking where it should go. That was the Inn's big chance, all right, but somehow it failed the test. Mitchell suggested that the money be given to raise the salaries of college professors, thus demonstrating a certain lack of foresight about the future direction of college tuitions.

A toast to Silas Weir Mitchell.

Keywords: Franklin Inn Club, S. Weir Mitchell, J. William White,

Philadelphia or Saratoga? (4)

2005-04-06T15:51:00.000-04:00

Philadelphia or Saratoga? (4)

When the British finally decided to subdue the Colonies, Howe was to take New York (and Philadelphia if there was opportunity) and then go up the Hudson to join an army under Burgoyne, which was coming down from Quebec. Howe, who was related to the King, decided on his own to take Philadelphia and leave Burgoyne to his own devices. The plan was too ambitious, and the British generals didn't communicate with each other.
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H<auctions>elen of Troy launched a thousand ships, and Lord Howe only launched seven hundred, but they were bigger. It is estimated a thousand oak trees were cut down to build just one man o' war. This flotilla was parked in lower New York harbor while forty thousand redcoats conquered Brooklyn Heights, Manhattan, Washington Heights, Perth Amboy, New Brunswick, Princeton, Trenton -- and then Washington promptly made fools of Howe and Cornwallis, at Trenton, Princeton, New Brunswick. Howe and Cornwallis in particular, was raging mad.

<auctions>The grand plan laid out in London by Lord Germaine was for Howe to capture New York, and maybe Philadelphia, while Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne took an army from Canada along that giant cleft which starts at the St. Lawrence River, down Lake Champlain, then down the Hudson from Albany to New York. The Hudson is very wide, and the British Navy would have no trouble sailing upriver to Albany, landing an army to meet Burgoyne coming south, with the effect of cutting New England off from the rest of the Colonies. Burgoyne got his orders in London shortly after Howe's January disaster in Trenton, arrived in Quebec in May, and started on his campaign June 20. Nothing dilatory about him. Howe, however, had six months to get to Albany before that, and several months more before Burgoyne would get to Saratoga, tromping through the woods and black flies. From Staten Island, it might have taken Howe ten days to sail to Albany in plenty of time.

<auctions>Instead of that, Howe solitarily and without advice, decided to take Philadelphia. The capture of the enemy capital would help people forget Princeton, and it would be sweet to whip Washington. Unfortunately, they wasted a lot of time doing it. Finding the Delaware too well fortified, and almost as snaggy as Henry Hudson had found it more than a century earlier, he sailed all the way to Norfolk, came up the Chesapeake and landed at the head of Elk, and marched for Philadelphia. The Brandywine Valley has deep sharp cliffs off to the right, so Cornwallis was sent off to the left as a flanker past Dilworthtown while Howe attacked Washington head on at Chadd's Ford. When Washington found himself facing encirclement, he ordered a withdrawal. Philadelphia was essentially then occupied without further fight, with the British setting up their defenses at Germantown, seven miles from the center of town. Three weeks later, Washington attacked Germantown in a three pronged assault that mainly failed because two of his formations attacked each other in the fog. That was October 4, 1777. The news soon reached them that Burgoyne had surrendered the other British army --starving in the woods -- at Saratoga, New York on October 17. Howe had in effect abandoned Burgoyne in order to take Philadelphia.

<auctions>In retrospect, it was a bad choice. All the world -- and the King of France in particular -- could see that Washington had beaten Howe at Trenton and then Gates and Benedict Arnold had soon beaten Burgoyne at Saratoga. General Gates of course was in charge at Saratoga, but Arnold was the flamboyant hero. Adding to his earlier exploits in Quebec and later providing the captured cannon of Ticonderoga for General Knox to drag over the mountains to Boston, thereby allowing Washington to drive the British fleet to safer distances, Arnold now essentially won two more battles at Saratoga. The first was to defeat Leger, who had been sent down Lake Ontario to come back up the Mohawk Valley to Albany. Then, turning his troops through the woods, Arnold soon joined Gates at Saratoga and defiantly led the charge that smashed the British line, when Gates would have been satisfied with containment. Arnold, like Alexander Hamilton, was a man after Washington's heart.

Meanwhile, Howe settled down to enjoy a winter at Philadelphia. His court jester and chief entertainer was Major Andre. There was some satisfaction in knowing that Washington was freezing at Valley Forge.

Keywords: Germaine, Burgoyne, Howe, Benedict Arnold, Gates, Saratoga, Ticonderoga,

© George Ross Fisher, M.D., 2004

The Pennamite Wars: Who Had The Last Word?

2005-04-06T15:49:00.000-04:00

The Pennamite Wars: Who Had The Last Word?

When we shifted from a King to a Republic, we created novel problems reconciling the two theories of continuous ownership of land. The courts did their mystifying best, we suppose.
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Pennsylvania once fought three wars with Connecticut, but nowadays most people in both Connecticut and Pennsylvania have never heard of it. Those who do know, call them the Pennamite Wars . As you might expect, accounts by Connecticut patriots portray the matter as just taking possession of what they owned. Pennsylvania accounts of the wars, on the other hand, describe them as a stout defense against invasion. <auctions>The matter boils down to the undisputed fact that King Charles II gave what is now the northern third of Pennsylvania to Connecticut in 1662, and in 1681 the same king gave it to William Penn. Eighty years after that, in 1769, Connecticut moved in, and Pennsylvania threw them out. It all happened twice more, and the Continental Congress became distressed that two of the thirteen colonial allies were fighting each other instead of the British. So it had to be resolved in court, and therefore we all have to get a little education in the fine points of real estate law in order to understand why Pennsylvania won the case. In short, Connecticut claimed that Charles II had cruelly and unjustly reversed himself, while the Penn Proprietorship simply maintained they were nonetheless legally entitled to the property.

Let's look at this dumb situation from the lawyers' point of view. If you own some land, but someone says you don't, your first response would be to show that the last owner turned it over to you without strings attached. And then you show that the title passed person-to-person backward in a clear chain of unclouded ownership. As long as this is provable, the critical deciding factor rests on what right the "original" owner had to it, from the Indians, or a King, or government charter. No one can be found to claim ownership earlier than that, so it must be yours.

The critical point is that "the original owner" is therefore the first private (non-governmental) owner. We are so used to this legal convention that it can be upsetting to discover that things were exactly opposite when we had a king -- and that our courts still uphold the monarch's decrees. Kings had a right to do absolutely anything, and that divine right therefore included the ability to revoke private ownership and take the property back, or give it to someone else. Establishing a clear title is now a process of tracing backward to the last moment when someone still had an absolute right to do anything he pleased with it. If what he did was cruel and unjust, too bad.

As soon as you trace your title back to a king or other absolute tyrant, the courtroom situation effectively reverses. At that critical turning point, the important issue stops being what a still-earlier owner intended, and becomes what the final owner said. The last word of the last monarch extinguishes anything intended by anybody earlier. Even after all this ponderous logic is thoroughly explained, perhaps even repeated, the loser of a case goes away dissatisfied and angry. It ain't right.

It is right, of course, since you can't be an absolute monarch if you can't do what you please. If someone was an absolute monarch in the past, whatever he said was his right , and it would be disruptive to overturn in retrospect what seemed perfectly orderly at the time. The whole progress from Magna Carta to American Revolution was to accept old confiscations as final, as the necessary price of putting an end to having any new ones. After the cutoff point, the right to transfer property became the sole discretion of the current owner. The transfer of sovereignty from governmental to individual ownership was a serious main issue in the Revolutionary War.

Pennsylvania thus fought three Pennamite wars with Connecticut over conflicting land grants by kings, and also got into hot but non-military quarrels with Virginia and Maryland over much the same issues. If Pennsylvania had lost these disputes, the Commonwealth would now be little more than an eighth its present size. Pittsburgh would be in Virginia, Scranton would be in Connecticut, and Philadelphia would be a city in Maryland. Perhaps that wouldn't be so bad -- after all, maybe they don't have a city wage tax in Maryland.

What would be very bad, and therefore is the heart of the matter, is that we probably would have undergone two hundred years of contested titles and maybe even shooting wars, as a result of having property ownership in constant dispute. After a couple of generations, it matters less who was right and who was wrong. What begins to matter more is that things get fairly and finally settled so everyone can get on with his life.

Keywords: Pennamite Wars, Connecticut invades Pennsylvania, ownership disputes, Royal prerogatives, the last word of Monarchs,

Philadelphia in 1976: Legionaire's Disease

2005-04-06T15:38:00.000-04:00

Philadelphia in 1976: Legionaire's Disease

Philadelphia's ambitious Bicentennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence was ruined by an epidemic of a new disease that seemed to focus on tourists.

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<auctions>No other city in America is remembered for an epidemic; Philadelphia is remembered for two of them. The Yellow Fever epidemic, for one, that finished any Philadelphia's hopes for a re-run as the nation's capital. And Legionaire's Disease, that ruined the 1976 bicentennial celebration. One is a virus disease spread by mosquitoes, the other a bacterial disease spread by water cooled air conditioners. Neither epidemic was the worst in the world of its kind, neither disease is particularly characteristic of Philadelphia. Both of them particularly affected groups of people who were guests of the city at the time; French refugees from Haiti and attendees at an American Legion convention.

<auctions>In 1976, dozens of conventions and national celebrations were scheduled to take place in Philadelphia as part of a hoped-for repeat of the hugely successful centennial of a century earlier. Suddenly, an epidemic of respiratory disease of unknown cause struck 231 people within a short time, and 34 of them died. Every known antibiotic was tried, mostly unsuccessfully, although erythromycin seemed to help somewhat. The victims were predominantly male, members of the American Legion of a certain age, somewhat inclined to drink excessively, and staying in the Bellevue Stratford Hotel, one of the last of the grand hotels. Within weeks, it was identified that a new bacterium was evidently the source of the disease, and it was named Legionella pneumophilia. Pneumophilia means "love of the lungs" and Philadelphia means "city of brotherly love", but still the Latin name seemed to imply that someone was trying to hang it on us. Eventually, the epidemic went away, but so did all of those out-of-town visitors. The bicentennial was an entertainment flop and a financial disaster.

Since that time, we have learned a little. One third of Australians who were systematically tested were found to have evidence of previous Legionella infection. A far worse epidemic occurred in the Netherlands, at the flower exhibition. Lots of smaller outbreaks in other cities were recognized and reported. It becomes clear that Legionaire's disease has been around for a very long time, but because the bacteria are "fastidious", growing poorly on the usual culture media, had been unrecognized. And, although the bacteria were fastidious, they were found in great abundance in the water-cooled air conditioning pipes of the Bellevue Stratford Hotel. Even though the air conditioning was promptly replaced, everybody avoided the hotel and it went bankrupt. When it reopened, 560 rooms had shrunk to 170, and it still struggled. Although there is little question that lots of other water-cooled air conditioning systems were quietly ripped out and replaced, all over the world, the image remains that it was the Bellevue, not its type of plumbing, that was a haunted house. There is even a website devoted to its hauntedness.

Keywords: Philadelphia Bicentennial, Legionaire's disease, Bellevue Stratford,

© George Ross Fisher, M.D., 2004

Philadelphia Calendars

2005-04-06T15:19:00.000-04:00

Philadelphia Calendars

Here's how to use a computer to be reminded what's going on.
Keeping dates straight
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As life becomes more cluttered, its time to keep track of what is important. Here is our approach.

We’re trying something new; let’s explain it.
You can learn when you can hear this magnificant orchestra from our calendar.

Look down the left-column of the home page of Philadelphia Reflections, and click on a box called “Philadelphia Calendars.” (It’s about the 12th one down). In time, the screen will display a list of group activities, like Music, or Sports, or Computer Discussion Groups, or whatever. Clicking one will display a list of activities. If there are enough activities, we may have to go to a third row of choices.

At the moment, we start with the Philadelphia Orchestra concerts. Click that choice, and you get a year’s calendar, marked with what is presently known about the schedule. If you wish, you can drag the calendar to your desktop, dropping it there. In the URL box, there’s usually a tiny icon to the left of the text. (It’s meant for dragging purposes and called a Favorite-Icon, or FaviconThe Kimmel Center.

So, if you want to know what’s at the Kimmel Center for some date, what time it starts, or who the soloist is, you can find it in this nook of Philadelphia Reflections. Frequent fliers in the music world can even have their own calendar on their own website, by dragging the Favicon. We hope to attract many such calendars, and it would be just fine to have local field hockey schedules, local poetry readings, etc. Just so it’s located from Trenton to lower Delaware, the area once known as the Quaker colonies, now called the Philadelphia region. Why not just print it out? You can do this, but you lose any last-minute updates provided by the calendar creator, and that’s one of the great features of Internet communication.).

To pull this off, several components must be assembled:

1. The calendar creator, the secretary, or executive office of the sponsoring organization, must either have iCal (free for Apple users), Outlook (about $100 for PC users and at a 60% discount at some on-line stores), or the Mozilla calendar available for both Macintosh and PCs. Users, however, only need normal Internet access. If you create one, you are responsible for the accuracy of the calendar.

2. The calendar server, is a computer that holds the master copy of the calendar, and it really should be running night and day, every day. Both iCal and Outlook can make such arrangement. The server can be anywhere in the world.

3. The calendar clearing house, Philadelphia Reflections in this case, offers a defined selection from the millions of potential calendars in the world. Our selection merely claims to be local to Philadelphia, nothing more.

4. The end-user. Just what the user does with the information is rapidly evolving. The software is changing, getting more convenient every day. We’ll comment from time to time, passing on suggestions as clever folks perfect them.

Oh, yes, one more thing. If you want to post a calendar with us, click the button on the front page, called “Contact us.” It’s a self-addressed e-mail.
Rate this “Reflection” Printer-Friendly Format E-mail to a Friend

Keywords: Internet calendars, Philadelphia regional calendars, iCal, Outlook, calendar programs,

Philadelphia Gardens

2005-04-06T15:11:00.000-04:00

Philadelphia Gardens

Philadelphia likes azaleas, and loves its famous flower show.

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<auctions>There are many show gardens, mainly on former large estates, scattered around the United States, and the ones on Southern plantations are quite famous. However, the fact of gardening is that climate has a lot to do with success. The really premier gardens of America are found in an East Coast strip from northern Virginia to southern Connecticut, with Philadelphia in the center of things. There is also a good-gardening area from Oregon to British Columbia, with a particularly notable garden in Vancouver, named after a sort of Philadelphian named Nitobe Inazo whose story will be related in a later blog. To have a really notable variation of exotic display plants, you need a lot of rain, a long cool spring, and a tradition of cultural association with the British Isles. Alkaline soils, generated by limestone, will produce a fine lilac display. Denmark would be a good place to go see that; but most of the show gardens in America are based on acid soils, with dogwood and azalea the predominant backround coloration in May and June. A visitor from Michigan was once heard to ask what all the pink bushes were around Philadelphia, so it's likely the soil is not acid in Michigan.

Many of the Philadelphia suburbs have thousands of azalea bushes in each town , and hundreds if not thousands of pink and while dogwood, or blue Blue Empress Trees, or magnolias. When you have a lot of those as background to start with, you are ready to begin planting a show garden. The grounds of Friends Hospital are particularly notable for azalea display, and the Pennsylvania Hospital is pretty good, too. Although they are closer to Wilmington, the two most famous show gardens in the Philadelphia area are on duPont properties, Winterthur, and <auctions>Longwood Gardens, They feed you pretty well in the associated restaurants there, and the bookstores and gift shops are truly outstanding. But what in many ways is the best show garden in Philadelphia is Chanticleer , the former estate of a family that founded what is now Merck Pharmaceuticals, located in the suburb of Wayne, across the street from where Tracy Lord, the heroine of the The Philadelphia Story, lived on two square miles of the Main Line. It's not clear why Chanticleer is such a well-kept secret, but it's sure worth the trip to see it at almost any season, May preferred.

Interest in gardening is not limited to just a few big estates, it's a Philadelphia sport. Therefore it's not surprising to learn that the largest flower show in America is held in Philadelphia at Convention Hall in the Spring. If your feet aren't flat when you go in, they will surely be flat when you come out, because a complete tour would be miles long, threading among the aisles. It's not easy to guess how much money each exhibitor spends on a display, but it's surely not a cheap hobby when you get to this level. If you notice the landscaping on public grounds in the city, it's always a fair guess that it was paid for by the profits generated by The Flower Show . Almost everybody has heard of the Burpee Seed Company, and Mr. Burpee summed up the prevailing attitude of Philadelphia gardeners: "If you want to be happy for a day -- get drunk. If you want to be happy for a week -- get married. But if you want to be happy for a lifetime -- get a garden."

Keywords: Philadelphia Flower Show, azaleas, Longwood Gardens, Friends Hospital, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania Hospital,

Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in its 1776 Heyday (1)

2005-04-06T15:06:00.000-04:00

Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in its 1776 Heyday (1)

Tough and decrepit Perth Amboy was once the glamorous capital of New Jersey.

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Not everyone would think of the town of Perth Amboy as part of Philadelphia history or culture, but it certainly was so in colonial times. Sadly, the town is now so run-down that almost no one would fight over its ownership very vigorously. The best advice given to a visitor is don't get out of your car.

To understand the strategic importance of Perth Amboy to Colonial America, remember that King James thought of New Jersey as the land between the North (Hudson) River, and the South (Delaware) River. This land has a narrow pinched waist in the middle. New York Bay pinches on one side, Perth Amboy marking the deepest penetration of tha pinch on the East. The Western pinch is from Delaware Bay, which has a sharp angle at Trenton marked by waterfalls in Colonial times, where the Delaware River makes an abrupt turn from Easterly to Northwesterly. Quite naturally in the Nineteenth Century, a canal was eventually constructed along this narrow waist between two large bays, and it is easy to see why the Seventeenth Century regarded the connecting strip of land as the likely future site of important political and commercial development. The two large and dissimilar land masses which adjoin this strip -- sandy South Jersey, and mountainous North Jersey -- were sparsely inhabited and largely ignored in colonial times.

<auctions>The name, Perth Amboy, is modified from local Indian words. Like Pittsburgh at the conjunction of three rivers, Perth Amboy's local importance was that it sits at the mouth of Raritan Bay an extension of the Raritan River as it empties into New York Bay, just inside Sandy Hook. The second "river" of the fork is really just a channel between New Jersey and Staten Island. Viewed from the sea, Perth Amboy sits on a bluff, commanding that junction. (Staten Island, in a sense, here seems more naturally a part of New Jersey than New York). Amboy was the original ocean port in the area, soon overtaken by New Brunswick further upriver, as increasing commerce required safer harbors. It was the capitol of East Jersey, and then the first capitol of New Jersey after East and West Jersey were joined in 1704. The Royal Governor's mansion stood there, as well as the grand houses of the Proprietors and Judges overlooking the banks of the bay. The last Royal Governor was William Franklin, the illegitimate son of our Benjamin. When his father was stationed in London as a representative of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, the appointment of William to a plush job in the colonies was just the normal method of government, made somewhat worse by King George III. Urged on to be a really King-like King by his mother, George III had considerably expanded the system of buying the loyalty of important people by giving them jobs and favors. Where people were already rich and powerful, they were offered monopolies and protective tariffs in return for their loyalty, and irritation at these intrusions into trade was to be a main incitement of the American Revolution. William and Benjamin eventually had a permanent falling-out over political matters, and naturally American historians take the side of the father. However, it would appear that William was in fact a very good governor, a charming and diplomatic person, who used his considerable talents to smooth over the local conflicts between his King and his neighbors. Even after hostilities broke out and the rebels took over the government, William Franklin stayed on trying to calm things down, instead of fleeing behind the British lines as most Loyalists tended to do. His reward was to be packed off to confinement in Connecticut.

Speaking geologically, <auctions>the Raritan River is a little trickle running along the path of what was once Delaware Bay. In prehistoric days, southern New Jersey was a sandy barrier island, but the gap gradually filled in along the route from Perth Amboy to Trenton, leaving sheltered harbors at both ends of a strip of unusually fine farmland attractive to early settlers. By the time of the Revolution, the strip was mainly rich farmers who tended to favor the Loyalist cause, while the pine barrens to the South and the hilly woods to the North were inhabited by later immigrants who tended to be poor and hence favored the rebel cause. In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin relates how, as boy, he came from Boston to Philadelphia by coming down from Perth Amboy (the capitol of East Jersey) to Trenton and nearby Burlington (the capitol of West Jersey), and then down the Delaware to Philadelphia. Later on, Washington was to retreat down the same path from his defeats in New York, hotly pursued by the British. After the battle of Trenton, Washington promptly chased the British back up the Raritan to New Brunswick and Perth Amboy, and bottled them up there by establishing winter quarters in Morristown. Much later, when the British General Henry Clinton later abandoned Philadelphia, which General Howe had captured by coming in the back door from the Chesapeake, the British marched back up the same Raritan waist of New Jersey by first crossing the Delaware to Haddonfield, up the king's Highway to Trenton/Burlington, and then East to New Brunswick and the British fleet. This was the main highway of the middle colonies, and the persisting term "King's Highway" was once completely appropriate.

When considering the relationships between New Jersey's Raritan Strip and Philadelphia in later decades, the names of Aaron Burr, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Doris Duke, and Charles Lindbergh come up, along with a number of others whose tales need retelling. College football was invented in a game between Rutgers and Princeton, eighteen miles apart, and Woodrow Wilson started the movement to put an end to college fraternities, called eating clubs at Princeton. But the strip itself seems to have been glorified only by Thornton Wilder.

A short play called "A Happy Journey To Trenton and Camden" has been a favorite production by the drama societies of Rutgers, Princeton and Lawrencevile for almost a century. As written by Wilder during the time when he was a school teacher at Lawrenceville, the occupants of a Model T rattle and bump along the strip, commenting on the passing scene. Both the play and the strip deserve more attention than they usually get.

Keywords: Perth Amboy, Governor William Franklin, Thornton Wilder, Rutgers, Princeton, Lawrenceville, Doris Duke, Charles Lindbergh,

Perth Amboy to Trenton (2)

2005-04-06T15:03:00.000-04:00

Perth Amboy to Trenton (2)

Lord Howe landed troops on Staten Island, and from there launched his attack on Phil

<auctions>The Revolutionary War had been raging for a year in New England before the Declaration of Independence, a point that never ceased to bother John Adams whenever Thomas Jefferson or his devotees took credit for starting the Revolution with a piece of paper nailed to a lamp post. This interval of a year, however, allowed for the organization of the Continental Army, and Washington's maturing military background by the summer of '76. It also explains the landing of Sir William Howe's army on Staten Island at the end of June, 1776. A month or so later, his brother Admiral Howe landed some more troops. By September, 1776, not all of the signers had yet put their names to the Declaration of Independence, but there were about 40,000 British troops parading around the essentially uninhabited Staten Island in New York harbor, in plain sight of the inhabitants of New Jersey's capitol in Perth Amboy, scarcely a mile away.

<auctions>The British were quite shrewd in selecting New York harbor as the center of their operation, since their Navy was able to move quickly from New Jersey to Rhode Island, up and down the Hudson as far as Albany, and around the considerable expanse of Long Island, not to mention Manhattan. Meanwhile, Washington was faced with crossing numerous rivers to defend hundreds of miles of shoreline, and moving foot soldiers to the necessary position. He tried to defend New York, it is true, but the battles on Brooklyn Heights, Harlem, Fort Washington and Fort Lee were essentially unwinnable, and the best he could really do with the situation was escape with an undestroyed army.

<auctions>By the fall of 1776 Howe had consolidated his hold on New York, and Washington was reduced to scattering clusters of troops around the places Howe might next choose to invade at any time. In early December, he started landing in New Jersey and marched toward New Brunswick. Washington thought that meant he was going to head for Trenton, and then down the Delaware to Philadelphia. There was not much to stop him except skirmishers and Minute Men, but it was not even safe for Washington to move his troops from the New York region until the intentions of the British were really clear, by which time it would probably be too late to stop the advance.

<auctions>Since the Raritan Strip along which Howe and Cornwallis were advancing, was prosperous and Tory, things went pretty well for the British. After two weeks march, they finally arrived in Trenton around December 20. In this triumph they failed to appreciate the significance of several things, however. Washington was hurriedly summoning about six little colonial armies of five hundred to a thousand men each, to join him now that the intentions of the enemy were clear. Furthermore, the Whigs or rebels of New Jersey were aroused in the Pine Barrens of the South and the hills of the North; New Jersey was not as Tory as it seemed during the initial march down along the Raritan. And, finally, the British and Hessian mercenary soldiers had ravaged the countryside almost as much as the spinmeisters of the Whig patriot cause shouted out they had. The Quaker farmers were particularly upset by the activities of the camp followers, who pillaged curtains and other things not normally attractive to marauding soldiers. And the sharpshooters, loyalist and rebel, were close enough to their own homes to dispose of other booty. It was a cakewalk down to Trenton, but it was not going to be the same coming back.

Washington was getting ready to defend the Capitol in Philadelphia, and the wide Delaware river was the best place to do it. When Howe and Cornwallis reached Trenton, they found no boats available for miles up and down the river, artillery was planted in strategic places on the Pennsylvania side, ice was beginning to form on the river, it was cold and the December days were short. To them, Washington posed no particular military problem with his naked ragamuffins. Howe had some lady friends in New York, while Cornwallis was planning to spend a month in London before the spring military season. So the British generals made an overconfident miscalculation, and posted their troops in winter quarters, strung out in outposts from Perth Amboy to Trenton and down to Bordentown. A thousand Hessians were quartered in Trenton. By December 20th, it looked like a peaceful but boring Winter.

Keywords: Lord Howe, Raritan Strip, Cornwallis, Brooklyn Heights,

Our Federal Reserve: Okayed (3)

2005-04-06T14:30:00.000-04:00

Our Federal Reserve: Okayed (3)

Martin van Buren of Old Kinderhook invented a lot of what's bad about American politics.
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The 8th President of the United States, <auctions>Martin van Buren, was born in Kinderhook, New York along the Hudson. He was known as "Old Kinderhook", so in time he initialled his documents "OK", and that's how that slang term originated. It's also of note that his retirement home in Kinderhook was named Lindenwald, although any connection with the terminus of the PATCO high speed line is unclear. His real claim to fame is that he sort of invented what we know as the modern political system, particularly that unfortunate doctrine known as the "spoils system". The full allusion is "to the victor belongs the spoils". The two-party system, the Democoratic Party, spinning, log-rolling, and other clever manipulations were of his devising. He must have been pretty shrewd, having defeated De Witt Clinton for Governor of New York, when Clinton was known as one of the most ruthlessly ambitious politicians around. Recognizing he was unlikely to be elected President, van Buren took on Andrew Jackson the war hero and manipulated him into the presidency, with the clear understanding that when Jackson stepped down, van Buren would have the job, next. Van Buren was a cabinet officer during Jackson's first term, and vice President during the second term. During that time, he was the real power running things from the shadows. He ruined the careers of John Calhoun and Henry Clay, regularly taking both sides of a number of disputes over the extension of slavery into new Western territories. What people ultimately thought of all this may be judged from the fact that he ran unsuccessfully for re-election -- three times.

It is therefore not certain just whose ideas were in operation when Jackson blocked the re-chartering of Biddle's bank, but one main benefit, "cui bono?", went to New York. Wall Street had sold stocks under a Buttonwood tree for fifty years, but its real start in the financial world can be traced from Jackson's action.

The Industrial Revolution and the expansions of the United States by the <auctions>Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas, and the Mexican acquisition caused an explosion of new wealth, and hence an urgent need to make some better financial alignment of three asset classes: land,, precious metals, and Currency. Everywhere and at all times it is difficult to determine what land is really worth; in 19th Century America it was particularly speculative. When Jackson closed Biddle's reserve bank, the land speculating public was ecstatic, because any constraints on the lending power of banks made it harder to sell real estate . But what had been done was eliminate the only reasonably effective way of matching the true wealth of the country with its circulating monetary assets, and after a brief boom the almost certain consequence was going to be a national bank panic. It came in 1837, during the first year of Martin van Buren Presidency.

The only imaginable alternative to a market-based monetary system is a government-based one Van Buren's political behavior was by itself sufficient warning of the danger of allowing politics into this matter. For nearly a century, that warning was almost enough.

Keywords: Martin van Buren, Andrew Jackson, Nicholas Biddle, Wall Street, ruthless politics,

© George Ross Fisher, M.D., 2004

Our Federal Reserve : Biddle’s Bank (2)

2005-04-06T14:29:00.000-04:00

Our Federal Reserve : BiddleÂ?s Bank (2)

Nicholas Biddle was a cultured gentleman who invented a lot of the structure of modern banking. But he got in Andrew Jackson's road.
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I<auctions>n 1823,the Biddles were prosperous, having made money in real estate (a Biddle ancestor had been a member of the Proprietors), and influential, having been Free Quakers who sided with the Revolution. So, Nicholas Biddle became the president of the second bank at 4th chestnut and was allowed make imaginative advances with if money days it people needed mortgages particularly those who bought land the first placesome loanedd out unwise amounts excess whatthey hadd in deposits how could you keep this from leading to inflation a real estate bubblecollapsee of banks or all three?

Biddle's bank had ideas, derived in part from Alexander Hamilton. In those days, banks issued their own paper currency, or bank notes, representing the gold in their vaults or the real estate on which they held mortgages. There was a risk in one bank accepting bank notes from another bank that might go bust before you changed their notes into gold. The further away the issuing bank was, the riskier it was to rely on it. So, it was important to be a friendly sort of banker, who knew a lot of other bankers who would accept your money or who were known to be trustworthy. <auctions> Biddle himself was well known to be pretty rich, and utterly trustworthy. He had a good instinct for how much to charge or discount the banknotes from other banks, or even other states. It was quite profitable to do this, but it became even more profitable when people began to use Biddle's own bank notes because they were safe. By setting a fair standard, he could control the exchange rate -- and hence the lending limits -- of banks that dealt with him. Sometimes a distant bank would get into cash shortages, and Biddle would help them out; if the other bank had a bad reputation, he might not.

In this way, the Second Bank was a reserve bank for other banks, with its banknote currency coming close to being the currency for the whole country. Soon, within a few blocks of Biddle's Bank, there were dozens of other banks, making up the financial capital of the country. Although it was a little obscure, and even Biddle may not have completely realized what he was doing, in effect his system automatically adjusted the amount of currency in circulation to the size of the economy. If the correspondent banks prospered, they issued more currency, and if there was a recession, the country had deflation. The volatility of this system was related to the volatility of a pioneer economy, so Biddle made lots of enemies whenever he guessed about the direction of the economy. It wasn't a perfect system, but at least he kept politicians from inflating the currency to get re-elected, and hence annoyed politicians by constraining them.

The worst enemy Biddle made was Martin Van Buren of New York. Van Buren was aconsummatee politician, one of whose many goals was to move the financial capital of the country from Chestnut Street--to Wall Street

Keywords: Nicholas Biddle, Andrew Jackson, Second Bank of the United States, banknotes,

Our Federal Reserve (1)

2005-04-06T14:28:00.000-04:00

Our Federal Reserve (1)

All governments find it's easier to inflate the currency than to raise taxes, so the population mistrusts anything but a gold and silver currency. But a scarcity of precious metals can strangle the economy.
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The most enduring, and bitter, controversy in American politics concerns the dependability of the <auctions>currency. That's not unusual, since as far back as 1000 B.C. the person or group that controls any government of any country has met resistance in raising taxes, and so was tempted to coin more money. Unless you received a big chunk of that coinage, you were opposed to the system, because of the inflation it invariably created. Prices go up.

So people got upset with watered currency, and refused to consider something to be real money unless it was made of gold.<auctions>Gold doesn't rust,, there's only a limited amount in the world, and everybody agrees it's pretty. Silver was maybe all right, too. Gold dust was weighed in the marketplace, but if you trusted it you took a risk that it had been diluted with something. So coins evolved, with a picture of the king stamped on them, and the edge of the coin serrated, so no one would be able to shave the coin and use the shavings. It didn't matter who stamped the coin, and throughout Colonial times in America, the Spanish piece o'eight was good as gold. But the use of gold and silver coins was cumbersome, and occasionally there were local shortages. One of the important causes of the American Revolution was local discontent with the way the British allowed disruptive shortages of coinage to interfere with commerce in the colonies, at the same time the British prohibited paper currency as too easy to counterfeit.

So, barbarous relic or not, gold<auctions> was quite effective in restraining governments from their irresistable tendency to promote inflation. The downside began to appear when the Industrial Revolution caused a great increase in trade, because a fixed amount of money in circulation impeded progress. When the economy expands and the amount of gold in ciruclation remains fixed, the price of gold may remain steady, but the price of everything else goes down. Merchants don't like lower prices, and debtors don't like to repay their debts with money that's scarcer.

It's sort of true that an unstable currency puts rich people and poor people into contention. But the more essential fact is that it puts creditors and debtors in conflict, thereby injuring everybody else by paralyzing commerce. For three centuries, our political rhetoric has enlisted support of "workers" against the "the rich", but that's only acceptable shorthand if the balance of currency has gone too far in one direction or the other, and needs to be corrected. If you really let those slogans polarize society, you won't get fairness, you will get another <auctions>French Revolution and the guillotine. What's needed is to adjust temporary imbalances, so that the amount of currency in circulation gradually grows in parallel with the economy. During nearly three centuries of struggling with this mysterious issue, we have frequently lost our way with attempts to have "free silver" , with honoring or dishonoring the Continental currency, with issuing Greenbacks during the Civil War, War Bonds during various wars, deliberate national deficits during recessions, going off the gold standard, and a host of other expedients and desperate political gestures. The first person to devise a workable system of matching the money in circulation with the size of the economy, was Nicholas Biddle, of 715 Spruce street.

Keywords: central banking, gold standard,

The Schuylkill Navy at Boathouse Row

2005-04-06T11:16:00.000-04:00

The Schuylkill Navy at Boathouse Row

Philadelphia's acropolis is Faire Mount, where the Art Museum presently marks the entrance to Fairmount Park. Stretching beyond is Boathouse Row and its rowing races. When the azaleas are in bloom, it can match any place in the world.
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Although the Art Museum now dominates the end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the earlier focus of the acropolis once called Fair Mount is just down the hill behind it, in the old Grecian complex of the Philadelphia waterworks When the Schuylkill was dammed at that point, the effect was to calm the rapids, drown the falls at Midvale Avenue upstream, and turn this portion of the river into a placid fresh-water lake. Fairmont Park was then created upstream in an effort (originally stimulated by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia) to reduce pollution of Philadelphia's water supply going into the pumps at the Waterworks, by replacing with parkland the warfs and industrial slums at the terminus of the canal bringing anthracite from upstate . The result was the creation of an ideal place for public boating and skating.

The transformation of this area can be seen in retrospect as an impressive civic response to an economic upheaval. The War of 1812 had first forced Philadelphia to use anthracite hard coal, and the discovery of its superiority in making steel caused a continuing reliance on it and the canals that brought it here. By 1850, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad made the canals obsolete, and created this splendid opportunity for urban renewal. The waterfalls had created a natural boundary between industry oriented to upstate coal and other industry oriented to oil and commerce coming up the Delaware. It is a great pity that the lower section of the Schuylkill, once so famously beautiful, has never stimulated the same vision and and imagination in response to the eventual decline of the industrialization which defaced it.

To return to Boathouse Row, a large azalea garden starts the Park, and then the East River Driver winds along the attractively landscaped riverbank. Just beyond the azalea garden, the first of ten Victorian-style boathouses starts the home of the Schuylkill Navy, an association of rowing clubs which are now a century and a half in residence there. When the Schuylkill auto expressway was created on the other side of the river, someone had the bright idea of decorating the rowing houses with lights along their edges in the manner used for Christmas decorations in South Philadelphia, especially on Smedley and Colorado Streets. Ever since, the entrance to Philadelphia from the West has become one of it most arresting beauties. Add a few cherry blossom trees in the spring, and you have quite a memorable centerpiece. Rowing, sometimes called crewing, or sculling, is a central focus of Philadelphia society, and is curiously not something in which the city can claim to be first or the oldest. As you might expect, "regatta" is a word invented in Venice five hundred years ago, there are records of rowing races as far back as 400 BC, and New York -- ye Gods! -- had the first American boating club. The Philadelphia Schuylkill Navy was formed as an association of rowing clubs in 1858, and the oldest member, the Bachelor's Barge, was only formed in 1856. The development was largely spontaneous, and is said to have been briskly stimulated by a beer garden nearby, run by a former Philadelphia sheriff. About the same time, the British became crazy about the sport, having the Henley Races as the most famous regatta in the world, and both the Australians and the Bostonians occasionally have the largest, most expensive, most widely advertised regattas. Foo. Philadelphia has the Schuylkill Navy, and it is central to our existence.

There are a couple of things which are unique about rowing. In the first place, it is hard to think of a way to cheat. You can hire engineers to redesign the shape and size of your boat, but engineering really doesn't make a lot of difference once the basic development of oarlocks and movable seats was perfected. A good boat can cost as much as $30,000, but that is largely because all boats approach the limit of speed. If you have heavier or stronger oarsmen, it doesn't make that much difference. What matters is coordination, and in the longer boats, teamwork. Pull up with your shoulders, push with your legs, don't start with your buttocks, the art of rowing involves your whole body. The greatest champion of all time, Edward "Ned" Hanlan , only weighed 155 pounds Not only was he world champion from 1876 to 1884, he was undefeated in any race during the last four years. True, he was born in Toronto, and eventually he was thrown out of polite Philadelphia racing for deliberately ramming another boat, but those are private Philadelphia comments, not something you want to talk too much about. The whole secret of rowing is to manage the fact that the boat travels farther between strokes than while the oars are in the water; if you row too fast, you actually slow the boat. There are two other Philadelphia names associated with the Schuylkill Navy. One is Thomas Eakins, the great American painter, one of whose most famous pictures is that of Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (on the Schuylkill). The other name is Kelly.

John B. Kelly won two Olympic gold medals in 1920, and did it within one hour. He won a Third Olympic gold medals in 1924. But when he tried to race in the Henley Regatta, he was declared ineligible to row, because he had worked with his hands (summer work as a bricklayer), and could not thus be called a gentleman. Anyone who has ever heard Irishmen talk about Englishmen can imagine the reaction this caused in the Kelly family. The resentment took the form of pushing his son, Jack, into racing, and in 1947 John B. Kelly. won the Diamond Sculls at Henley. Meanwhile, his father vindicated himself in other ways. The firm of Kelly for Brickwork was an enormous financial success, right up there next to Matthew H. McCloskey and John McShain, the political builders of the Pentagon and numerous other government buildings. John B. Kelly became Mayor of Philadelphia and for a while was the local chieftain in chief. The Republicans at that time would meet for lunch at the Union League, and so John Kelly reserved a daily lunch table at the Bellevue Hotel, next door, where he could be seen holding court every day. The result was not entirely favorable for the Bellevue; more than one wedding reception was rescheduled to some other hotel in order to avoid the Democrat taint. But you always knew where you could find Kelly at lunch, and it was fun to watch the various minions come forward to the table to pay homage and provoke loud laughter from the great man with a salacious joke. The rowing clubs are mostly big barns with old boats high up on the walls, and silver cups and wooden memorial plaques lower down. They have lockers and showers, but no dining rooms, except at catered in the evening for parties. For a century, no women came there, but now almost half of the rowers are female. Membership is not difficult to obtain, although you have to be good to get on the club teams, and the dues are not expensive. If you show promise, you are expected to spend most of your waking hours working at it. Jack Kelly was famous for rowing three hours every morning, going to lunch, and then coming back for a couple of hours of more rowing. That doesn't leave much time in your life for anything else, so the friendships developed among active club members are very strong, just like the horsemen over at the City Troop. They sort of live in the past a little, with many anecdotes about a scull that broke apart and sank in the midst of a race, or a race that was lost because of too much recreation the night before. The lingo has to do with the fine points. A race can be between "eights" or "fours", or doubles, or singles. It can have a coxswain, or not, and be coxed or uncoxed. When a pair of rowers have two oars apiece, it is the normal arrangement. A much more difficult boat to control has two rowers, with one oar apiece. Like Hercules or Achilles, stories are told of Hanlan, great Hanlan, who sometimes would win a one-mile race by eleven lengths. Or who would get so far ahead of his competitor that he would lie down in the boat and wait for the other boat to catch up -- and then race ahead to beat him. This sort of person can get to be a little hard to take, and it is privately muttered that Hanlan was sent off to Australia, where people do that sort of thing more commonly.

Keywords: Fairmount Park, Boathouse Row, Faire Mount, John B. Kelly, Ned Hanlan, rowing races, single scull,

Market Street, East (3)

2005-04-05T14:59:00.000-04:00

<$BlogItemTitle$>Market Street, East (3)

Philadelphia built a White House for George Washington at Ninth and Market, a block from the place Franklin once flew his kite.
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B<auctions> ut wait. At Ninth and Market Philadelphia had once built the White House, or at least a mansion for the President of the United States. Secret deals between James Madison and Alexander Hamilton had agreed to move the nation's capitol city to Virginia in return for nationalizing the states' Revolutionary war debts, although the circumstance which made it acceptable to the public had been the Yellow Fever epidemic. After that happened, no amount of logic or log-rolling was going to keep the government in this city. Philadelphia vainly built a very elaborate mansion for the President , but President Washington never occupied it, and it was converted to housing the University of Pennsylvania. That University eventually tore it down and replaced it with two somewhat more suitable buildings, meanwhile using the Walnut Street Theater and the Musical Fund Hall, at Ninth and Walnut and Ninth and Locust Streets respectively, for commencement exercises and the like. No one can be completely certain, but it is felt by many that 9th and Market was the general area where Benjamin Franklin had flown his famous kite. This definitely later was the site of Leary's second-hand book stall, which had the remarkable history that it was once run by a former Philadelphia mayor. Ninth and Market Street is now the site of a Post Office on one corner and a vacant lot on the other. But let imagination wander a little, and see Ben Franklin, The White House, the University of Pennsylvania, and a former mayor tending a book stall.

<auctions> There is a resoration of the house, the very house, where Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at the corner of 7th and Market. Although hidden among the hulks of former department stores, some idea of the former elegance of the area is given by the description of stir raised by that rich young Virginian arriving in Philadelphia for the Continental Congress with his fancy carriage, team of horses, and several footmen. All of that colonial splendor has just about vanished in a sea of Victorian commercial architecture, which has in turn become merely a quaint relic. Over the front door of what was Lit's Department Store is still to be seen the mystifying motto, "Hats trimmed free of charge.", and today almost no one knows what that meant. At Sixth and Market, however, look out. The National Park Service brings colonial history crashing across Market Street, with tourists, a vista of Independence Hall, and lots of federal money. Dare we mention pork barrels? The whole subject of Independence National Park is so huge we must return to it several times, but just glance as you go through from City Hall to Penn's Landing.

<auctions> Notice in particular the corner of Sixth and Market, where the real White House really stood. Robert Morris once had a mansion there, which Benedict Arnold occupied for a while after he was in charge of recovering Philadelphia from the British occupation, and subsequently both Washington and then John Adams lived there, as Presidents. Unfortunately, a fire took it away around 1830, and the remains were covered with trashy commercial buildings for decades, until the Park Service built a big public restroom there, now torn down. Current public furor about this site is truly remarkable, and the ample amounts of federal money our Senator has been able to obtain from the Appropriations committee on which he sits, is probably a big factor in attracting interest. The main focus of dispute has to do with the fact that President Washington brought eight black slaves with him, and although he hastened to replace them with white indentured servants whose civil rights were probably no greater than slaves, the black slaves undoubtedly had to have lived somewhere. A search is on for the real, the true, the authentic slave quarters, as a suitable place for a public monument to their service to the country. The Park Service has a long reputation for defending scholarly standards, and its reluctance to accept archeological evidence of the slave quarters has brought down on their heads the furious response of the black community and the politicians seeking their favor. None of these latter groups can see any sense to quibbles about precise location of Washington's outbuildings, just put up the monument, but for a while it looked as though the scholars were determined to go down with their flags flying.

<auctions> Several blocks further East, Market street comes to the brow of what was a cliff overlooking the Delaware, where the earliest settlers lived in temporary caves while they built houses. At the corner of Front and Market, from 1702 to 1883, stood the London Coffee House; during the Continental Congress, it was a place of high intrigue.The trolley lines once made a loop at the bottom of the hill at the river. Prior to that time, horse trolleys had to stop at the top of the hill at Front Street because the hill was too steep for them. At the lower level on the waterfront, there was a terminus for the ferry from New Jersey, bringing commuters, shoppers and farm produce from the Garden State. In time, a subway was built down Market Street, taking a sharp turn at the brow of the hill and heading off toward Frankford and the far northeastern parts of the city. The conjunction of the trolleys,the subway and the ferries brought throngs of shoppers, mixing with other crowds emerging from three subways at 8th Street, still others from two train stations at 13th Street, and trolleys or buses at every one of the fourteen cross streets. This fourteen block strip was surely a great place to sell dry goods. But today, with the ferry terminal gone and the trolleys vanished, it is mainly a question whether the foot of the hill at the Delaware River is destined to become a museum or an amusement park.

Keywords: Market Street, High Street, London Coffee House, President's mansion, Declaration of Independence, Robert Morris House, Delaware Ferries, Frankford Elevated, Eighth and Market,

Market Street, East (1)

2005-04-05T14:57:00.000-04:00

Market Street, East (1)

The central keel of the city, Market Street, must be considered in three quite different sections, East and West of City Hall, and West of the Schuylkill River. The street was once called High Street , and the name was slow to change. It will be enough for now to consider only the oldest section of fourteen blocks from City Hall to the Delaware River,which is almost a lesson in archeology. Start at Victorian City Hall and face East to Penn's landing on the Delaware.

<auctions>William Penn had laid out the city plan as a cross, with Market and Broad Streets intersecting at the green central park which now holds the massive building with his statue on top of the tower. Market was originally called High Street. It's doubtful that Penn intended his statue to be there, since the early Quakers were so scornful of vainglorious display that they prohibited the naming of streets after persons, declined to have their portraits painted, and the strictest ones would not even consent to their names on their tombstones. The cult of personality in dictatorships like the Soviet Union, Maoist China and Baathist Iraq more recently illustrate the sort of thing they probably had in mind, and it wasn't just a quaint idea to discourage the portraits of leaders in public places.

For a tour of the area mentioned in this Reflection, visit Seven Tours Through Historic Philadelphia

Market Street, East (2)

2005-04-05T14:55:00.000-04:00

Market Street, East (2)

East Market Street was once the merchantile capital of the country.
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W <auctions> e are about to look at a remarkable fourteen block stretch of street, with several unifying historical themes, but there is one notable feature which stands by itself. The PSFS building is now the site of a luxury hotel, but it once housed the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society, the oldest savings bank in the country, having been founded in 1816. Setting aside the place of this institution in American finance, and passing quickly by the deplorable end of it with swashbuckling corsairs in three-piece suits, the 1929 building itself remains so remarkable that the hotel still displays the PSFS sign on its top. The imagination of the achitects was so advanced that a building constructed seventy five years ago looks as though it might have been completed yesterday. The Smithsonian Institution conducts annual five-day tours of Chicago to look at skyscraper architecture, but hardly anything on that tour compares with the PSFS building. From time to time, someone digs up old newspaper clippings from the 1930s to show how the PSFS was ridiculed for its odd-looking building, but anyhow this is certainly one example of how the avante guard got it right.

<auctions> At the far Eastern end of Market Street, right in the middle of the street, once stood a head house, which in this case was called the market terminal building. In those days, street markets were mostly a line of sheds and carts down the middle of a wide street, but usually there was a substantial masonry building at the head of the market, where money was counted and more easily guarded. An example of a restored head house can today be found at Second and Pine, although that market ("Newmarket") was less for groceries than for upscale shops. The market on Market Street started at the river and worked West with the advancing city limits, making it understandable that buildings which lined that broad avenue gradually converted to shops, and then stores. The grandest of the department stores on Market Street was of course John Wanamaker's, all the way to City Hall, built on the site of the Pennsylvania Railroad's freight terminal (the passenger terminal was on the West side of City Hall). In the late Nineteenth Century, the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Reading Railroads terminated at this point, so rail traffic flowing east merged with ocean and river traffic flowing west. Well into the Twentieth Century, a dozen major department stores and hundreds of specialty stores lined the street, with trolley cars, buses, and subway traffic taking over for horse-drawn drayage. The pinnacle of this process was the corner of Eighth and Market, where four department stores stood, one on each corner, and underneath them three subway systems intersected. The Reading terminal market is Philadelphia's last remnant of this almost medieval shopping concept, although the Italian street markets of South Philadelphia display a more authentic chaos. Street markets, followed by shops, overwhelmed by department stores, showed a regular succession up Market Street, and when commerce disappeared, it all turned into a wide avenue from City Hall to River, leaving few colonial traces.

<auctions> The history of Market Street is the history of the Reading Terminal Market. Farmers and local artisans thronged to sell their wares in sheds put up in the middle of the wide street, traditionally called "shambles" after the similar areas in York, England. Gradually, elegant stores were built on the street, and upscale competitors began to be uncomfortable with the mess and disorder of the shambles down the center of the street. By 1859 the power structure had changed, and the upscale merchants on the sidewalks got a law passed, forbidding shambles. After the expected uproar, the farmers and other shambles merchants got organized, and built a Farmers Market on the North side of 12th and Market. Relative peace and commercial tranquility then prevailed until the Reading Railroad employed power politics and the right of eminent domain to displace the Farmer's Marketplace with a downtown railroad terminal that was an architectural marvel for its time, with the farmers displaced to the rear in the Reading Terminal Market, opening in 1893. Bassett's, the ice cream maker, is the only merchant continuously in business there since it opened, but several other vendors are nearly as old. The farmers market persisted in that form for a century, until the City built a convention center next door. As a result the quaint old farmers market became a tourist attraction, with over 90,000 visitors a week. That's fine if you are selling sandwiches and souveniers, but it crowds out meat and produce and thereby creates a problem. If the tourist attraction gets too popular, it drives out everything which made it a tourist attraction; so rules had to be made and enforced, limiting the number of restaurants, but encouraging Pennsylvania Dutch farmers. Competition and innovation are the lifeblood of commercial real estate, but they are always noisy processes. The history of the street is the history of clamor and jostling, eventually dying out to the point where everyone is regretful and nostalgic for a revival of clamor.

Keywords: Reading Terminal, PSFS Building, Wannamaker's Store, Bassett's Ice Cream,

Easter Sunrise in Philadelphia

2005-04-04T10:49:00.000-04:00

William Penn laid Philadelphia out in squares, using a compass for North. If he had used true North instead of magnetic North, Easter sunrise might shine down every cross street just in time for an awesome spectacle.
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William Penn first advertised the layout of his new city in a book by Thomas Holmes published in 1683. Records are lacking about how these plans developed, how much of the idea came from Holmes, how much of the rest was carefully planned, versus how much just worked out. There's not much doubt the streets were laid out in a square grid. There's also not much doubt the "numbered" streets all run North and South, following the compass path. These two ideas make it inevitable that the cross streets named after trees would run due East and West. That's enough for a sketch, and whether anyone thought about it further is not clear.

<auctions>However, the consequences of this layout are that if you looked East at the sunrise on March 21, the rising sun would be exactly framed within the streets, whether they are lined with trees or lined with skyscrapers. That would make quite an Easter morning, with every cross street in the city pointed exactly but briefly at the rising sun.

Let your imagination run on this idea, a little. The exact day of Easter varies a little because of the Biblical definition of Passover to which it is linked, and the Eastern Orthodox Easter varies from that. With Philadelphia providing a forceful example of the utility of using an astronomical definition which was probably the original basis for all the religious traditions, maybe it would even become easier to remember just what date Easter is, each year. Or, perhaps things would go haywire the way things did in Brazil. Magellan sailed into what looked like the mouth of a big river on January 1, 1520, so he named it the Rio de Janeiro. They have an enormous Mummers-like celebration down there in Rio every New Year's, in spite of the awkward fact that it's just a big bay, there is no river there at all, and the dates for Christmas are astronomically a little mixed-up too.

Well, to get back to William Penn, his streets run North and South from Magnetic North. Even though it's quite a natural mistake to make in the Seventeenth Century, that's six degrees off from True North. So the astronomical transformation of Philadelphia into one big humongous Easter sunrise celebration never happened.

We'll never know for certain, but, on reflection, that may be just as well.

Keywords: William Penn, Thomas Holmes, square city grid, magnetic north, true north,Rio de Janeiro, Easter, spring solstace.

John Woolman Reports on Yearly Meeting, 1758

2005-03-31T14:08:00.000-05:00

John Woolman Reports on Yearly Meeting, 1758

At a time when the whole world thought slavery was perfectly natural, John Woolman brought the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to declare it must be abolished.
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"In this yearly-meeting (1758) several weighty matters were considered; and, toward the last, that in relation to dealing with persons who purchase slaves. . . .

<auctions> "Many faithful brethren labored with great firmness, and the love of truth, in a good degree, prevailed. Several Friends who had negroes expressed their desire that a rule might be made to deal with such Friends as offenders who bought slaves in future. To this it was answered, that the root of this evil would never be effectually struck at until a thorough search was made into the circumstances of such Friends who kept negroes, with respect to the righteousness of their motives in keeping them, that impartial justice might be administered throughout. Several Friends expressed their desire that a visit might be made to such Friends who kept slaves; and many Friends said that they believed liberty was the negroes' right; to which, at length, no opposition was made publicly. A minute was made, more full on that subject than any heretofore, and the names of several Friends entered, who were free to join in a visit to such who kept slaves. "

Keywords: John Woolman, Minute of 1758, Slavery, abolition,

Inazo Nitobe, Quaker Samurai

2005-03-31T13:36:00.000-05:00

Inazo Nitobe, Quaker Samurai

The story of Inazo Nitobe (1862-1933) comes in two forms, one from the Philadelphia Quaker community, and the other from his home, in Japan. One day, a ninety year-old Philadelphia Quaker gentleman, rumpled black suit, very soft voice -- and all -- happened to remark that his Aunt had married a samurai. A real one? Topknot, kimono, long curved sword, and all? Yup. Uh-huh.

That would have been Inazo Nitobe, who met and married Moriko, neé Elkinton, while in college in Philadelphia. He became a Quaker himself, and when the couple returned to Japan, the Emperor then found himself with a warrior nobleman who was a pacifist. You can next sort of see the hand of his Quaker wife in the diplomatic suggestion that there were vacancies for Japan at the League of Nations and the Peace Palace in the Hague, and perhaps, well perhaps there could be service to his Emperor as well as his new religion. Good thinking, let it be done. As far as Philadelphia is concerned, Nitobe next appeared when Japan was invading Manchuria, and the Emperor had sent him on a tour of America to explain things. At the meetinghouse on Twelfth Street, Nitobe took the line that Japan was bringing peace and order to a chaotic barbarian situation, saving many lives and restoring quiet. After a minute of silence, Rufus Jones rose from his seat. He was having none of it. And that was that for Nitobe in Philadelphia.

The other side of this story quickly appears if you go to Japan and ask some acquaintances if they happen to have heard the name Inazo Nitobe. That turns out to be equivalent to asking some random American if he has ever heard of Abraham Lincoln. To begin with, Nitobe's picture appears on the 5000 Yen ($50) bills in everybody's pocket. He was the founder of the University of Tokyo, admission to which is now an automatic ticket to Japanese success. He wrote a number of books that are now required reading for any educated Japanese. A number of museums, hospitals, and gardens are named after him; one of them outside Vancouver, at the University of British Columbia.

Nitobe's father, Jujiro Nitobe, had been the best friend of the last Shogun, deposed by the return of the Emperor to effective control, after Perry opened up Japan to Western ideas. The Shogun was beheaded, of course, and the tradition was that the victim could ask his best friend to do the job, because he would do it swiftly. Jujiro was unable to bring himself to the task, refused, and his family was accordingly reduced to poverty. Subsequently, the samurai were disbanded by the newly empowered Emperor, given a pension, and told to look for peaceful work. Inazo Nitobe was in law school when the Emperor's emissary came and said that Japan did not need culture, it had plenty of culture. The law students would please go to engineering school, where they could help Japan westernize.

Nitobe later wrote a perfectly charming memoir, called Reminiscences of Childhood in the Early days of Modern Japan , which dramatizes in just a few pages just how wide the cultural gap was. His father brought home a spoon one day, and this curious memento of how Westerners eat was placed in a position of high honor. One day, a neighbor ordered a suit of western clothes, and hobbled around it it, saying he did not understand how Westerners are able to walk in such clothes. He had the pants on backward.

One of Nitobe's greatest achievements was to struggle with his appointment as governor of Formosa (Taiwan). Japan acquired this primitive island in 1895, and Nitobe had the uncomfortable role of the colonist in Japan's first experience with colonization. He sincerely believed it was possible for Japan to bring the benefits of Westernization to another Asian backwater, and just as the British found in their colonies, there was precious little gratitude for it. Although he was undoubtedly acting dutifully on the Emperor's orders when he later came to Twelfth Street Meeting, he surely knew -- perhaps even better than Rufus Jones -- that there was something to be said on both sides, no matter how conflicted you had to be if you were in a position of responsibility. The most revered man in his whole nation almost surely saw himself as a complete failure.

Keywords: Inazo Nitobe, Formosa, Quaker Samurai, Moriko, Elkinton, Rufus Jones, Jujiro Nitobe, Shogun, beheading, University of Tokyo, University of British Columbia, Vancouver gardens, League of Nations,

Getaway

2005-03-30T17:36:00.000-05:00

Getaway
The Delaware Hospital in Wilmington once had a real shoot-out.

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Occasionally prisoners must be taken to the hospital, and it is a problem for the authorities. Philadelphia General Hospital had a special prison unit on the grounds, so that the problem for the guards was merely to get the prisoner to the locked ward and bring him "home" when his medical problems were fixed. The State of Delaware doesn't have a prison unit in its hospital, and so the security risk has to be addressed by sending at least two guards, night and day, to the hospital, and having the prisoner manacled to the bedstead. Nobody likes this situation, particularly the head nurses, but no one has a better solution to offer.

When a prisoner has to make an outpatient trip to be given an x-ray or similar, there is an iron rule that no one is to know about it in advance. In one particular case, however, a convicted Delaware murderer had to have an x-ray of his gallbladder, which in those days required giving him some large pills the night before. That was the tip off.

So, in the morning, he was bundled into a patrol car with manacles and guards, and wisked off to the Delaware Hospital. The x-ray department was at the end of a long corridor, with the diabetic clinic on the right and the bathrooms on the left side of the corridor. The entrance was on the side of this corridor, right next to the office for visiting consultants. Things were busy but peaceful that morning, when commotion arose as three prison guards came marching through the door, surrounding the manacled prisoner. They turned left, and down the hall to the x-ray department.

As they passed the men's room, the prisoner begged his guards to let him relieve himself, so they took him into the bathroom, and removed the handcuffs. He washed his hands, dried them with a paper towel, and put it into the waste container. But quick as a flash he thrust his hand deeper into the crumpled waste paper, got the loaded revolver his accomplices had put there, and emerged from the waste basket -- shooting. The guards got down on the floor, a bullet went into the Diabetic Clinic where Mrs. duPont was working in a pink volunteer's uniform, and another bullet went into my office. The escapee was running hard, fired one final bullet into the ceiling at the door, and was out in a second to the waiting getaway car where his buddies were waiting. He got away clean, as they say.

There's nothing like an episode of that sort to bring people together. We were survivors of an exhilarating experience, having something in common that no one could take away. For a couple of years afterwards, the bullet hole remained unobtrusively in the ceiling by the entrance. The nurses told me that workmen had arrived several times to patch it up, and Mrs. duPont, who was a trustee of the hospital, wouldn't let them fix it. That was our bullet hole.

Keywords: Delaware Hospital, escaped prisoner, shooting,

Germantown Before 1730

2005-03-30T17:33:00.000-05:00

Germantown Before 1730

The early German settlers of Germantown were religious intellectuals, and definitely not farmers.

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In 1730, there was a great influx of German peasantry to America, stimulated by the English government giving bounties to ship captains who would help fill the country with settlers. Protestants only, of course; the ships were forced to land in England on the way, so Catholics on board could be returned to Europe. The majority of these ships landed in Philadelphia, but one group of thirty families did land in New York where they unfortunately discovered the Dutch inhabitants had maintained their traditional dislike of those sects from upriver on the Rhine. Both the Calvinists and the Dutch Reformed were quite interested in religious freedom, but both were uninterested in religious toleration. The thirty German families then went up the Hudson to Albany, were treated badly there, too, and eventually cut their way through eighty miles of forest to the headwaters of the Susquehanna at Cooperstown, New York. From there they floated down that river to the back woods of Pennsylvania and started a colony in what is now called the Pennsylvania Dutch country. Hummelstown was their metropolis.

The flood of German immigrants into Philadelphia after 1730 soon made Germantown German indeed. From 1683 to 1730, however, Germantown had been settled by Dutch Quakers, and some Swiss ones. These earlier immigrants were townspeople of the artisan and business class, rapidly establishing Germantown as the intellectual capital of Germans throughout America. This eminence was promoted further by the establishment by the Rittenhouse family (Rittinghuysen, Rittenhausen) of the first paper mill in America. Rittenhousetown is a little collection of houses still readily seen on the north side of the Wissahickon Creek, with Wissahickon Avenue nestled behind it. The road which now runs along the Wissahickon is so narrow and windy, and the traffic goes at such dangerous pace, that many people who travel it daily have never paid adequate attention to the Rittenhousetown museum area. It's well worth a visit, although the entrance is hard to find (try coming down Wissahickon Avenue).

Even today, printing businesses usually locate near their source of paper to reduce transportation costs. North Carolina is the present pulp paper source, before that it was Michigan. In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, paper came from Germantown, so the printing and publishing industry centered here, too. When Pastorius was describing the new German settlement to prospective immigrants, he said, "Es ist nur Wald" -- it's just a forest. A forest near a source of abundant water. Some of the surly remarks of Benjamin Franklin about German immigrants may have grown out of the competition from Christoper Sower (Saur), the largest printer in America.

Francis Daniel Pastorius was sort of a local European flack for William Penn, assembling in the Rhineland town of Krefeld a group of Dutch Quaker investors called the Frankford Company.When the time came for the group to emigrate, however, Pastorius alone actually crossed the ocean; so he had to return the 16,000 acres of Germantown, Roxborough and Chestnut Hill he had been ceded. Another group, half Dutch and half Swiss, came from Krisheim (Cresheim) to a 6000 acre land grant in the high ground between the Schuylkill and the Delaware. The time was 1683. They were soon joined by Mennonites, followers of Menno Simons, a reform group similar to Quakers but a hundred years older. The truly Dutch origins of these original settlers gives an additional flavor to the term "Pennsylvania Dutch".

Where the Wissahickon crosses Germantown Avenue, a group of Rosicrucian hermits created a settlement, one of considerable musical and literary attainment. The leader was John Kelpius, and upon his death the group broke up, many of them going further west to the cloister at Ephrata. From 1683 to 1730 Germantown was small wooden houses and muddy roads, but here was nevertheless found the center of Germanic intellectual and religious ferment. Several protestant denominations have their founding mother church on Germantown Avenue, Sower spread bibles and prayer books up and down the Appalachians, and even the hermits put a defining Germantown stamp on the sects which were to arrive after 1730. The hermits apparently invented the hex signs, which was carried westward by the more agrarian later German peasant immigration, passing through on the way to the deep topsoil of Lancaster County.

Keywords: Germantown, Pastorius, Christopher Sower, Rittenhouse, hex signs, Kelpius, Rosicrucian hermits, Hummelstown,

Germantown and the French and Indian War

2005-03-30T17:32:00.000-05:00

Germantown and the French and Indian War

In 1750, the frontier was not very far from Germantown, and the pacifist Germans were as conflicted as English Quakers about Scotch-Irish behavior, Indian warfare techniques, and Benjamin Franklin's intrigues.

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<auctions>Present-day interest in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and related issues tends to drown out what was once a lively interest in the French and Indian War (1754-1760) as the pivot of American colonial history. Benjamin Franklin was so important in the French and Indian War that he could have died in 1761 at the age of 48 and still be remembered as one of our most far-sighted and influential statesmen. He was, however, far from a plaster saint. Little Germantown was peripheral to events in those days, little interested in what was happening in Quebec or Albany. Like Hamlet's schoolmates Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, however, the Germantowners got drawn into events they did not entirely understand, and thus played an unwilling part in history.

The French and Indian War was mainly about control over the Ohio Valley<auctions>. Having established a communications system running out of Quebec, and carefully placing forts in the area beyond the Allegheny Mountains from which to trade with, and possibly convert, the Indians, the French had a rather elegant strategy for controlling the center of the continent. It involved urging their Indian allies to attack and harrass the English-speaking settlements along the frontier, admittedly a nasty business. The survivors of General Braddock's defeated army at what is now Pittsburgh reported hearing screams for several days as the prisoners were burned at the stake. Rape, scalping and kidnapping children were standard practice, intended to intimidate the enemy. The Scotch-Irish settlers beyond the Susquehanna, which was then the frontier, were never terribly congenial with the pacifism of the Eastern Quaker-dominated legislature. The fact is, they liked to fight dirty, and gouging of eyes was almost their ultimate goal in any mortal dispute. They had an unattractive habit of inflicting what they called the "fishhook", involving thrusting fingers down an enemy's throat and tearing out his tonsils. As might be imagined, the English Quakers in Philadelphia and the German Quakers in Germantown were instinctively hesitant to take the side of every such white man in every dispute with any red one. For their part, the Scotch-Irish frontiersmen were infuriated at what they believed was an unwillingness of the English Quaker-dominated legislature to come to their defense. Meanwhile, the French pushed Eastward across Pennsylvania, almost coming to the edge of Lancaster County before being repulsed and ultimately defeated by the British.

In December 1763, once the French and Iroquois were safely out of range, a group of settlers from Paxtang Township in Dauphin County attacked the peaceable local Conestoga Indian tribe and totally exterminated them. Fourteen Indian survivors took refuge in the Lancaster jail, but the Paxtang Boys searched them out and killed them, too. Then, they marched to Philadelphia to demand greater protection for the settlers. Benjamin Franklin was one of the leaders who came to meet them, and promised that he would persuade the legislature to give frontiersmen greater representation, and would pay a bounty on Indian scalps.

Very little is usually mentioned about Franklin's role in provoking some of this warfare, especially the massacre of Braddock's troops. While he and Logan were at the conferenence of Albany, he persuaded the Iroquois to sell all of western Pennsylvania to the Penn proprietors for a pittance. The Delaware tribe, who really owned the land, were infuriated and went on the warpath on the side of the French at Fort Duquesne.

Meanwhile, Franklin became active in raising troops and serving as a soldier. He argued that thirteen divided colonies could not easily maintain a coordinated defense against the unified French strategy, and called upon the colonial meeting in Albany to propose a united confederation. The Albany Convention agreed with Franklin, but not a single suspicious colony ratified the plan, and Franklin was disgusted with them. Out of all this, Franklin emerged strongly anti-French, strongly pro-British, and not a little skeptical of colonial self-rule. Very little has been written about the agonizing self-doubt he must have experienced when all of these viewpoints had to be reversed in 1775. Furthermore, as leader of a political party in the Pennsylvania Legislature, he also became vexed by the tendency of the German Pennsylvanians to vote in harmony with the Philadelphia Quakers, and against the interest of the Scotch-Irish who were eventually the principle supporters of the Revolutionary War. It must here be noticed that Franklin's main competitor in the printing and publishing business was the Sower famliy in Germantown. Franklin persuaded a number of leading English non-Quakers that the Germans were a coarse and brutish lot, ignorant and illiterate. If they could be sent to English-speaking schools, perhaps they could gradually be won over to a different form of politics.

Since the Germans of Germantown were supremely proud of their intellectual attainments, they were infuriated. Their response was almost a classic episode of Quaker passive-aggressive warfare. They organized, off Market Square, the Union School, which was eventually to become Germantown Academy. Its instruction and curriculum were sufficiently outstanding to justify the claim that it was the finest school in America. Later on, George Washington was to send his adopted son (Parke Custis) to school there. In 1958 the Academy moved to Fort Washington, but needless to say, the idea of forcing the local ignorant Germans to go to a proper English school was rapidly shelved. This whole episode , and the concept of "steely meekness" which it reflects, can be seen in the Japanese response to the destruction of Hiroshima. Without a word of reproach, the Japanese set about and probably achieved, the reconstruction of Hiroshima as now the most beautiful city in the modern world.

Keywords: French and Indian War, Scotch Irish American settlers, Paxtang boys, Union School, Ben Franklin, General Braddock, Albany Convention, Germantown Academy,

Germantown After 1730

2005-03-30T17:27:00.000-05:00

Germantown After 1730

Germantown became the spiritual and intellectual capital of German America as immigrant farmers passed through on the way to better farmland. When Benjamin Chew built his mansion there, it became an affluent suburb as well.

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<auctions>The early settlers of Germantown were Dutch or German-speaking Quakers; they were also of the craftsman class. Unfortunately, they made rather poor subsistence farmers. With a whole continent stretching beyond them, professional farmers would not likely choose to settle on a stony hilltop, two hours away from Philadelphia. Their future lay in religious congregation, in paper making, textile manufacture, publishing, printing and newspapers. Plenty of stones were lying around, so stone houses soon replaced the early wooden ones. Since Philadelphia in 1776 had only twenty or so thousand inhabitants, and only thirty wheeled vehicles other than wagons, it was not too difficult for Germantown to imagine it might eventually eclipse that nearby English seaport. Two wars and two epidemics brought those Germantown dreams to an end, but in a sense those calamaties were stimulants to the town, as well.

In 1730 German peasants began to arrive in large numbers from the Palatinate section of the Rhine Valley. While it is true they arrived as survivors of a horrendous ocean sailing experience, packed in such density that it was not unusual to find dead bodies in the hold, of passengers that had only been supposed to have wandered into a different part of the ship. Quite often, they paid for their passage by selling themselves into what amounted to limited-time slavery, and a customary pattern was for parents to sell an adolescent child into slavery for eight or ten years in order to pay for the voyage of the family. They were uneducated, even ignorant, and often were proponents of small new religious sects. All of that made them seem to be a primative tribe to the earlier settlers. But they were professional farmers, and good at it. They knew, and a quick tour of Lancaster County today confirms their belief, that if you had a reasonable amount of very good land, you could live a life that approached that of the craftsmen in comfort, and usually far exceeded them in personal assets. They have taken a long time to rise from farm to sophistication, while the already sophisticated craftsmen in Germantown wasted no time in abandoning farming. The newcomers arrived in Philadelphia, made their way to nearby Germantown, learned a little about the new country and the refinements of their Protestant culture -- and then pressed on to the great fertile valley to the West. Only a minority stayed on permanently in the steadily growing little metropolis on the hill.

During this period, this Athens of German America also invented the Suburb. The pioneer of this concept was Benjamin Chew, the Cheif Justice, who built a magnificent stone mansion on Germantown Avenue, which was to become the main fortress of the Battle of Germantown in the Revolutionary War. Present-day visitors are still impressed with the immensity and sturdy mass of this home. Grumblethorpe, Stenton and a score of other country homes were placed there. Germantown in 1750 still wasn't a very big town, but it was plenty comfortable, quiet, safe, intellectual and affluent. Its first disruption came from the French and Indian War.

KEYWORDS German immigrants, Benjamin Chew, the origin of suburban life, Germantown,

The American Friends Service Committee

2005-03-25T17:47:00.000-05:00

The American Friends Service Committee

AFSC, the American Friends Service Committee, has helped suffering people, no matter how unpopular they are or where they are located, for almost a century. AFSC's Bread Upon the Water has sometimes returned with astonishing results.

Two things uniquely characterize the work of the Friends Service Committee (AFSC): it's often both dangerous and unpopular. That's not required for relief following Indonesian tidal waves perhaps, but the work that really needs someone to do is often both dangerous and controversial.

The Service Committee was founded in 1917, mostly by Rufus Jones and Henry Cadbury, as a way of helping conscientious objectors to World War I. The Mennonites, the brethren, and the Quakers were opposed to all wars not just that particular one, but two of those religions are of German ancestry, and lacked the same credibility of the English-origin Quakers in a war with English allies against the Huns, Boche, and Kaiser enemies. The early focus of the Committee was on the Field Service, or Ambulance Corps; which was plenty close to the action, and plenty dangerous. After the War, the defeated German population was starving, and the Quaker Herbert Hoover directed the relief effort with great credit to the Quaker name, and immense European gratitude.

After that, when German Jews were suffering persecution by the Hitler administration, the Quakers initially responded in a uniquely Quaker way. Rufus Jones and two other Quakers went to see Heinrich Himmler, to tell him the world disapproved of his behavior. They fully realized they represented a pool of important world opinion, particularly within Germany, and it was time to speak truth to Power. The Germans left the room to confer, and the three Quakers bowed their heads in silent prayer. Apparently the room was tape recorded, and when the German officials returned, they did promise some efforts to improve matters. As the situation for the Jews soon got much worse, many Quakers risked a great deal to shelter and rescue the persecuted exiles. Relief to the defeated German populace had to be repeated after that war, as well. Each effort built up more credibility to be able to switch sides for the next effort, and the sincerity has seldom been seriously questioned.

The Japanese were also our hated enemies in World War II, and once more a long history helped the relief effort. Nearly 100,000 American citizens of Japanese origin were interned on the West Coast as potential traitors in 1941, often under deplorable conditions. Clarence Pickett was director of AFSC at the time, and his sister had spent years in Japan as a missionary, so his remonstrations with the American government were prompt and credible. One of the more active workers was Esther Rhoads, sister of the famous surgeon, who had spent time in Japan earlier. One of the ingenious efforts with the Nisei was to assist 4000 of them to get into college, and find them hostels and jobs while they were away at school. Many of these college students later became prominent in various ways, greatly assisting the post-war reconciliation between the two countries.

Two Quaker ladies at the AFSC made a totally unique contribution when a request was received to provide a suitable tutor for the Crown Prince, now Emperor. He didn't convert to Christianity, but he later married a Christian, and you can be sure he got a plenty good dose of Quaker style and belief from Elizabeth Gray Vining. This tall, strikingly handsome Philadelphia woman had Bryn Mawr written all over her, and turned heads whenever she entered a room. When she went back home, she was followed as tutor for seven years by, guess who, Esther Rhoads who by then was the director of the Tokyo girls school. It remains to be seen, of course, what the final outcome of this deeply emotional situation will prove to have been. At the moment, the main sufferer seems to be the immensely talented American-educated woman who married the Emperor. But we will see; these are all powerful women in a very quiet way, unaccustomed to losing. One wishes the royal family all the best in their sometimes difficult position.

And then the Service Committee did its work in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Zimbabwe, and Somalia -- on the unpopular side, in every case. There are stories of venturing into war zones with hundred-dollar bills scotch-taped to their torso, where every fifty feet there was someone who would cut your throat for a dime. One worker in Laos entertained a group of us tourists with tales of living for weeks with nothing to eat but grasshoppers and cockroaches. Dangerous, unpopular, and -- uncomfortable. It sounds like a wonderful outlet for someone who is a perpetual rebel without a cause, but if you can find one of those at the Service Committee, you must have done a lot of looking.

The Service Committee, like the Quaker school system, is mostly run by non-Quaker staff. That means that neither of them exactly speaks for the religion itself. This little religious group of 12,000 members is stretched thin to provide a vastly greater world influence than its numbers imply. Hidden in the secrets of the group is an enduring ability to attract sincere non-member adherents to their work. And a quiet watchfulness to avoid losing control to any wandering rebels without a cause.

Keywords: Friends Service Committee, Nobel Peace Prize, Jewish refugees, Henry Cadbury, Clarence Pickett, Rufus Jones, Elizabeth Gray Vining, Esther Rhoads, Japanese internees.

From Trenton Back to Perth Amboy (3)

2005-03-24T16:41:00.000-05:00

From Trenton Back to Perth Amboy (3)

At the Battle of Trenton, George Washington established his military reputation for all time.

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<auctions>Aweek later, they got a bad jolt, when Washington declined to play by their Winter rules. At the Battle of Trenton, Washington was 44 years old, six feet-four inches tall or more, a horseman and athlete of outstanding skill, and as the husband of the richest woman in Virginia, accustomed to housing, feeding, transporting and getting cooperation from two hundred slaves. All of those qualities may have been of some use in the battle. But after the Battle of Trenton, Washington emerged as one of the most naturally gifted Generals of all time. In the Battle of Trenton can be seen the elements of audacity, timing and courage that were notable in Stonewall Jackson, George Patton -- Virginians, both -- the Normandy Invasion, and the Inchon Landing. He forged, if he did not create, the American military tradition of inspired risk taking. And he did it with a collection of starving amateurs against the best Army in the world at the time.

<auctions>On December 21, Washington thought Howe was going to sweep on through Trenton to Philadelphia. In a day or two, he saw that wasn't the plan, organized the famous crossing of the Delaware in horrible weather, and caught and captured a thousand Hessians with a three-pronged attack which cut off their retreat and made resistance useless. Nowadays, the event is marked by a reenactment on Christmas Morning, although it took place on December 26, 1776. The timing did not have to do with religious observance, it had to do with hangovers. To the great disappointment of his troops, he had them abandon the great stores of booze in Trenton because a second detachment of Hessians was in nearby Bordentown, and retreat back to the Pennsylvania side of the river. As you might imagine, Howe and Cornwallis promptly came charging down from New Brunswick to exact bitter vengeance. Instead of trying to rescue their comrades in Princeton, the Bordentown Hessians took off for New Brunswick. Defiantly, Washington recrossed the Delaware to the New Jersey side, put up fortifications, and waited for them.

<auctions>Well, almost. On the night of January 2, the two armies were facing each other with about five thousand men on both sides, but with the British much better trained and equipped. The Americans had the advantage of not being exhausted by a fifty mile forced march, except for about a thousand who had been deployed forward to skirmish and delay the British advance with sniping from the bushes. The Americans made a great deal of noise, and had many bonfires behind their fortifications. But the next morning, the British found out where they really were by hearing distant cannon fire coming from Princeton, ten miles away.

Washington had slipped five thousand men wide around the enemy flank during the night, and had taken a parallel country road to Princeton where a major detachment of British were then defeated at the Battle of Princeton. An infuriated Cornwallis turned his army around in pursuit, and the race was on for the supplies left undefended in New Brunswick. Washington might have been able to get there first, except that his men were too exhausted, and he was afraid to risk his main strategy, which was to avoid head-on collisions with the main British Army.

So Washington went into winter quarters in nearby Morristown, and thousands of British soldiers were thus bottled up in winter quarters in Perth Amboy and New Brunswick, where scurvy, lack of firewood and small pox gave them a few months to consider their miscalculations.

Keywords:George Washington, Battle of Trenton, Battle of Princeton, Cornwallis, Howe, Washington's Crossing,

Pea Patch Island

2005-03-24T14:16:00.000-05:00

Pea Patch Island

A string of three forts at the level of the Delaware-Chesapeake Canal once guarded the approaches to Philadelphia, but were never needed. Fort Delaware on Pea Patch Island served as a deplorable prison camp for Confederate prisoners; it's now a tourist stop.

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<auctions>There's a tradition that a boatload of peas ran aground on the mud flats of Delaware Bay near Salem in the Sixteenth Century, turning the mudflats into a patch of peas. In any event, the island is known to have been growing in size as long as anyone remembers, and now is home to about 12,000 families of Herons. The number of mosquito families has not been accurately counted as yet, but they are numerous. The island doubled in size when the Army Corps of Engineers built the present Fort Delaware on it in 1847-59.

<auctions>The War of 1812, which included the burning of Washington DC and bombardment of Baltimore, propelled America into a frenzy of coastal defense, and the first fortification of Pea Patch Island took place in 1813. A plan was adopted by Congress in 1816 to build 200 coastal forts, and about forty of them were actually completed by the time of the Civil War. The most notable example of the style was at Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina, which was nearly complete by the time of its famous bombardment, hastily occupied by Northern defenders arriving just in time to be evicted. In essence, these forts were huge walls of bricks with a concrete outer shell, holding a couple dozen very large cannons and a parade ground.

<auctions>The river defenses of Philadelphia were provided by three forts, Fort DuPont at the mouth of the old Delaware-Chesapeake canal, Fort Delaware on the island, and Fort Mott on the New Jersey side. You can now take a ferry between all three, between April and September; it's a pleasant afternoon excursion. Not so many years ago, you had to go into an ominous little taproom in Delaware City and ask in a loud voice if someone wanted to take you to Pea Patch in a fishing boat. The scene was reminiscent of old movies about derelicts hanging out in Key West, complete with George Raft and Earnest Hemingway, but now the National Park Service has given it the characteristic NPS sprucing up, with pamphlets and rest rooms.

<auctions>The place never had any serious military activity except when it was used to house Confederate prisoners after the Battle of Gettysburg. Over 12,000 prisoners were brought there, and there were about 3000 deaths among them. Historians have compared the treatment of Confederate prisoners with the treatment of Union prisoners at Andersonville, Georgia, but it's hard to say which place was worse. There are certain diseases of poor sanitation, like typhoid, cholera, amoebic and bacillary dysentery, and hepatitis, which decimate all concentration camps at all times. And adding to them the mosquito-borne diseases of both Delaware and Georgia at the time, you don't really need to assert that there was a lot of prisoner mistreatment to account for the morbidity and mortality. Undoubtedly there was some of that.

Keywords: Fort Delaware, Fort DuPont, Fort Mott, herons, Andersonville, fixed gun harbor defenses.

Franklin: Upstart Hero of King George’s War

2005-03-24T11:30:00.000-05:00

Franklin: Upstart Hero of King George the Second's War

Franklin was a war hero even before the French and Indian War. It probably changed his whole life.

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In 1747, Benjamin Franklin had a life-transforming experience, acting quite unlike his character before, or later. At that time, Old Europe was engaged in some distant tribal skirmishing which has come to be known as King GeorgeÂ?s War. King George II, that is, under whose rule Franklin in 1751 inscribed on the cornerstone of the Pennsylvania Hospital that Pennsylvania was flourishing,Â?for he sought the happiness of his people.Â?

The cornerstone of the Pennsylvania Hospital inscribed by Franklin. Those distant commotions suddenly developed a harsh reality for the little pacifist sanctuaries on the Delaware River, when French and Spanish privateers suddenly raided and destroyed settlements on Delaware Bay. The Quaker Assemblies and their absentee Proprietor merely dithered and huddled in the face of what impended as a totally unexpected threat of annihilation of the pacifist colonies. It probably only seemed natural for the owner of the largest newspaper in the colony to publish a pamphlet called Â?Plain Truth,Â? urging the inhabitants to rally to their own defense, and pressure their government to lead them. The Quaker leaders were in fact unable to readjust a lifetime of pacifist belief in a few days of emergency, and the English Proprietor, then Thomas Penn, was far too remote to take active charge of matters. So, Franklin gave speeches, also an unfamiliar role for him, and finally brought out a detailed proposal for the creation of a Pennsylvania Militia. Ten thousand volunteers promptly signed up, elected Franklin as their Colonel; but he declined, and served as a common soldier.
Benjamin Franklin in 1767.

<auctions>Against naval attack, the Militia needed cannon, which did not exist in the colony. So Franklin organized a lottery, raised three thousand pounds, and tried to buy cannon from Governor Clinton of New York. New York declined to sell, and so Franklin led a delegation to New York to negotiate. The negotiations largely consisted of getting Governor Clinton drunk and convivial, but they were successful, the artillery was shipped off to Philadelphia. Although they were undoubtedly grateful to Franklin for saving the day, this entirely extra-legal recruitment of an army badly rattled the Quakers and their Proprietor, since it demonstrated the ineffectiveness of their governance at a time of obvious crisis, and might ultimately have led to their overthrow. FranklinÂ?s heroic behavior seemed so threatening to Thomas Penn that he described him as Â?a dangerous man,Â? acting like Â?the Tribune of the People.Â?

<auctions>When the underlying commotion in Old Europe subsided, the threat to the colonies disappeared, so the Militia disbanded in a year. Franklin seemed to be just as uncomfortable with his unaccustomed role as the governing leaders were, and he hardly ever mentioned it again. However, this is the sort of reflex leadership which makes political careers, and it surely influenced his decision to retire from business in 1748, run for election to the Assembly, and live like a gentleman. Seven years later, during the French and Indian War, he had become the chosen leader of the Pennsylvania Assembly, had much longer to think through what he was doing, and had learned how to organize a war. By that time, as the saying goes, he knew who he was. He was a man whose silent memories could flash back to that time when a bald fat printer stepped out of the crowd, saying Â?Follow me,Â? and ten thousand men with muskets did so.

Keywords: Ben Franklin, King George's War, Thomas Penn,

American Philosophical Society

2005-03-23T16:04:00.000-05:00

American Philosophical Society

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<auctions>All of the red brick buildings on Independence Square look as though they were part of Independence Hall, but there is one exception. The building facing Fifth Street is Philosophical Hall, one of the four buildings of the American Philosophical Society. Right now, Philosophical Hall is used as a museum. It could be called the first museum in America, but not the oldest, because it had interruptions and different proprietorships. Rembrandt Peale started his museum of curiosities there, and then moved it to the second floor of Independence Hall, where he painted the famous portrait of himself holding up the curtain. In recent years, Philosophical Hall has again become a museum, holding treasures and curiosities belonging to the Philosophical Society itself. The docent is pleased to alternate between calling it America's new oldest museum, and America's oldest new museum. And, yes, the newell post has an Amity Button.

<auctions>Patents were established by the Constitution when it was a piece of parchment lying on a table fifty feet away from here, and the early patent office required the submission of a working model of every application for patent. After a while that got to be a lot of working models lying around, and many of the more interesting ones are on display in the museum. Like the model of Fitch's first steamboat, or the gadget Jefferson used, to make simultaneous copies of documents he was writing. That's right near the Gilbert Stuart copy of Washington's portrait, and von Neumann's first algorithm to be stored in his stored program machine, or computer, and Neil Armstrong's speech on the moon, concerning one step for mankind and all. It's a splendid museum, full of the real stuff, in a handsome Georgian building with sparkling immaculate marble staircases.

<auctions>In the Eighteenth Century, Natural Philosophy was what we now call science. That's why PhD's get a degree of Doctor of Philosophy when they study chemistry and physics. The idea for forming a scientific society in America apparently originated with John Bartram. As so often happens, the originator couldn't quite get it established, and had to call on Ben Franklin that impressario of publicity, to get it off the ground. To be fair about it, Franklin was probably the more distinguished scientist of the two. To be even more fair about it, the organization struggled a bit until Thomas Jefferson (that's the one who was President of the United States) gave it a real publicity shove. During the depths of the 1930s depression, one of the members left it several million dollars with the stipulation that the investments should focus on common stock. Since buying stock in 1935 was widely regarded as about the stupidest thing an investor could do, this little episode reinfoces a strong impression that membership in the APS is given to people who are very smart, not merely famous. The four buldings, the many fellowships, and the big endowment were largely made possible by this contrarian investment decision.

There are eight hundred members, of whom 93 have won Nobel Prizes. Over the years, two hundred members have been awarded Nobel Prizes, but you must remember that the organization existed for 150 years before there was such a prize. Several U.S. Supreme Court justices are members, and lots and lots of people who are famous. The docent comments that they look pretty much like everyone else. There's a rumor that Bill Gates turned down the offer of membership, so now we will just see. He's young enough to have several decades' opportunity to reconsider an offer, although the APS might just be old enough to lack interest in any second chances.

Contemporary Germantown

2005-03-23T15:23:00.000-05:00

Contemporary Germantown

Top-level medical collegiality.

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The Strittmatter Award is the most prestigious honor given by the Philadelphia County Medical Society, and is named after a famous and revered physician who was President of the society in the 1920s. There is usually a dinner given before the award ceremony, where all of the prior recipients of the award show up to welcome to this year's new honoree.

<auctions>This is the reason that Henry Bockus and Jonathan Rhoads were sitting at the same table, some time around 1975. Bockus had written a famous multi-volume textbook of gastroenterology which had an unusually long run because it was published before World War II and had no competition during the War or for several years afterward; to a generation of physicians, his name was almost synonymous with gastro-enterology. In addition, he was a gifted speaker, quite capable of keeping an audience on the edge of their chairs, even though after the speech it might be difficult to recall just what he had said. On this particular evening, the silver-haired oracle might have been just a wee bit tipsy.

<auctions>Jonathan Rhoads had likewise written a textbook, about Surgery, and had similarly been president of dozens of national and international surgical societies. He devised a technique of feeding patients intravenously which has been the standard for many decades, and in his spare time had been a member of the Philadelphia School Board, a dominant trustee of Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, and the provost of the University of Pennsylvania. Not the medical school, the whole university, and is said to have been one of the best provost of the University of Pennsylvania ever had. When he was President of of the American Philosophical Society, he engineered its endowment from three million to ten times that amount. For all these accomplishments, he was a man of few words, unusual courtesy -- and a huge appetite in keeping with his rather huge farmboy physical stature. On the evening in question, he was busy shovelling food.

"Hey, Rhoads, wherrseriland?". Jonathan's eyes rose to the questioner, but he kept his head bowed over his plate.

"HeyRhoads, werssiland?" The surgeon put down his fork and asked,"What are you talking about?"

"Well," said Bockus, "Every famous surgeon I know, has a house on an island, somewhere. Where's your island?

"Germantown," replied Rhoads, and returned attention to his dinner.

Keywords: Strittmater, Henry Bockus, Jonathan E . Rhoads,

James A. Michener (1907-1997)

2005-03-18T16:40:00.000-05:00

James A. Michener(1907-1997)

James A. Michener was a birthright Quaker from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he made his home when he wasn't traveling. He wrote 40 books, most notably "South Pacific", but lived a fairly simple smalltown life, in spite of giving over $100 million to charity.

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<auctions>James Michener seemed headed for a recognizably Quaker life until show business rearranged his moorings. He was raised as a foundling by Mabel Michener of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, under circumstances that were very plain and poor. Many of his biographers have referred to his boyhood poverty as a defining influence, but they seem to have very little familiarity with Quakers. When the time came, this obviously very bright lad was offered a full scholarship to Swarthmore College, graduated summa cum laude, went on to teach at the George School and Hill Schools after fellowships at the British Museum. And then World War II came along, where he was almost but not exactly a conscientious objector; he enlisted in the Navy with the understanding he would not fight.

<auctions>While in the Pacific, he had unusual opportunities to see the War from different angles, and he wrote little short stories about it. Putting them together, he came back after the War with Tales of the South Pacific. Much of the emphasis was on racial relationships, the Naval Nurse who married a French planter, the upper-class Lieutenant (shades of the Hill School) who had a hopeless affair with a local native girl that was engineered by her ambitious mother, as central characters. Michener himself married a Japanese American, Mari Yoriko Sabusawa, whose family had been interned during the War. There are distinctly Quaker themes running through this story.

And then his book won a Pulitzer Prize, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein made it into a Broadway musical hit, then a movie emerged. The simple Quaker life was then struck by the Tsunami of Broadway, Hollywood, show biz and enormous unexpected wealth. Just to imagine this simple Bucks County schoolteacher in the same room with Josh Logan the play doctor is to see the immovable object being tested by the irresistible force. Michener retreated into an impregnable fortress of work. He produced forty books, traveled incessantly, ran for Congress unsuccessfully, and was a member of many national commissions on a remarkably diverse range of topics. Although he lived his life in a simple Doylestown tract house, he gave away more than $100 million to various charities and educational institutions.

And then, in his 91st year, he was on continuous renal dialysis. He finally told the doctors to turn it off.

Keywords: James A. Michener, Quaker, South Pacific, Doylestown PA, Bucks County.

Doylestown

2005-03-18T15:36:00.000-05:00

Doylestown

Doylestown's population of 8000 are trapped between the steadily advancing edges of New York and Philadelphia, and will soon submerge. For now, the town's a lovely little jewel.

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Caught between the expansion of two metropolitan areas, Bucks County is inevitably doomed to extinction as a culture. Chester County and Bucks are in similar situations, as the suburbia devours exurbia, in this case the Quaker farm communities. So you better go have a look, while they still survive to some degree.

The political unit of the area has been the county, and the county seat is in Doylestown, population about 8000. Within a few decades, it seems safe to predict the county population will approach a million. The town has lots of pride in itself, and is just as cute as any town could possibly be. New Castle, Delaware has been preserved with the same pride but is uniformly of a single period of architecture; Doylestown is a carefully preserved jumble of styles and periods, sizes and shapes. Like Princeton, NJ, and Odessa, DE, it is so attractive it brings hordes of visitors, which in turn quickly strangle it with traffic and lack of available parking space. There is going to be an attempt to rescue the town with a by-pass highway, and blessings on the attempt. But the problem for these exurban jewels is not that people want to go around them, people want to go to the place itself.

Doylestown was created in 1745 when William Doyle built a tavern at the crossroads. The county seat brings the courthouse with eleven judges and who knows how many lawyers, and the hospital. Henry Chapman Mercer brought three astonishing buildings, his 44-room mansion on 70 acres in the center of town, his famous Mercer tile factory in his back yard, and his multi-story museum of tools and crafts. All three of Mercer's buildings are made of concrete, built by craftsmen and himself with essentially unlimited personal funds derived from fabric manufacture. And then this last bastion of the crafts movement encountered the artist colony established by Redfield at New Hope, and attracting all those rich Broadway stars and publishing moguls. Right in the center of town the Mercer crafts museum sits across the street from the James A. Michener Art Museum, small but very tasteful, the museum home of the Pennsylvania Impressionist school of art. The essence of this style is a smooth careful background, overlaid with quick thick foreground brushwork, producing a strong three-dimensional effect.

Schoolchildren in buses delight in the dolls house aspects, tourists admire the very fine art, everybody likes the cute little jumble of well-preserved eclectic buildings. It's all in a setting of Quaker farmhouses for the time being, but the split-levels and the McMansions by the thousands are coming. Visitors throng to see, and the residents are proud of what they have. But, really, does everybody have to bring his car?

Keywords: Doylestown, Pennsylvania Impressionism, Henry Chapman Mercer, James A. Michener, crafts movement, Quaker farmhouses,

New Castle, Delaware

2005-03-18T15:35:00.000-05:00

New Castle, Delaware

New Castle, Delaware was once the capital of the state, the home of three signers of the Declaration of Independence, the beginning point of the first national highway, and still remains a perfectly splendid little Colonial town.

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New Castle is easy to get to, but hard to find. It's right on Delaware Bay, at the start of the old National Road (Route 40), next to two huge bridges, a few miles from the main north-south turnpikes, a couple of miles from an airport -- and lost in a sea of suburban housing and highway slums. It's lost, so to speak, in plain sight.

<auctions>And yet it is a perfect jewel of early American history and architecture. It's just as attractive and historically important as ,Williamsburg, Virginia, except these buildings are not reproductions, but the real thing. The town says it was founded in 1651 by Peter Stuyvesant, but Peter Minuit in 1638 could make a claim to be even earlier. Located at the narrow neck of the funnel that is Delaware Bay, it was a natural place to start a colony, eventually to be the capital of the state. The Delaware River makes a rightward turn at that point, and creates a river highway all the way to Trenton. But a few miles upriver at Tinicum, now Philadelphia International Airport, the river started to fill up with islands and snags; was it better to locate upriver or downriver from the narrows? New Castle was downriver.

But in 1777 the British fleet came to visit with hostile intent, and New Castle could look out the windows along the Strand right into the mouths of ships with twenty or thirty cannons pointing at them. Philadelphia, on the other hand, was protected upriver by a series of mud flats and barricades at Fort Mifflin that quite effectively barred entrance to enemy sailing ships. <auctions>Delaware got the point, and shortly thereafter, the capital of Delaware was prudently moved to Dover, while even the county seat of New Castle County was moved to Wilmington. New Castle had a big fire in 1824; rebuilding afterward accounts for much of the present uniformly Federalist architecture. The final nail in the commercial coffin of the town was driven by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which just by-passed the town. For a century, the little architectural jewel just sat there in the fields, until the narrow neck of the Delmarva Penninsula became such a transportation crossroads that the fields filled up with construction more appropriate to Los Angeles. New Castle disappeared, without moving an inch.

<auctions>For fifty years in Colonial days, the rector of Immanuel Episcopal Church in New Castle was one George Ross. His son, also named George Ross became a lawyer in Lancaster and signed the Declaration of Independence. His widowed daughter, Gertrude Ross Till married George Read, a lawyer in New Castle who also signed the Declaration. And, a third signer Thomas McKean, lived two houses away. George Read had studied law under John Moland, whose house was Washington's headquarters in 1777.

<auctions>The northern border of Delaware is a semicircle, with a twelve-mile radius based on the cupula of the New Castle courthouse. It was originally the border of New Castle County, and it proved to be slightly imperfect. In the first place, it extended across the Delaware River into New Jersey, but it was a nuisance to go there, so it was abandoned to New Jersey. However, the border of the State of Delaware therefore extends to the high-water bank of the river, rather than running down the middle of the river. <auctions>The significance of this curiousity appeared when the Delaware Memorial Bridges were built, and all of the tolls go to Delaware, instead of being split between the states as is more customary. The other problem with the semi-circular arc was that three lines meet at the northwestern corner of Delaware, and each was defined in its own way. The Mason-Dixon line goes due east-west, the border with Maryland goes north-south, and the idea was that the semicircular arc would meet the other two lines at a point. However, the instructions could be read in two different ways, leaving a little "wedge" of territory that could be reasonably said to lie in either Pennsylvania or Delaware, depending on the sequence of describing them. This was certainly a circumstance where any decision was better than no decision, but it took until 1921 for the states to harrumph their way to a final pronouncement.

Keywords: New Castle, George Ross, George Read, signers of Declaration of Independence, National Road, former state capital, Delaware, border wedge, twelve mile arc

Brandywine Museum

2005-03-18T11:16:00.000-05:00

Brandywine Museum

The Wyeths, one of the great artistic families of America, display their work in the Brandywine Museum, which is itself a work of art.

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<auctions>Artistic talent must be inherited; some of us don't have any at all, while other families seem to have unusual talent in every member. Around Philadelphia, one notable example is the Peale family, and another is the Wyeth clan. Three generations of Wyeths show their work as a group in a former Brandywine Creek grist mill which has been elaborately restored and enlarged for the purpose. Using large glass windows, part of the display is the Brandywine Creek itself, with the high banks that once made it seem like a perfect defense line for George Washington in the biggest battle of the Revolutionary War. Outside the museum entrance are several of those inevitable Delaware tip-offs, large millstones that may in this case have ground grist, but often were used to grind gunpowder.

<auctions>Andrew Wyeth spent much of his early career doing watercolors, and then turned to tempera as re-popularized by N.C. Wyeth, his father. That's a fairly drastic change, since a watercolor must be completed in one sitting, before it dries. Oil base paint dries slowly, and allows the painter to work on a piece for a number of days. <auctions>Tempera, using the protein in milk and eggs to hold the pigment, dries hard and fairly quickly. But another layer of tempera can be painted on top of the hardened base layers, making a glowing effect possible, a peculiar luminosity if the artist chooses to bring it out. Andrew Wyeth migrated to what he called drybrush, where the paint on the brush is mostly squeezed out, so extremely detailed fine lines can be painted. Thus, he spent his early years with fast blurred watercolors, and the rest of his life with meticulous slow painting, where detail is everything. He chose to use this technique to produce a haunting silent scene, even if it contained people. His son, Jamie, tends to emphasize dancers, so you can see the typical family rebellions alternating between generations, at the same time that the Wyeths (and Howard Pyle, the artistic forefather) preserve a strong family unity. From what the neighbors say, there were plenty of family clashes, but that's artists for you.

Keywords: Andrew Wyeth, N.C. Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth, Howard Pyle, Brandywine Museum, Battle of Brandywine, Grist mill, Brandywine Creek, tempera, drybrush,

Bristol, PA (2)

2005-03-17T14:03:00.000-05:00

Bristol, PA (2)

Bristol is at a narrow point of the river, long the main crossing point for New York to Philadelphia traffic. William Penn placed his mansion there and for decades Bristol was a flourishing social center. The Pennsylvania Railroad cut it off, just as it cut off New Castle, Delaware, and both towns are now museums.

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<auctions>In 1681, Samuel Clift activated a local land conveyance. written to go into effect as soon as King Charles II signed the overall land grant to William Penn. In this way, Bristol can claim to be the oldest settlement in English Pennsylvania, and Clift got here before Penn did. He chose the narrowest spot in the river as an excellent place to run a ferry which was only replaced by the Burlington Bristol Bridge in 1930. A ferry landing is an excellent place for an Inn, which he also built there. The town he founded was called Buckingham, and the surrounding county became Buckinghamshire, Bucks for short. The name later changed to Bristol. The New Jersey town on the other end of the ferry ride was called Bridlington,later Burlington. North of this narrow spot in the river was a several-mile extent of marsh and swampy inlets, and then the river turns abruptly left at what used to be the falls of Trenton.

William Penn had considered building his house sixty miles south of there at the Southern end of Philadelphia Bay, at Chester, then pondered building it on the Faire Mount where the Philadelphia Art Museum now overlooks the Schuylkill. In the end, he built a Philadelphia house near Dock Creek (Street) and a palatial manor house,Pennsbury, in the swampy marshes above Bristol, where a tourist visit is now a valuable experience.

<auctions>No doubt being near the Propietor's estate gave Bristol some class, but it was also half-way on a two day stagecoach ride from Philadelphia to New York. A succession of inns and resorts grew up in Bristol, and it became a busy trans shipment place, a good place to build schooners. A local Captain John Cleve Green is celebrated as first to carry the American flag to China, although it must be admitted his cargo included opium; Green is regarded as the financial founder of the nearby Lawrenceville School. The terminus of the Delaware canal brought coal from the anthracite region in 1827; more prosperity ensued as coal was loaded on ships in the Delaware, or utilized instead of water power for the Bristol Mills which had been founded by Samuel Carpenter in 1701. John Fitch invented the first steamboat and tried it out here; more prosperity ensued. As a consequence, little Bristol gradually filled up with imposing waterfront mansions, the declining shells of which can still be admired.

<auctions>The advent of the railroad isolated Bristol when it cut off the corner of the bend in the Delaware River. Four-lane highways eventually consolidated the isolation of the little river town, but the turning point was around the time of the Civil War. For nearly a century, between the Revolution and the Civil War, Bristol was the booming little queen of northern Philadelphia Bay, and the Bay itself was an American Lake Como, lined with Federalist and Victorian mansions, their lawns sweeping down to the water's edge. Small wonder there was so much social interaction between the railroad-isolated Bristol, and planters of Chesapeake Bay.

<auctions>The Bristol area has had moments of fame. George Washington had originally planned to attack Trenton from both the north and the south simultaneously. He come over Washington's Crossing amid the ice floes on the north side of the Pennsbury delta, and General Cadwalader was to cross the Delaware at Bristol, on the south side of the marshes. As it turned out, the ice was worse at Bristol and the river wider, so Cadwalader was late for Trenton but caught up with Washington to help with the battle at Princeton. President Tyler's daughter married a dashing gentleman from Bristol. Republican politicians from Bristol teamed up with some others in West Chester to decide that favorite-son Seward couldn't win, so they backed Abraham Lincoln for the presidential nomination, and Pennsylvania was therefore in time richly rewarded for its political acumen. Despite the arts and crafts group that moved in around New Hope PA,, Bucks County has remained a Republican stronghold ever since. The region's influence was long symbolized by Joseph P. Grundy, the gentle Quaker manufacturer from Bristol whose name struck terror in Republican politicians as well as Democrat ones, but for opposite reasons.

<auctions>The Burlington Bristol Bridge is now getting a little narrow and ancient, but is still serviceable. It long charged only a dime's toll because that was enough for painting and upkeep. Together with the Tacony Palmyra Bridge, which charged the same low toll, these locally owned bridges stuck a thumb in the eye of the tax-and-spend folks who owned the Philadelphia bridges and who wanted to charge three dollars toll, spending most of it on non-bridge activities. As Tacony Palmyra Bridge rests on both sides of the river, the local politics gradually shifted enough to permit a restoration of toll "equity".

Keywords: Bristol, Bridlington, Burlington, Grundy, Samuel Clift, Pennsbury, Cadwalader,

Benjamin Franklin Parkway (2)

2005-03-16T17:01:00.000-05:00

Benjamin Franklin Parkway (2)

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There are a number of residential relics along the Parkway, but in general the idea seems to have been to put governmental buildings there, in a sort of French-like celebration of governmental glory. There is the Youth Study Center, the Department of Education administration building, the Boy Scouts of America, the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, and of course the tower of City Hall at one end and the Parthenon-like Art Museum at the other. But this is Philadelphia, and certain small touchs of the town are tucked amongst the European grande design.

For example, WFLN,(is now WWFM) the original FM classical music station, had its studio tucked in a little building just behind the Cathedral. Ralph Collier would interview authors and city visitors there during the lunch hour, in a studio that was little more than a closet, while someone else changed records in a room downstairs. Somebody from New York once said that Ralph didn't seem to know how good he really was, which is a way New Yorkers like to talk. Ralph was, thejust about only interviewer who had actually read your book before the interview. In 1997, WFLN was sold for forty million dollars, which ought to impress even a New Yorker.

It is to be noticed that the brownstone Cathedral on Logan Circle is bigger than it looks, primarily because the windows are set 100 feet high. This came about after the anti-catholic riots of the Civil War era, which made it advisable to put stained glass higher than most people can throw rocks. There is usually a cardinal in residence at this cathedral, and Cardinal Bevilacqua the much-respected lawyer-cardinal is now just retiring in favor of an incoming occupant from St. Louis. Cardinal Krol was famous in the past for his opposition to Pope John's Vatican Constitution, which he refused to allow to be translated into English. Before that, was Cardinal Dougherty, who is remembered for being considerably overweight. Cardinals are addressed as Your Eminence, and Cardinal Dougherty was (very privately) referred to as You're Immense. He was perhaps most famous for the Legion of Decency, an effort to make motion pictures more socially acceptable. The story is told of a 12 year-old girl who stood up and told the Cardinal that she didn't agree with him, she liked movies. The next day, her father, the most powerful Catholic banker in Philadelphia, had to go to the Cardinal and humble himself to make amends.

<auctions>Franklin Institute was originally on 7th Street, where the Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia History is now located. Much of the money to build it came from a $5000 bequest from Franklin himself, which was intended to demonstrate the power of compound interest over a period of time. It is part science museum, part memorial to Philadelphia's most famous citizen. It has a Planetarium, locomotive, a passenger airplane, Amelia Earhart's plane, a huge replica of a human heart, and thousands of working demonstrations of electrical phenomena. Ben Franklin's huge statue sits in a grand marble rotunda, where socialites occasionally hold receptions and weddings. But between the two extremes is the most interesting combination of museum and memorial -- a series of demonstrations of Franklin's most important scientific discoveries, utilizing the same instruments he used. Just a little effort at understanding these exhibits will convince any educated adult that Franklin was truly a genius.

Almost next door to the Franklin Institute is its more venerable neighbor, the Academy of Natural Sciences. The Academy is an offshoot of the American Philosophical Society, itself (originally founded by Franklin) and has a distinguished history of discovery and research of its own making, not merely a display of the work of others. Most school children will recognize the famous display of dinosaurs, including the First Dinosaur ever unearthed intact (in Haddonfield).

<auctions>The Art Museum was intended to inspire awe, and it does. The builders ran out of money before the decorative friezes could be completed, but that even enhances its resemblance to the Partenon, where the friezes were blown off in various wars. It's a little hard to know how to respond to the criticism that the building overwhelms its contents. Perhaps it is true that the creaking floorboards in Madrid's Prado Museum show off the treasures on its walls, but there is also little doubt that Spain (or Boston) would replace the floors if it could afford to. Although the City of Philadelphia has a little trouble finding the money to maintain and guard the Museum, the masonry is ultra-solid, it's very big, and will endure for ages to come. The collections slowly grow, benefaction by benefaction. The traveling exhibits are clearly the center of Philadelphia culture. And there, at the top of the stairs without any clothes on, is Diana of fame and fable. Her perfectly straight back is the true essence of the famously beautiful Philadelphia woman, like Fannie Kemble, Rebecca Gratz, Evelyn Nesbitt, Grace Kelly, and Katherine Hepburn.

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© George Ross Fisher, M.D., 2004

A Toast To Silas Weir Mitchell, MD

2005-03-16T16:31:00.000-05:00

A Toast To Silas Weir Mitchell, MD

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S ilas Weir Mitchell lived to be an old man during the Nineteenth Century, when it was unusual to get very old. He was an important part of both the Philadelphia medical scene, and the literary one. He became known as the Father of American Neurology as a published studies of nerve injuries caused by the Civil War. He published about 150 scientific papers, including famous investigations of the neurological effects of rattlesnake venom. His most famous medical treatment was the "rest cure" for hysteria, while his most enduring scientific discovery was the phenomenon of causalgia. He despised Freud, and psychonanalysis. No doubt the feeling was mutual, but the passage of time has tended to favor Mitchell more than Freud. The central role of sex is the essence of Freud's viewpoint, while Mitchell's is summarized in the remark that, "those who do not know sick women, do not know women."

Mitchell's second career was literary, publishing 12 novels and 5 books of poetry. He is honored as the founder of the Franklin Inn Club, for a century home to every important literary figure in Philadelphia. It is striking that he selected Benjamin Franklin as the guiding star of the Inn, since Franklin similarly was eminent in both science and culture, and an ornament to conversation and society. In a pacifist Quaker City, both men approved of combat, and his novel about Hugh Wynne stresses that his hero was a "Free Quaker, meaning one who fought in the Revolution. Because of his strong Republican views, he was never made a professor at the local medical school.

Mitchell's patient Andrew Carnegie donated the funds to build a new building for theCollege of Physicians when Mitchell was its President. When Mitchell was president of the Franklin Inn, Carnegie wrote him, asking for suggestions about donating a small sum, say five or ten million, and asking where it should go. That was the Inn's big chance, all right, but somehow it failed the test. Mitchell suggested that the money be given to raise the salaries of college professors, thus demonstrating a certain lack of foresight about the future direction of college tuitions.

A toast to Silas Weir Mitchell.
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© George Ross Fisher, M.D., 2004

A Toast To J. William White, MD

2005-03-16T16:19:00.000-05:00

A Toast To J. William White, MD

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J. William White left a legacy to the Franklin Inn, the income from which was to pay for an annual dinner, with all the trimmings. Good as its word, the Inn holds the J. William White dinner every year on Benjamin Franklin's birthday, although inflation and fluctuations of the stock market require it to make a modest charge for attendance. White also created the J. William White Professorship in Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, a chair which was once occupied by Jonathan Rhoads.

These trust-fund memorials do little to convey the wild and glamorous image of Bill White. White was a member of the First City Troop, and fought the last known honest-to-goodness duel on Philadelphia's field of honor. The right and wrong of the argument are in dispute, but the details boiled down to White at the critical moment raising his gun to the sky and firing at the stars. That it was not a meaningless gesture was then brought out by his opponent taking slow and deadly aim -- and then missing him.

White was an academic in the sense that he was the first, unpaid, Professor of Physical Culture at the University of Pennsylvania. Active in the Mask and Wig Club, he was chief surgeon at Philadelphia General Hospital, chief surgeon to the Philadelphia Police, and chief surgeon to the Pennsylvania Rail Road. He was Chairman of the Fairmount Park Commission, and numerous other positions where political contact was more important than surgical skill. When World War I came along, he was off to France with the University of Pennsylvania Hospital Unit, writing two books with Theodore Roosevelt. Although his friendship with Henry James suggests greater literary talent, Roosevelt published more than thirty books. What emerges from the history of Bill White is flamboyance and lots and lots of unfettered energy. He might feel a little out of place at one of his endowed dinners today, but he was probably always a little out of place in any company -- and didn't care a whit.

A toast to Bill White.

© George Ross Fisher, M.D., 2004

Benjamin Franklin:Franklin Crown Soap

2005-03-16T15:16:00.000-05:00

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN:Franklin Crown Soap

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It’s easy to make soap, but hard to make good soap. You just boil animal fat with wood ashes, and you get soft soap. Soft soap was sold by the barrel in the Colonies. Hard soap is made by adding salt to the mix, allowing it to be sold by the bar. The trick to all this is to know how long to boil it, how much ash of what kind, and how much salt. If you get it wrong it will be too soft or too hard, and if you have too much lye from the ashes, it will burn your skin when you wash with it. Most people made their own soap in the colonies, so they often got it wrong, because they didn't exactly know what they were doing. What they were doing was called Saponification, after the old Roman hill of Sapo. The legend is that burnt animal sacrifices in the Temple at the top of the hill would wash down and help the washerwomen in the river below get their clothes clean. The point of all this is that Josiah Franklin, the father of Benjamin and sixteen other children, was a candlemaker and a soap boiler. Somehow he got the recipe right, particularly the part about adding salt, and made famously fine bars of soap with a crown stamped on them -- Crown soap. The formula was a strict family secret, the source of family discord when one sister let it out.

The point which needs reflection is that nobody in Franklin's family ever heard of potassium hydroxide, saponification, triglycerides or fatty acids. The process of achieving fame throughout the colonies -- for making a product everyone could make haphazardly -- must have involved a careful series of experiments with different fats, tallows and lards, with different amounts of ashes of various trees, and different amounts of salt. When you got it right it worked consistently, but it would have been necessary to make many experiments to get it right. To avoid repeating the same mistakes, it would be necessary to keep careful records. In other words, little Benjamin must have observed a great many examples of experimental chemistry which made him a chemist fit to talk with Lavoisier and Priestly on equal terms, even though he quit school after the second grade. His childhood was one long demonstration of a motto of Claude Bernard: "Experiment first, theory later."
Franklin Bets His Wad on General Braddock
General Braddock

The defeat of General Braddock at Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh) in 1755 was not a turning point of the French and Indian War, because although the French won the battle, they lost that War, they also lost Canada in the Seven Years War that followed, and eventually had to sell what remained of their American dream in 1804 as the Louisiana Purchase. The French dream was an empire stretching in an arc from the St. Lawrence River to New Orleans, leaving the British only the thirteen Eastern seaboard colonies.

Nevertheless, the disastrous defeat of the Redcoats was a real turning point in the attitudes of two direct participants, Lieutenant Colonel George Washington of Virginia, and Pennsylvania's political leader, Benjamin Franklin. Both men greeted the arrival of Braddock's troops in America with great relief because it was increasingly evident to them that the Colonies themselves were too indecisive to survive. Both of them were in a unique personal position to see that the French and their Indian Allies were serious about conquering the back country, even likely to do so. These two staunch British patriots therefore threw themselves into the crisis, with Washington eventually having two horses shot from under him, taking charge of the retreat after Braddock's death. And Franklin pledged his considerable personal fortune on Braddock's behalf, almost losing it and spending the rest of his life in debtor's prison as Robert Morris would later actually do. These two men knowingly laid their lives on the line for the British Empire, and came very close to losing everything else for their King and country.

Franklin had retired seven years earlier, a rich man at the age of 42. We now know that he lived like a gentleman for another 42 eventful years. Puttering with science and public works, he joined the Assembly in 1750. It was not long before he was the political leader of the Colony, in a peculiar struggle with the dominant Quaker party who not only opposed war for their own self defense, but were enraged that the Penn family had turned away from Quakerism and refused to be taxed for the defense of its colony. The Governor was appointed by the Penns, with an express contract not to agree to any taxation of the Penn holdings. Since it began to look to Franklin as though everybody was trying to commit suicide rather than spend a farthing, he greeted the arrival of General Edward Braddock's redcoats with great relief. But then Braddock himself turned out to be a brave but exasperating ninny.

Braddock's plan was to take the old Indian trail from the Potomac River to the Monongahela (now Route 40), fording the Monongahela just below its junction with the Ohio at Fort Duquesne, then blowing up the French fort with artillery. He had brought plenty of troops and cannons on his ocean transports, but he needed horses and wagons from the colonies. When he was warned of the dangers of Indian ambush in the wilderness, he made a much-quoted response, "These savages may be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia, but upon the king's regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they would make any impression." The other thing he said was, if he didn't get wagons and horses pretty damned quick, he was going back home to England.

Within two weeks, Franklin and his son William collected 259 horses and 150 wagons for him. But to do so, they had to overcome the Pennsylvania farmer suspicion that the swaggering English General wouldn't pay for the goods. To persuade them, Franklin made a public pledge to stand behind the debts with his own money, and his word was known to be good.

The other thing wrong with Braddock's plan was that the trail wasn't wide enough for the wagons and gun carriages, so he had so send a body of axemen ahead of the troops to widen the road. Progress was at times as slow as two miles a day, plenty of time for word to be taken to Fort Duquesne that the British were coming with cannon. Since it was clear that the Fort could not withstand a siege army, the French commander ordered his troops to attack Braddock as he was crossing the Monongahela. It was meant to be an ambush, but the two armies blundered into each other on the trail, and the Indians simply fought the way they knew best, from behind trees. Two thirds of the British were killed and most of those captured were burned at the stake. The death toll would have been even higher, and probably would have included Washington, except the Indians ignored French orders and delayed pursuit to collect scalps. And by the way, all of Franklin's wagons were burned.

Franklin spent an anxious two months, since his later reflection was that the loss of 20,000 pounds sterling would surely have ruined him. However, he was lucky that Governor Shirley of Massachusetts, an old friend of his, was appointed at Braddock's successor, and Shirley ordered the debt to be repaid out of Army funds.

The American Revolution would not come for another twenty years, but you can be sure the Braddock episode had an important impact on the minds of both Franklin and Washington. The British Army was not invincible. It was not even very smart.

Madame Butterfly

2005-03-15T18:32:00.000-05:00

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<auctions>There are two ways of looking at the love affair of Pinkerton, the dashing Philadelphia naval officer, and Madame Butterfly, the beautiful Japanese geisha. John Luther Long wrote about it one way, and Puccini somehow portrays it another, even though Long collaborated on the Libretto of the opera. Puccini, of course, was himself a famous libertine, tending to the typical belief of such men that women somehow just like to be victimized. Long was a Philadelphia lawyer, trained to keep a straight face when people relate what a mess they have got into. If you know the story, you can see Long in the person of Sharpless, the consul. Sharpless is definitely meant to be a Philadelphia name.

<auctions>Long was one of the early members of the Franklin Inn, and it is related he wrote much of his successful play at the tables of the club on Camac Street. David Belasco was the "play doctor" who knew how to make a good story fill theater seats. Even after Belasco's polishing, the play came through as a portrayal of the well-bred gentleman who had been trained to regard foreign girls as just what you do when you are away from home. His girl friend, the beautiful Philadelphia aristocratic woman in a spotless white dress, was the sort you expected to marry. In just a few sentences of Long's play, this woman comes through as just about as distastefully aloof to foreign women as it is possible to be, while remaining rigidly polite about it. Butterfly sees this at a glance, knows it for what it is, and knows it is her death. Her duty immediately is "To die honorably, when one can no longer live with honor".

It is Puccini's genius to take this story of how two nasty Americans destroy an honorable Japanese girl, and using the same story with the same words, make it into a romantic woman being destroyed by a hopeless, helpless love affair. The power of the music overwhelms the story, and sweeps you along to the ending. Even if you are like Long/Sharpless, dismayed and disheartened by watching some acquaintances doing things you know they shouldn't.

When Puccini's opera comes to Philadelphia every year or so, the Franklin Inn has a party for the cast, one of the great events of the Philadelphia intellectual scene. Somehow, the full significance of Luther Long's works never seems to come out.

Reader Note: The material on these blogs migrates in more polished form to: www.Philadelphia-reflections.com

David F. Bradford, 1939-2005

2005-03-14T11:27:00.000-05:00

David Bradford, Princeton economist, recently died in an unfortunate accident. His 1977 paper "Blueprints for Tax Reform" inspired Individual Retirement Accounts, Health Savings Accounts, individual Social Security Accounts, the flat tax, and the advantages of shifting from income taxation to consumption taxes.
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We should take the word of his friend and colleague, Daniel Schaviro, that the core of David Bradford's professional career as an economist was his conviction that a very deep wrong existed when two people could earn exactly the same income over their lifetimes but the one who spent every cent immediately would pay less in taxes than the other who carefully saved for his retirement and heirs. Bradford was offended by this message our society was broadcasting.

<auctions>Working for a time in the U.S. Treasury Department and later as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, he was able to explore the mechanical workings of tax law well enough to translate moral conviction into a workable proposal for political reform. In 1977 he published "Blueprints for Tax Reform" , introducing these practical ideas at the highest level of academic rigor. The impact of his ideas in this paper extended through three presidencies, particularly the present one.

Bradford saw the tax injustice which penalized the Protestant ethic could be corrected in two ways. Either the tax code could shelter individual savings from taxes until they are spent (the IRA), or else convert the income tax into a consumption tax (like VAT). In either case, taxation would take place at the same time as consumption, rather than at the time of earning. Notice the person who saves money to spend later will suffer from both inflation and taxes on taxes on the inflation "gains". The political choice between the two proposed solutions was made by Senator William Roth (R, DE) who sponsored the Individual Retirement Account (IRA) and shepherded it through an intensely political Congress. His was a wise decision, since its voluntary nature made it attractive to politicians, while the French experience with a mandatory Value Added Tax (VAT) created political opportunities to favor certain industries, which politicians were quick to understand.

After twenty-five initially slow years, the eventual popularity of the IRA has now encouraged its extension to Social Security. That's what agitates domestic policy debate at the time of David Bradford's unfortunate death. The IRA model is also the basic concept underlying Health Savings Accounts (HRA), which struggled for many years but have reached their own period of growing acceptance. The Blueprints idea has thus dominated domestic politics for nearly three decades, while its originator remained largely unknown. Far from being a sign of weakness of the idea, it is a proof of the revolutionary nature of this simple concept that it initially provokes public resistance, but also inspires relentless tenacity among those who have taken up its challenge.

David Bradford returned to Princeton from his Washington experience, resting for decades at the quiet center of an Economics department that is not known for its quietude. After a most unfortunate fire at his home, he died of the burns in nearby Philadelphia, which hardly knew him.

Keywords: David Bradford, Blueprints for Tax Reform, IRA, HSA, individual Social Securty accounts, consumption taxes, tax reform

Who Watches the Watchmen?

2005-03-11T16:13:00.000-05:00

INVESTMENT STRATEGIES

The no-load, open-ended, mutual fund run by the Pitcairn Foundation has consistently outperformed the index by 1.5% as a result of concentrating on firms which continue to be overseen by their founding families.

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The Latin phrase Quis custodiet custodies warns that it's pretty hard to find hired agents you can completely trust. Investing for your retirement, you must be careful to avoid excessive transaction fees to pay your agents, and minimize taxes to pay your government to watch your agents, who in turn watch the companies they invest in. Those companies are managed by hired experts , who are selected and overseen by a board of directors. The agents hired by the investors are charged with overseeing this process.

<auctions>Gradually, the world is coming to accept John Bogle's idea of a market index fund as the best most people can do. Index funds don't even try to tell a good one from a bad one; they just buy them all in proportion to their size (successful companies grow, unsuccessful companies shrivel). Investing in the whole market,an index fund doesn't do much trading, seldom buying or selling. Therefore, it has minimum costs, minimum taxes. As a by-product, it has maximum diversification, hence maximum safety. Low costs and high safety don't automatically give best performance, except that somehow they do. The Index Fund idea just relentlessly outperforms the vast majority of investment advisors, in both up-markets and down-markets. Investment advisors just hate index funds, bad-mouthing them constantly. But if you buy anything else, you had better have a very good reason to do so. The performance of an index is called beta; outperforming the index is called alpha. The sad truth is that most experts have a negative alpha.

Well, it's just possible that a second Philadelphia-born idea can do the seemingly impossible task of showing a small but consistently positive alpha. The Pitcairn Foundation was created for his family by John Pitcairn, one of the world's all-time champion investors. About fifteen years ago, the Johnny Appleseed spirit caused the Foundation to open up its investment approach to non-family members; they created a public mutual fund company based on the collective ideas and experiences of the Foundation. John Pitcairn bought the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, nurtured it to success as PPG Industries, and then eventually sold it, based on the observation that almost no firms, family owned or otherwise, survive more than seventy-five years. Companies should be bought with the intention to sell them, even though they are managed expertly throughout their existence.

The Pitcairn Foundation observed that continuing dominance by a founding family almost always proved beneficial for the running of the company by hired expert managers. Notice that, while nepotism was often a bad thing in the managers, it could be a useful thing in governance. If you go too far with this idea, of course, you may get into the stifling arrogance of family control in European and Oriental firms. Founding family control keeps the managers from over-paying themselves or worse still, under-working themselves. But outside investors better watch these founding famiilies; if you allow the inevitable minority of worthless family members to pilfer the company, you get the same thing at a different level of control, where it is even harder to fire them. There's a good idea here, but it needs a little extra.

After a great deal of intense scholarly work, it was observed that there are about six hundred major American corporations available for public participation where the founding family maintains control. Even this select group comes in two types. About a quarter of them have no "outside" directors other than the family, and the performance of these companies is about 15% worse than the index, suggesting the dominance of playboy directors. In the remaining group, family members only constituted about half of the outside directors. Now, that group of companies regularly perform 15% better than the index. Guess which type you ought to buy as an investor.

So, now we have the Constellation Pitcairn Family Heritage Fund, open to the public as a no-load mutual fund. Its portfolio consists of fifty-five of those six hundred family dominated companies (with a market capitalization of at least $200 million each), selected by the Pitcairn Financial company, entirely owned by the Pitcairn family. As long as it continues to outperform the index by 150 basis points, you can be fairly confident that the principle of family domination will endure, up and down the line. But not exclusively; somewhere it must be mixed with professional management. The family owns the fund manager, which is run by professionals, who watch the governance of the portfolio components, which are run by professional managers, overseen by founding family members on the corporate board -- themselves overseen by an equal number of non-family independent board members. It's like a Calder mobile, which by the way, is still another Philadelphia idea.

If you are looking to get rich fast, this isn't much of an idea. But since the Family Heritage Fund has consistently outperformed the index by 1.5%, it looks as though the advantage of selecting better corporate governance in the portfolio distinctly outweighs the disadvantage of reduced diversification. Maybe that's all it proves, but most of us poor saps don't even know that much.

Keywords: Pitcairn, Family Heritage Fund, Constellation Pitcairn Family Heritage Fund, founding family governance, investment strategy

Do-It-Yourself Globalization

2005-03-03T22:38:00.000-05:00

Do-It-Yourself Globalization

Cheap mass-produced (and mostly foreign-made) goods make it cheaper to buy a new one than to repair what you already have. The effect on our culture is largely unnoticed, but quite profound.
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<auctions>Computers, whether small or mighty, could be described as modified telephone switches. In any event, almost every computer is attached to the telephone system with wires. It once required an electrician to splice the ends of copper wires together in a way that would hold, but now the ends are held together by a little plastic clip that slips into the fitting, and then is held in place by a small plastic dongle. Unfortunately, these dongles break off easily and you get a wire that keeps falling out of its attachment. The plastic dongle surely costs less than a tenth of a cent, but a multi-gigabyte Internet system is useless without it. Solution: go buy a whole new telephone wire, with new clips at both ends.

The other evening that approach offended my sense of frugality , self-reliance and home repair ethos sufficiently that I went to an electronics store to buy a bag of clips and a special tool to apply them. After considerable discussion with several employees, all of them quite sympathetic to my repair- don't- replace motive, the equipment was located. I was half-way to the check-out counter when the arithmetic began to emerge. It would cost exactly three times as much to repair as to replace the whole wire with a new one having a clip already fastened to both ends. So, naturally I bought the new wire instead, and will not have the repair tool and bag of spare clips to clutter up my drawer. To get lost before I need them again, or else forget I have them and buy a second set. It all makes sense, it's modern and increases productivity, but the clerks and I had a moment of bonding. Our way of life has taken another step out the door. We are just a little further from the self-reliance of the frontier, and a little closer to dependence on those starving wretches in China who make dongles.

On the way home with my new wire, I saw something I hadn't noticed as I went out shopping. Two hardware stores going out of business. Everything must go, the signs said.

Keywords: Computer wires, telephone wires, hardware stores, globalization

The Empire Visits Haddonfield, Briefly

2005-02-28T22:26:00.001-05:00

The Empire Visits, Haddonfield, Briefly.

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When William Penn extended an invitation to all religions to come to a place of religious freedom, he really meant it. All religions were welcomed and tolerated, but the English government was deathly fearful of French Catholics in Canada, and Spanish Catholics in Florida. The Stuart kings were catholic, sort of, but the important issue was protecting colonial real estate more than protecting doctrinal purity. When ships picked up immigrants at European ports, they had to make a stop in England, and any Catholics aboard were removed.

That's why one very large and important cultural group never had much influence in America, particularly in Philadelphia. The Holy Roman Empire, that large loyally powerful European catholic group in central Europe and southern Germany, just never got here in any great number. Americans came to hear that there was an important culture of some sort centered in Vienna, full of fat jolly folks who danced waltzes, but these apparitions were seldom seen in person an never much thought about. The steel mills of western Pennsylvania drew in large numbers of Hungarians, and they told of a rival captital in Budapest, but that rivalry was apparently like Penn and Cornell or maybe Harvard and Yale, and what difference. An occasional visitor from those regions would grow strangely hostile upon encountering this indifference to what seemed pretty important back home. One must remember to be more polite when around guests, that's all.

<auctions>It took the Second World War and its attendant cultural struggles to bring a real wave of immigrants to America from Vienna. And these people were neither poor nor uneducated. They quickly moved into the classical musical world and assumed roles that were not only important, but culturally more advanced than we were accustomed to. They entered the universities and quickly rose to the academic peaks. Many of them could out-sing, out-dance, out-conversationalize any little group of colonial folk who happened to encounter them. Their names began to appear in the social pages, marrying debutantes. To a large degree, this singular immigration movement came to an end when the Cold War did. And that,'s rather a pity; we could really use more people like that.

<auctions>One unusual exile from that movement lived for a long time next to the Haddonfield Quaker Meeting, or at least just down a little wooded lane to the rear. The occupant of that house was John Waite, a Quaker who really looked like a Quaker, soft-spoken, wry and understated, steel-rimmed glasses and the whole bit. A mathematician, which is what you expect of peaceful people who are very smart. What you don't expect, is that John worked for the CIA, in Austria. While there, he met and married his bride, who was a direct descendant of Marie Therese, the Austrian Queen of Louis XIV. So that little inconspicuous cottage happened to have a crystal chandelier from Versailles, and a gigantic ruby ring that belonged to some other nobleman. One of the children of the family plays in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, on the family Avante, the viola equivalent of a Stradivarius.

John was one of the pioneers of the computer, belonging to the group that included Mauchly and Eckert, and of course von Neumann. He once remarked that his first computer had 724 bytes of memory. Not 724 gigabytes, or megabytes, or kilobytes. Just 724. It takes a much higher level of intellect to do anything useful with such a small instrument, but many of the founding principles of computing were established on such machines. He introduced me to a friend, Maurice Slud, who could entertain a dinner party by multiplying two fifteen-digit numbers in his head, while someone else ran out to the home computer to verify his accuracy. Those were the days. They must make people that smart somewhere, even today, but maybe you have to go to Vienna to find them.

Quakers Turn Their Backs on Power

2005-02-13T21:30:00.000-05:00

Quakers Turn Their Backs on Power.

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There have been a number of excellent books about Ben Franklin lately, but all take his side in the dispute with Quakers. These authors relate Franklin struggled with the Quakers, fought with that political party, heroically overcame them with wisdom and guile. Good thing, too, or we all might still be subjects of the British crown.

Well, within the Quaker community these events are viewed differently. Around the year 1755, the Quakers who owned and ran Pennsylvania abruptly turned away from politics and left the government to their political enemies, rather than compromise religious principles. It is difficult to think of any other instance in history when a ruling party decided to become humble subjects of the opposing party, simply because they refused to do what obviously had to be done.

<auctions>The background of this perplexing issue goes back to the founding of the Quaker colonies, which had lived in a real Utopia for seventy-five years. Repeatedly it had been true that if they just followed highest principle, things worked out well for everybody. For example, they didn't need to buy the land a second time from the Indians, but they did, with the gratifying result of peaceful co-existence while other colonies experienced constant Indian wars. Penn negotiated the borders of his states with the neighbors, and although it took decades, brought peace and prosperous trade in return. Strict honesty in mercantile matters led to a reputation for trustworthiness, and that in turn led to prosperous commerce. Using a fixed price rather than haggling over price speeded up transactions, gained respect for fair dealing, led to more prosperity. Just you do the right thing, and all will be well. That includes extending freedom of religion, welcoming strangers to the colony to worship together in peace.

<auctions>Toward the end of this Utopian period, some questions began to arise. More and more non-Quakers came to the colony, making the colony progressively less Quaker. That was a silent disappointment to William Penn. The founder had been a charismatic evangelist for his religion as a youth, but came to grave disappointment about peaceful persuasion by the end of his life. Convincing the adherents of other religions of reasonable Quaker principles had often proved to be as intractably difficult as arguing religion with Henry VIII. The Quakers, a religion without a clergy, were appalled that so many adherents of other religions did not concern themselves with earnest reasoning, preferring to do strictly what their ministers told them to do.

Another disconcerting thought was growing within the Quaker community that success itself might be corrupting them. Worldliness seemed to grow inevitably out of wealth and prominence; all power does tend to corrupt. If you are rich, people always seem to steal from you, and that leads to violent punishments, something regrettable in itself. These were not new arguments, but by 1750 nearly a century of success in paradise had begun to stir Pennsylvania Quakers to wonder why more of their neighbors did not ask to become Members. These were troubling concerns of the day which would probably have worked themselves out, except that far-away France and England declared war on each other. The French responded by stirring up the Indians along the Western frontier. Pennsylvania settlers were soon scalped, kidnapped and burned at the stake. Something had to be done about it since protection was a duty of government, and effective protection now had to be non-peaceful. The Quakers dithered. More Scotch-Irish settlers around Pittsburgh were slaughtered. The Quaker meetings sent minutes to the Quakers in the legislature that they must not compromise their peaceful principles, and the Scotch-Irish exploded with rage. The Meetings told their representatives to resign from office, their members to retreat from politics altogether.

So Ben Franklin rose to the occasion, and General Forbes led an army to Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio, and Colonel George Washington was the hero of that day. The French were driven off the frontier, the English were victorious at Quebec. North America became a British continent.

Meanwhile, the Quakers retreated into tight-lipped solitude. And self-doubt, because the episode seemed to demonstrate that rigidly peaceful principles cannot govern a state or a nation, if that nation contains others unwilling to be sacrificed for peaceful principles. An unthinkable logic emerged; freedom of religion led to conflict with the duty of a non-violent government to protect its citizens.
It began to be clear it was the duty of government to enforce its laws, by force if necessary. Underneath the pile of documents, was a gun.

So, the Quakers proudly walked away from power and dominance, for all time. Sadly, too, because the significance was clear. Peaceful utopia is not possible, within a dangerous world.

Jim: During the French and Indian War, the Quakers who ruled Pennsylvania were forced to choose between political power and peaceful principles. They withdrew from power.

Keywords: Quaker political renunciation, French and Indian War, Pennsylvania politics, Scotch Irish massacres, Fort Duquesne, General Forbes, General Braddock, Colonel Washington, Ben Franklin, freedom of religion, William Penn

Use the Internet for Your Club (2)

2005-02-06T19:16:00.000-05:00

Clubs like to have newsletters. If you have enough news to fill one, they are pretty easy to create and maintain. However, they are a little hard to explain, so stick with us as we build up the idea.

First, take a look at what you are trying to achieve, and a handy example would be http://www.yahoo.com/. You will see it is not a daily or a weekly, it is continuous. The page of the newspaper is a montage of ten or twelve blocks on a page. For example, one block might give you the month's schedule, another shows the sports scores, another shows the stock market, etc. Each one of those blocks is probably updated at a different time, making this a continuous newsletter, and of course there is a way provided to individualize the blocks of space, change the color schemes, etc. Since this newsletter is on the internet, anyone can read it from anywhere in the world, at any time. That is, they can read it if they know the password, which some clubs want to keep private, and others prefer to skip because it is a nuisance when people forget what the password is.

What underlies this process is a technique known as RSS. Each block of space in the newspaper is operating on a different scheduling, and each blocks "polls" a donor site every so often, for example fifteen minutes. The polling program calls the URL of each donor site at a preset time, where a record is kept of the last time the site was modified. If the site has been changed since that last visit of the polling program, the new site is downloaded to the newsletter page. If there has been no change, the polling program simply goes on to the next-scheduled site. In effect, the polling program is acting as a "robot". Modifications of this system, with considerable elaboration, are at the heart of the Google robot and other robots for other purposes. Generally speaking, the ordinary user doesn't have to know how to construct one of these robots, or modify one. No doubt, there will be extensive elaboration of this concept in the near future, but that's essentially how you can construct a usable newsletter in short order.

Use the Internet for Your Club (1)

2005-02-02T11:49:00.000-05:00

Most clubs, family groups, or neighborhood associations are held together by one loyal volunteer who does all the work. This limits the scope of the club to what one person is able to do in spare time. When that central person gets tired of it or moves away, things tend to fall apart. In the spirit of encouraging more volunteerism, this article suggests some ways the home computer can easily automate the normal drudgery of running a club. Having just performed this task for the local computer society, I can report it takes about two hours to put it together. If I did it three times, it would take forty-five minutes. A rank beginner, who doesn't even know what the words mean, might take all day to do it, but no more than that.

Most of the programs a club would need were first developed for people on the go, like a salesman who visits several cities, or a college student who commutes. It's an easy step to imagine different club members in different places instead of one person in several places. Electricity travels so fast that connecting computers together with the whole world's internet can be thought of as essentially all one big computer. For practical purposes, it doesn't matter whether a piece of information is in two parts of one computer or in two different computers hooked together by the internet. The whole process is so cheap it might just as well be free.

Selection of Computer and Operating System. Over ninety percent of the world's home computers are based on the Windows operating system, but Windows is having a lot of trouble right now with viruses and spam. Right now is Apple's big chance, because the Apple OS X operating system, based on Unix, seems to be immune to viruses and spam. So, if you are buying a new computer, I suggest you look at Apple's "headless" version. That's a little six-inch box to which you attach the monitor, keyboard and printer that presumably you have left over from some Windows system. Times will change, but right now this five hundred dollar little headless job is worth the money. That's for the club secretary; all the club members can use any kind of machine they happen to have, for "read-only" use.

Router. If you have several computers on one telephone line, you need a router to send the right signals to each machine. Because the router changes the identification numbers every time it is restarted, it tends to foil the buccaneers out there who are trying to find your credit card. Therefore, it's not a bad idea to have a router attached, even if you only have it connected to a single computer. Security folks say it takes about fifteen minutes for some buccaneer to find a newly installed computer, and most banks get several hundred break-in attempts every hour. That's because everybody is getting automated these days, including criminals.

Choice of Browser. After you get set up and organized and all, you need to download the Firefox browser, which right now is faster and more spam-proof than either Internet Explorer or Netscape. Go to some other browser and enter www.firefox.com There's no harm in having several browsers sitting on your computer, including Opera if you like, but right now Firefox is the one to use. A browser, in case you care, is a program that takes a stream of internet data and translates it into the image on your screen, sort of like translating Morse code into a telegram. Some browsers are lean, mean and fast, while others are loaded with a lot of bells and whistles that slow them down. If you can't see any difference by trying them, go with the one that gives you most spam protection.

Yahoo Calendar. There are lots of computer calendars, but right now Yahoo offers one that is somewhat better for public use by clubs. For an illustration, take a look at the Philadelphia Orchestra calendar that can be located on Philadelphia Reflections in the lower left column, by first clicking the Philadelphia Calendars button, and then clicking the link to the Orchestra's schedule. Naturally, the Orchestra doesn't want people changing their public schedule, so the calendar is "read only". You can create a calendar like this for your club or organization by going to www.calendar.yahoo.com and entering an identifier and password. You can only change the calendar if you have the password, so be careful who is allowed to have it. If you make a misjudgment about this, just abandon the calendar and start a new one. You can of course create a personal calendar for yourself; it would be nice to merge your calendar with organization calendars. Calendar-merge programs do exist, but presently are a little primitive. Even nicer would be the ability to drag and drop individual events from one calendar to the other, but that's mostly on the wish list.

Yahoo Address Book. There are zillions of address books, but Yahoo provides a public one, if you allow club members to know the password. On the one hand, it's a big convenience for the secretary to have everybody fill in his own data. It can take ten or fifteen minutes apiece to complete all that information. On the other hand, if just anybody can have all this data, you can expect to get lots of unwanted solicitations. Naturally, you want to keep intruders from altering the data, but whether or not you make your membership list public is your own decision. So, probably you want to transfer the data to a list that you keep private, using a system of letting people enter data, and then erasing it after it is transferred.

Listserv. A very handy tool is to create a listserv, which is a system of e-mail that is sent to everyone on the list, and everyone can chime in with comments. It makes for a lot of local excitement, and it keeps families together, including reunion classes from all the schools you went to, 'way back then. If the Rs and the Ds get to bashing each other on the Listserv, you will learn the value of designating some sober soul to be list master, given the power to exile people whose mouths get too noisy.

Minutes and History as Blogs. Most clubs keep minutes, and after a while they start to record their history. It's a lot of work, and often gets lost; furthermore, it's hard for anyone but the author to read. We suggest you create a blog, and hang it on the internet.

While there are a dozen programs and systems for creating blogs (that's short for "Web logs"),Google has bought www.blogger.com from that company, and has pepped it up quite a lot. Like the rest of these ideas, this one is free, and there are several million of these in existence. Sometimes people write poetry in the form of blogs, and some other people put up some pretty raunchy pictures or commentary. Apparently Google doesn't care, so they shouldn't mind if you publish the minutes of the East Whipswitch Cooking Society as blogs. It's very easy to do, and their canned "templates" produce some pretty elegant web sites in minutes. That's right, minutes in minutes.

Finances and Newsletters. Clubs typically collect dues or charge for luncheons, but financial stuff on the Internet is more complicated and must be dealt with in a later article. Similarly, you can publish a newsletter using RSS that is very spiffy indeed, but that's really hard to explain, and must be described in a separate article, too. Anyway, these preliminary items are enough to keep a new club busy for a few months.

Fast User Switching. Other operating systems will surely imitate it, but Apple is at present where you have to go to make a separate computer section for your club. Apple originally had the idea that several people would use the same machine, and want to keep their data secret from each other. So, they have a system in which you can click the upper right corner of the screen, and you can place yourself in a secret room with its own password. We suggest that it would be better to see this as a new desktop. All graphical interfaces of all computer operating systems use the metaphor of a desktop, which is what suggested to me that the club needs a desktop like my own. That is, it's littered with half-finished business of a dozen sorts, suddenly abandoned when the phone rings or a visitor arrives. You would like to be able to come back to your desktop and take up your work where you left off. For that, you probably need several desktops, and that's what fast user shifting provides you. Not vitally essential, but very convenient.

Favicons. Especially if you have fast user desktops specially designated by work topics instead of people, you can really use the favicon, or favorite icon, feature. A favicon is the little miniature do-hickey to the left of the webpage URL in the URL box. Maybe you never noticed it, but it's usually there. If you take your mouse and drag the favicon onto the desktop (you may have to shift something to create some blue sky desktop room) a new icon will appear on the desktop. Close up and click on that new icon, and you will open up a browser and go right to the page you were using when you created the icon. This is such a real neat feature that your desktop is apt to fill up quickly with a lot of web pages you happened to come across. It doesn't take long for the favicons to choke the desktop into uselessness, so this feature is at its best in a system where the topics of general utility to the user are sub-set by fast user switching.

Your Own Website. Apache. Your club will soon get the idea that you need your own website, but in fact you already have several of them. Your calendar, address book, club minutes blog, club history blog already add up to four websites. To most people, having their own website means consolidating all this material into one elegant page, with photos and artwork. You can do that, but it's much harder, and you first need to see if you really have a need for that.

If you do, and particularly if your club runs a little on the snooty side and highly prizes its privacy, you might want to consider going all the way and becoming your own internet provider. That brings us back to Apple, since the OS X system includes a free copy of Apache, the program for running your own site on your own computer. Now, that's really a big undertaking, far beyond the average club. So if privacy of that order is mandatory, you may have to hire someone to do it for you. But Apache sure makes it possible, if that's where you feel you want to go.

Jim: It's both easy and free to put a small club's busywork on the Internet. The hard part is discovering the ideas and knowing where to look for the tools. Here's a short guide to automating your club, family group, or neighborhood association.

Keywords: Favicon, listserv, club minutes as blogs, club calendars, club member lists

The Swedenborgian Church

2004-12-30T18:01:00.000-05:00

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mong the many churches centered in Philadelphia, the Swedenborgian is probably the least typical and most difficult to understand. The church does not actively seek out new membership, but it welcomes everyone, in the spirit of Emanuel Swedenborg's observation that "All people who live good lives, no matter what their religion, have a place in Heaven." Without attempting to define the teachings of Swedenborg (1699-1772), who was quite able to speak for himself, it can be approximated that Heaven plays a central role in this belief system, and predestination does not. Although the ceremonial features of this religion are very similar to the Episcopal Church, its main emphasis is on good works as a way of attaining the reward of Heaven. In some ways, that is an unexpected position for a noted scientist like Swedenborg to take, since generally scientists lean toward Calvinism, with the mechanistic view that if God is all-powerful, then human free will must be impossible.

<auctions>There are at least four divisions of the Swedenborgian religion, but the Bryn Athyn branch is most notable in the Philadelphia region. A very wealthy adherent of Swedenborg named John Pitcairn bought a large tract at Bryn Athyn and gathered the local church to live around a perfectly magnificent cathedral and church school. It is hard to think of any church in the Philadelphia region which approaches the magnificence of the Bryn Athyn cathedral. It has a special character that it was conceived and built during the crafts movement of the early twentieth century , with imported European workmen deliberately organized like medieval craft guilds. The central features of this workmanship reflect and then project the belief in personal individuality within the whole religion. No two windows, or doorknobs, or carvings are the same in the cathedral, reflecting the wish for each workman to devise his own unique creation and show the way of personal responsibility to the faithful. This cathedral is one of the things in the Philadelphia region most worth visiting, but to appreciate its quality you have to know what you are looking at.

<auctions>Everybody in this church is unexpectedly hard to characterize. The Pitcairn Foundation was such a successful investor that it formed a mutual fund for others to share in its good fortune. Its central philosophy is to invest only in corporations which have been dominated by a single family, preferably the founding family, for at least fifteen years. There are about six hundred eligible corporations, and recent management scandals in the newspapers illustrate the Pitcairns exactly knew the dangers of handing your assets over to a hired manager. This family-centered investing approach consistently yields better than the S & P 500, which in turn beats ninety percent of investment managers. You sort of get the idea you know where this family is coming from when you meet a courtly, meek, retiring but friendly person, who can say, "My mother is the only person I ever met who looked perfectly at home seated under a sixty-foot ceiling."

Two other famous Swedenborgians illustrate the unusual individualism of this religion. Helen Keller, the deafblind girl who overcame her handicap by going to Radcliffe and becoming a successful author and lecturer, for one. The other would be Johnny Appleseed (1774-1845), whose real name was John Chapman. Grammar school legends would have this bearded, barefoot vegetarian adopting a life of poverty like St. Francis, but in fact he was an extremely shrewd businessman who died rich. He developed the business plan that American settlers would be going West into what was then the Northwest Territory, and having a tough time getting enough to eat the first year or two. So, he anticipated the paths of frontier settlement, and went ahead among the Indian tribes, planting apple trees. When the settlers arrived in the region, he sold them young apple trees and showed them what to do with them. Apples grown from seed are not the tasty morsels we know today, but tend to be rather shriveled and bitter. So Johnny showed them how you make cider, and if you let it sit around a while, hard cider. The settlers would use the pulpy squeezings for compost, and he would be back to collect the seeds from them so he could continue his business plan in the next county. In short, he showed them how to drink the apples. He also let the Indians pick the apples, so they liked him, and spared him the common troubles of the frontier.

If you are going to boil apples, you need a pot, and Johnny often carried his like a hat. He wasn't a nut, at all, he was a showman. In his back pack, he was also carrying a Bible. And in his head, he carried a motto,"All religion has to do with life, and the life of religion is to do good."

Jim: The Swedenborgians belong to the Church of the New Jeruselem, following the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and strongly emphasizing personal responsibility, individuality, and good works. The Philadelphia branch is particularly strong, centered around a magnificent medieval cathedral in Bryn Athyn. Johnny Appleseed and Helen Keller were notable adherants, and a driving force has been the Pitcairn family of industrialists.

Keywords: Helen Keller, Johnny Appleseed, John Pitcairn, Pitcairn Foundation, Glencairn, Cairnwood, medieval cathedral, Bryn Athyn

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Abortion

2004-12-26T15:18:00.000-05:00

Abortion

The state laws prohibiting abortion were instigated by the AMA for protection of the mother, during an era between the invention of anesthesia and the introduction of aseptic surgery. The medical profession wants to stay out of arguments about the unborn fetus, which may have less to do with abortion than the state/federal political balance.
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The official position of the Pennsylvania Medical Society on the topic of abortion is, we have no position on abortion. I ought to know, because I was the author of this position, proposed at a moment when the House of Delegates was obviously going nowhere. After two hours of angry debate we had to stop before we split into two warring medical societies. The Pennsylvania delegation to the AMA was then obliged to hold the same no-position on a national level. As I recall, our position was likewise greeted by the AMA House of Delegates with great relief, and word quickly circulated in the corridors that Pennsylvania had a position everyone could endorse for the good of the organization. For several years, this no-position position was widely referred to whenever the topic threatened to arise. It almost invariably stopped discussion in its tracks, as it was intended to do. In going back over the minutes, it would appear the AMA never actually voted to adopt a no-position motion, a discovery that surprised but did not change the basic determination to let the rest of the nation settle this. We were going to stay out of it.

Because, one hundred forty years earlier, we started it. If you actually read Justice Blackmun's opinion for the majority in Roe v. Wade, as very few agitated proponents seem to have done, the original medical origin is clearly laid out. Blackmun had been a lawyer for the Mayo Clinic before appointment to the Supreme Court, acquiring unusual medical resources and experiences for a lawyer. Now prepare for a logical leap. The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins masterpiece painting of Philadelphia's pre-eminent surgeon in black frock coat, holding a dripping crimson scalpel in his bare hand, encapsulates the original situation. Note carefully that anesthesia is being given to the patient, but the surgeon is not wearing a cap, mask, gown, or rubber gloves.

In 1850 medical science had progressed into a forty-year time window when anesthesia made abortions painless, but Pasteur had still not identified bacteria, and Lister had not devised a way to cope with them. Abortions, common in ancient Greece but forbidden by Hipppocrates, suddenly were widely demanded by 19th Century women in a situation when their judgment was vulnerable. Abortions were easy to do, all right, but women died like flies from the resulting infections, and the American Medical Association was distraught about it. The Oath of Hippocrates was brought forward to emphasize its prohibition of abortion, and the performance was made unethical for a member of the Association, sufficient cause to warrant expulsion. When that proved inadequate, the delegates agreed to go to their local state legislatures and seek legislation prohibiting the performance of abortion by anyone, member or non-member of the Association. These laws were quickly passed, and the Texas version was overturned by Roe v. Wade as an unconstitutional denial of privacy. Roe was a pseudonym for the patient, and Wade was then Attorney General of Texas, the officer charged with enforcing Texas law. By 1900 abortions became both easy and safe for the mother, and by 1911 the AMA reversed its position. But it didn't matter, since by that time various churches had hardened their doctrines. Religious leaders and their constituent politicians simply no longer cared what the medical profession thought about it. For at least the last century, the ideological combatants were plainly only interested in whether physicians might advance one side or the other of the argument with useful official statements. Our real position, if anyone cares, is that we started out seeking protection for the safety of the mother, but the issue got twisted by others into disputes about the welfare of the unborn fetus.

Since this is the case, there plainly may be reason for state legislatures to reconsider the state laws they passed in the 19th Century. But when the leap is made for the federal government to overturn state laws, there has to be some reason to intervene. Justice Blackmun's discovery of an unnoticed right to "privacy" in the Constitution, where the word does not appear, is a little hard for non-lawyers to understand. Suppose we leave the fine points of the Bill of Rights to constitutional lawyers. What's at stake here, among other things of course, is whether the Federal Courts are justified in overturning well-intentioned state laws which had served well for at least fifty years -- simply out of impatience with the sluggishness and political timidness of state legislatures to revise obsolete laws. That's unbalancing the Constitution for comparatively minor cause. Even major cause is something we have agreed to adjust by amendment, not judicial opinion. And that's my opinion, having comparatively little to do with abortion.

Keywords: Abortion, AMA, American Medical Association, Justice Blackmun, Constitution, anaesthesia, aseptic surgery, Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, Samuel D, Gross, Thomas Jefferson University, PMS, Pennsylvania Medical Society

Financing a Research University

2004-12-21T17:24:00.000-05:00

Responding to staggering financial temptations, our most prestigious universities are beginning to put both themselves and the rest of the country at unacceptable risk.
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Fifty years ago, only three American universities, Harvard, Yale and Princeton, were considered world-class. The benchmarks for them were Oxford and Cambridge Universities; both British universities had long history and great prestige. Making allowance for wartime disruption, it was also considered pretty classy to study at the Sorbonne, or Humbolt University in Berlin. Sweden, Vienna, Rome were right up there in prestige.

<auctions>By 2004, the London Economist magazine was offering its view there were thirty American Universities better than anything in the European Community, in particular Oxford and Cambridge. We'll pass over the Economist's anguished analysis of what's wrong in old Europe, and focus here on what American universities are doing right. They certainly do seem to be doing something right, but nevertheless it's still possible to be uneasy about where they are going.

<auctions>For example, the top three all have more than ten billion dollars apiece in their endowment funds, and thus each perpetually generates roughly half a billion annually in disposable income from passive sources. You can accomplish a lot of worthwhile academic things with that much money. Operating revenue like student tuition, fees, research grants and royalties should support normal running expenses, so endowment income is available for new frontiers of learning, research, and social endeavor. These well-run institutions unquestionably do accomplish many innovative and important advances, to the point where it is simply trivial to point out a few areas of waste or misjudgment. Multiplying their annual discretionary funds by thirty offers an overwhelming force for good in the nation, and in the world.

<auctions>The other twenty-seven premier research universities may not all have ten billion dollars apiece, but they have the Avis, or we-try-harder motivation that may make up for it. The nation really does appreciate their worth. Applications for admission outnumber available places twenty to one, would be even greater if more people thought they had a chance to get in. Outstanding professors are in scant supply, commanding higher and higher salaries. In fact, a patient of mine who is a trust and estate lawyer tells me he gets a little uneasy about the growing number of university professors he sees with million dollar estates. A calm view would be that the nation recognizes the value of superior education, and is forcing the pace for a greater supply of it. Unless our economy experiences a disastrous decline, it is reasonable to expect a hundred universities to migrate up the quality chain in the next generation; most of those eligible for it are grimly determined to see it happen. China can make all the widgets it pleases, but that won't make them catch up with this champion competitor. The French can maybe make better wine, but unless they pep up their schools, they're going to have no shot at glory.

<auctions>Whew. That's intentionally laying it on thick, because American academic triumphalism has a darker side to give one pause. In the first place, the arrogance of it shows. Even the European aristocrats, formerly world experts in flaunted put-downs, are irritated; and red America is really sore at blue America. Sprinkling a few research universities into Arkansas and Idaho might relieve regional divisiveness somewhat, but lasting social peace can only derive from starting in the third grade of, say, north Philadelphia, Kensington and Norristown . In economic downturns, the country would have big trouble financing universal, bottom up, academic excellence. The tragedy is that money isn't the main problem in the science classes of the thirty research universities we already have; an alarming number of those seats are filled with foreign born students, not even to mention the honors students.

Secondly, the system is already under strain. The families of students are hard pressed by tuitions of twenty or thirty thousand dollars a year, and increasingly ready to complain about the inability, of classes of three hundred taught by non-tenured teachers, to justify to them such breath-taking fees. They may not understand educational financing, but they can count, and then multiply two numbers together . Faculty rewards favor research, not teaching, and teaching is what the students think they are paying for, their parents think they are sacrificing for. If what they are truly paying for are just credentials, they worry that affirmative action will cheapen the credentials. One clear sign of unease is the tendency of children from wealthy families to walk about the campus in torn overalls. This may be more than just a fad, it may be a sign they hope to hide from the university's system of redistributive taxation. Some people pay those high tuitions, but mostly tuitions are discounted for the eager family's ability to pay. Wearing blue jeans won't help, the universities demand to see the family's audited tax returns. In my presence, a university president remarked that the system was designed to extract the last dime from every student. The whole middle class is being asked to give until it hurts, for the unspoken goal of elevating a hundred more research universities to world class. Very few question the premise that unmatchable universities are the key to American world pre-eminence. Quite a few, however, have anxiety that it may not work out for each individual. It may only be a lottery with slightly better odds.

Now, let's get to the research part of the research university. In the past ten years, American universities have collectively received six or seven billion in commercial patent royalties; the aggregate now runs appreciably more than a billion dollars a year and it's growing.
The normal arrangement is to give 20% of royalty income to the professor whose name is on the patent. Since most research is performed by large teams, it is possible to imagine considerable inequity and academic bad feeling in this system. In other walks of life, striving for a bigger share of two hundred million a year would cause differences of opinion about fairness. Here and there, you read articles by participants in this system who are concerned ab out the message it is sending to the students about personal values. Universities that began with a mission to educate the clergy are now seemingly overpraising the big payoffs.

Many business analysts feel that a successful corporation needs to spend 10% of its revenues on research and development. Behind that is realization that prices and profit margins are largest for new inventions, steadily declining as the new invention attracts competition and eventually becomes a mere commodity. The scientific term entropy is a perfect description of the way world economies seemingly work, like clocks gradually winding down. So businessmen get rid of old products and look for new ones, and the universities are the source of most new ideas and products. Put every last cent into R & D for new products, while the developing countries grind out widgets. If we eventually graduate hundreds of thousands of Americans regularly from unmatchably excellent research universities, the outcome will take care of itself. Even flying airplanes into our tall buildings can't make much difference in this academic arms race. It's essentially how Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union, and it's discouragingly difficult to argue it is totally wrong.

However, you can imagine ways that it might all fall apart. The source of at least half the capital now pouring into the research universities comes from the federal government, particularly the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense. It only takes fifty-one votes in the U.S. Senate to change that suddenly, for reasons of national defense, to defend the value of the dollar, to combat inflation, or lots of other reasons. Even now, universities often face annual crises at the end of a funding cycle, when projects have been awarded, people hired, but funding is delayed for uncertain periods of time because of distant political wrangles within the "budget process".
That's known as a cash flow problem, and even it is trivial compared with what would happen if federal research funding were delayed a full year. Just look at any university and see all the big tall buildings . They have largely been built to house research activity, and the university would have big difficulty selling them if they were empty. They've usually been paid for with mortgages, and it costs a lot of money to heat, air condition, clean and repair them. Just cut off the cash flow long enough, and you will see how risky it was to get into the research arms race.

Keywords:
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, prestige universities, research fund, commercial patent revenues, patent royalties, NIH, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Defense Department, grants, overhead, cash flow, budget process, politics

Reviving the Mummers

2004-12-21T14:07:00.000-05:00

Reviving the mummers

The Philadelphia Mummers parade on New Year's Day is declining in both attendance and participation, just like its South Philadelphia home environment. Television is the likely main cause of this, but management difficulty and environment changes have contributed, too.
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There's a growing sense of alarm among loyalist Philadelphians that the Mummer's Parade may be in decline, possibly a fatal spiral of decline. Only 10,000 people participate in this folk ritual, when a few decades ago 25,000 people were some sort of participant. A great many people who don't participate, and don't attend, are having a lot to say about whose fault it is.

Much of the commentary is contradictory. The consensus among participants is that moving the parade from Broad to Market Streets, and then back again to Broad Street, broke the vital strands of tradition. On the contrary, say some former viewers, the problem is that once you have seen the Mummers, you have seen them; there's no variety. If you take either argument seriously, you have to conclude that what seems appealing to the participants -- continuity and stability -- unfortunately turns the spectators off. If that's the situation it's hard to know how the parade ever got popular in the first place. So one or the other of these comments is wrong, unless both are wrong. Or unless both are right, but insignificant, not the root of the issue.

What everyone agrees on is that the parade on New Year's Day is too doggone cold. Years ago it was tried to move the parade to the Fourth of July, and in fact it may have originally begun as an Independence Day celebration. What we now call "comics" were then called "shooters", because they carried and shot off guns. Since alcohol has always been an important attraction for these parades, it is easy to imagine the concern of the Quaker City about drunks lurching around the streets, firing real weapons. With the coming and going of Prohibition, sales of liquor on the street has vanished. But somehow it is possible to sell beer at baseball games, and while it is almost politically inconceivable to sell beer, or hot toddies, on Broad Street, there can be little doubt it would be traditional.

As for that doggone cold, it isn't any colder today than it was when the Mummers parade was thronged, is it? Well, yes, it's a lot colder. Skyscrapers cast dark shadows at the end of short winter days. And tall buildings block the wind at their tops, with the wind then scooting down the side of the building to the sidewalk. That's the "Marilyn Monroe effect", and it's plenty real. So, it has to be noticed that the parade has migrated up from South Philadelphia to center city, at the same time that center city has become climatically inhospitable. To get a little technical, there's also the "sundown wind". As the shadow of nightfall moves from East to West, the warm air in the sunlit area rises up over the cold air in the darker region, creating a sundown wind. Add to this the early sunset of winter, throw the sundown wind against skyscrapers, and it's time to go home. To television.

It's my view that television, which I never watch by the way, has a lot to answer for in the deterioration of the Mummers parade. If people who never watch the Mummers parade are allowed to criticize it, surely people who never watch television are entitled to surly opinions too. Back in the fifties and sixties, getting featured on television was a big thrill for the mummers. If the cameramen wanted a performance in one place so they needn't move their equipment, that was eagerly agreed to. There might even have been the prospect of big bucks, since everyone knows show biz commands top dollar. Let 'em perform at City Hall, where the judges can keep warm on elevated benches, and politicians can accidentally walk in front of the cameras. But notice that all of the successors in the parade line are backed up from City Hall to Locust street, not performing for the sidewalks. And all of the performers, having strutted their stuff at City Hall will then disband, instead of continuing up to Vine Street, as they once did. It's no longer a parade, it's a performance at City Hall. For television, you might say, except that television has used up the material and is abandoning it.

For completeness, we should mention the bad luck of snow and rain for a few years in a row. And the discomfort with blackface, but the absence of black people. The absence of Jewish and Oriental brigades in an ethnic extravaganza. You will occasionally see people at Philadelphia upper-crust dances showing off the Mummers Strut, but you aren't likely to see that on Chinese New Years. Whether newer ethnic groups were excluded from participation by the hard-core South Philadelphia Italian, Polish and Irish groups is not immediately obvious. It could well be the reverse, a rejection by the newer arrivals or their leaders. But these sullen opinions are somehow unsatisfying, particularly when the parade has such a noticeable tolerance for transvestite behavior.

But my suspect for culprit of the parade's decline is television. It was sure a nice parade before that thing came along. The leaders of the mummers parade must either find a way to cope with the monster, or -- fawgeddaboutit.

Keywords: Mummers Parade, South Philadelphia, Marilyn Monroe wind effect, skyscrapers, alcohol, ethnic changes, cold weather, New Year's Day

Specialized Surgeons

2004-12-19T18:25:00.000-05:00

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Local attitudes always somewhat persist among migrants from home. What’s distinctive about the Philadelphia diaspora is how unconscious most of them are about still carrying the hometown mark. Philadelphia leaves a prominent birthmark, but it’s sort of back between your shoulderblades and you forget it’s there. What occasions this observation is a Christmas call from a prominent California surgeon who was once my roommate, back in the days when residents were actually resident in the hospital. More than fifty years ago Bill Doane also served as best man at my wedding. Our conversation turned to clots in the lung, and he related a story. He had once fixed a hernia for a 22-year old girl in the days when it was customary to keep hernia cases in bed for a while. Getting out of bed for the first time, she coughed and turned blue, suddenly on the edge of death. Taken back to the operating room, her chest was opened, and Bill removed a clot which was essentially a cast of the blood vessels of one entire lung. As surgeons like to say, she then did very well.

<auctions>One doctor can tell such a story to another doctor in four sentences, while lay people who overhear it miss the whole point. The fact is, not one surgeon in ten thousand today could carry this off. Nowadays we train thoracic surgeons to open lungs; they never repair hernias. Conversely, we train hernia surgeons to fix a dozen hernias daily through a little telescope; they never open a patient’s chest. So it is hard to imagine many contemporary surgeons who could recognize this disastrous complication of hernia repair, then fix it themselves in time to rescue the patient. Although this disheartening decline into repetitive superspecialties has been forty years in the making, it has been recently popularized with the general public by Regina E. Herzlinger, a Harvard business professor. Writing books and speaking to businessmen groups, she has popularized the proposal to outsource the general hospital into what she calls "focused factories." She rightly characterizes the medical profession as reluctant. She’s a nice person, and undoubtedly sincerely believes focused factories will save money, improve quality. But we must not let this idea take hold.

Specialty hospitals have actually been given more than a fair try. About a hundred years ago, the landscape was peppered with casualty hospitals, receiving hospitals, stomach hospitals, skin and cancer hospitals, lying-in hospitals, contagious disease hospitals, and a dozen other medical specialty boutiques. With a few notable exceptions, they all failed for the same reason. Sooner or later they found they could not adequately service their specialty without the backup of a full hospital service. Children’s hospitals do thrive, but they have patients who are generally of the wrong physical size to fit adult hospital facilities and equipment. There are plenty of things to regret about general hospitals’ design, but the inescapable fact is they all must have a very wide range of services to perform any mission, no matter how discrete. It would be still better if the doctors had an equally wide range of skills in their own heads, but the avalanche of innovation and lawsuits has forced subspecialization, compartmentalizing, and narrowness of viewpoint. Cicumstances have forced the profession to hunker down, but that trend must be resisted, not celebrated.

The instant and successful repair of pulmonary embolism makes a dramatic illustration, but the reasons for broad medical training are more extensive than that. In the first place, it is much cheaper to use the generalist office than to bounce people to a gastroenterologist for heartburn, a psychiatrist for anxiety, and a dermatologist for pimples. The American employer community is desperate for a way to reduce its burden of employee health costs, and flocks back to their nurturing business schools for advice. They would do better to seek repeal of the tax dodges which tempted them into their present muddle, of course. But in any event they must be persuaded to recall the disaster of managed care and at least, avoid meddling in hospital design.

<auctions>That’s the cost issue, where specialization surely raises costs. Constant repetition of the same procedure seems superior to first-time fumbling, although it is questionable how long it takes a well-trained surgeon to pick up a new procedure and do it well. But for this system to work, the referring physicians need to be more skillful, not less, in choosing a good one to refer to. There’s just nothing like the experience of working for a few weeks in the specialty as a rotating interne, to tell you what to look for and what to avoid. If every doctor in a hospital is making a dozen referrals a day, the cumulative effect on quality of the whole institution is dramatic.

We’ll talk later about the Doane brothers of Bucks County, who were judged to be too handsome to hang. Right now, the point of this story can be summarized by the old Pennsylvania Hospital adage, that you should first be a good doctor before you can be a good specialist. Not only was the Pennsylvania Hospital the first in the nation. For sixty years it was the only hospital in the nation, and for decades after that it was the only hospital in Pennsylvania. In medical history circles it is said that the history of American medicine, is the history of the Pennsylvania Hospital.