Republican organization to cut down on intraparty strife. Backed by state party boss Matthew Quay, Durham had successfully maneuvered to gain control of the party’s central body, the Republican City Committee. Durham had changed party rules so that he and his closest allies picked the committee’s membership. He then put committee members first in line for lucrative patronage posts to ensure their loyalty. Durham also succeeded in giving the Republican City Committee the power to credential the delegates who nominated candidates for local office.29 According to one observer, once a candidate won Durham’s backing, he could skip the party’s nominating convention. Instead, he could go off and “rusticate in Florida or luxuriate at the Hot Springs,” confident that his nomination was assured.30
Whether or not Durham’s power ever reached such proportions, the more influence Durham gained, the more party regulars lined up behind him. The number of factions within Philadelphia’s Republican organization dwindled. Durham and state boss Matthew Quay never enjoyed absolute authority over Philadelphia’s political machine. Nor did their successors, “Sunny Jim” McNichol (who replaced Durham after his retirement in 1906) and U.S. Senator Boies Penrose (who assumed leadership of the state Republican Party after Quay’s death in 1904). McNichol and Penrose especially struggled to control George, William, and Edwin Vare, three brothers who held a tight grip on politics in Philadelphia’s southern neighborhoods. In the late nineteenth century, the Vares started a family business hauling refuse and ashes in an impoverished South Philadelphia neighborhood known as “the Neck.” Over time they built a multimillion-dollar contracting business that performed sanitation and construction work for the city as well as for local companies. The Vares used their profits and their connections to city government to establish a formidable political organization allied with the Republican Party that increasingly controlled South Philadelphia. Durham, Penrose, and McNichol usually collaborated with the Vares. Sporadically, however, the two factions tried to outmaneuver one another. Still, such conflicts played out within a local Republican Party that was more centralized than ever before thanks to Durham’s innovations.31
Widener and the city’s other utility owners had supported this process of party consolidation. Cutting down on rivalries within the Republican Party promised Widener and his colleagues a more predictable legislative process. Utility companies depended on public franchises, and a powerful, well-oiled political machine promised to deliver them. It hardly bothered Widener and the city’s other utility moguls that their allies in the Republican machine commonly resorted to voter intimidation and electoral fraud. Men like Widener had spent millions building the city’s electric, gas, and transit systems. They preferred to have their investments insulated from the whims of democracy.32
While Widener and the city’s utility interests backed the political machine, other segments of Philadelphia’s business community led the opposition. No single industry dominated Philadelphia’s economy as automobile manufacturing did Detroit’s. Rather, Philadelphia’s factories produced an exceptional assortment of goods, everything from textiles, leather products, and cigars to ships, streetcars, and train engines—an eclectic bounty that led local boosters to brag that their hometown was “the workshop of the world.”33
The ranks of the city’s antimachine “independent” reformers reflected this economic diversity. In 1905, independents established a new political organization, the Committee of Seventy. Its members included owners and top managers of firms that produced machine tools, locomotives, gas fixtures, soaps, and dyes, as well as bankers and merchants who dealt in coal, wool, and other dry goods. Prominent doctors and other professionals also joined the group. Lawyers, most of them well-off, signed up in especially large numbers. In 1911, a similar collection of businessmen and elite professionals united behind the successful mayoral candidacy of independent reformer and manufacturer Rudolph Blankenburg. When independents organized to revise the city charter in 1919, some of the most successful businessmen in the city backed the cause. They included Alba Johnson, president of the city’s mammoth Baldwin Locomotive Works; William Disston, vice president of another of Philadelphia’s largest factories; Coleman Sellers Jr., a major manufacturer of machine tools; Samuel Fels, a wealthy soap manufacturer; and Ernest Trigg, a factory executive and a director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Trigg was also president of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce—a stronghold of antimachine Republicans that helped spearhead the fight for charter reform along with the Committee of Seventy.34
Sharply divided over the question of machine rule, Philadelphia’s commercial and industrial leaders nonetheless managed to unify behind a number of policy goals. Easily the most ambitious was a sweeping, City Beautiful–inspired plan to expand the city’s park system and to construct a network of parkways to increase access to green space throughout the city. Integral to this project was the completion of a downtown boulevard, inspired by the Champs-Élysées in Paris, that would connect the center of the city to Philadelphia’s exceptionally large Fairmount Park. Supporters of the downtown parkway hoped to line the roadway with a series of grand monuments and civic structures, including new homes for the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the city’s Free Library. A number of local organizations joined forces in support of these plans. Elite businessmen led many of them, including executives of the Pennsylvania Railroad; the owner of one of the city’s principal department stores; and a partner in Baldwin Locomotives as well as Peter Widener, his lawyer, John Johnson, and Widener’s preferred banker and arguably the most influential financier in Philadelphia, E. T. Stotesbury. In 1904, these businessmen and the civic groups that they helped to run—such as the Fairmount Park Art Association, the City Parks Association of Philadelphia, and the Parkway Association—joined with a number of other local organizations to found a new umbrella group: Organizations Allied for the Acquisition of a Comprehensive Park System (OAACPS). The Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and other commercial organizations joined OAACPS, as did the city’s leading organization of elite women, the Philadelphia Civic Club.35
Figure 3. Plans for Philadelphia’s downtown parkway, first in 1908 (on the left) and then, as the plans evolved, in 1917 (on the right). Paul Philippe Cret Collection, The Athenaeum of Philadelphia.
A handful of municipal departments and public commissions also appeared on OAACPS’s roster, most notably the Fairmount Park Commission, a body that Peter Widener and his inner circle controlled. The judges of Philadelphia’s court of common pleas—many of whom were closely tied to the Republican machine—appointed the members of the park commission and habitually named Philadelphians tied to the city’s utility interests. From this perch, Widener and his close allies directed the planning of the proposed downtown parkway and the civic buildings that they hoped would line it. Widener was especially committed to constructing new buildings for the city’s Free Library and art museum. He was a trustee of the library and wanted the new museum to house his extensive art collection along with those of his closest business associates, John Johnson and William Elkins. Completing the new buildings and the downtown parkway would entail the demolition of acres upon acres of existing structures, including working-class homes and a number of factories. Businessmen whose property was slated for removal tended to oppose the plan, but most of the city’s business community embraced it.36
Figure 4. The intended site of the downtown parkway. The parkway was designed to cut diagonally from where the photograph is taken, through a stretch of structures that would have to be demolished, pass just to the left of the domed building, and end near the edge of the Schuylkill River, just before the river widens and the photograph begins to go out of focus. Courtesy of PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Records.
In addition to the downtown parkway, members of OAACPS backed a much more extensive set of proposals authored by a leading advocate of City Beautiful planning, Andrew Wright Crawford. In 1903, Crawford—in collaboration with the well-known architect Frank Miles Day—published a multivolume
