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William Warren Gibbs: The Rise and Fall of A Gilded Age Promoter

William Warren Gibbs (1846-1925)

William Warren Gibbs arrived in Philadelphia around 1880 with little more than a smooth tongue and gas-making equipment for sale.  Born in 1846 in the small town of Hope, New Jersey, Gibbs dropped out of school to work in a local store, and then married Frances Ayres Johnson, the daughter of a prominent Hackettstown merchant.  Not content with a life in central New Jersey farm country, he wanted to move to the thriving “Workshop of the World “and become a wealthy entrepreneur.

Soon after arriving in Philadelphia, Gibbs quickly gained a reputation as one of the most persuasive men in the city, able to sell anything to anyone, especially influential men with money. Those around him realized that Gibbs had a real knack at setting up companies and issuing securities. He teamed up with another up-and-coming Philadelphia businessman — Peter Arrell Brown Widener — and formed the United Gas Improvement Company, a massive trust that sought control over the city’s gas mains.  Another vested interest in UGI was W.G. Warden of John D. Rockefeller’s powerful Standard Oil Company.  The arrangement worked well for Widener, who parlayed the fortune he gained supplying meat to the Union Army into trolley lines and new real estate development in North Philadelphia.   By the 1890s, UGI had helped make Widener and his cronies extremely wealthy.  According to contemporary reports,  UGI was “the most successful enterprise of its kind in the country, already owning and controlling the gas works of about fifty important towns and cities.” That year, the outstanding stock of the United Gas Improvement Company was worth $5 million and sold “at a high premium, while the actual assets will aggregate at a much larger sum.” Eventually, the United Gas Improvement Company solidified its position by getting a 30 year lease on Philadelphia’s entire gas lighting system.  It also had a reputation for political corruption. In 1903, for example, UGI was accused of making an illegal $20 million profit on the sale of stock in the United Electric Company of New Jersey.

The United Gas Improvement Company headquarters at 1401 Arch Street…conveniently close to City Hall.

The business and social bonds between Peter Widener and William Warren Gibbs probably explain why they owned neighboring mansions on North Broad Street during the 1880s– Widener at 1200 and Gibbs at 1216.

In 1888, Gibbs struck pay dirt again when he trotted out the Electric Storage Battery Company, which made batteries for industrial uses. According to business historian Alfred Chandler, Gibbs “quickly worked out an agreement with leading Philadelphia capitalists to raise $4.0 million” in 1893, much of it from Widener and Elkins, who needed batteries to power their electric streetcars. With this money, Gibbs purchased several smaller companies and bought out patents belonging to Brush Electric, Edison Electric, and other American electric manufacturers.” He then supervised the creation of a network of factories and distributers to manufacture and sell these electric batteries to big clients such as General Electric and Westinghouse.  The company proved to be a great success, bolstering its organizer’s reputation and enriching him further.

The Widener mansion at 1200 N. Broad Street. The Gibbs mansion is a few houses to the north at 1216 N. Broad Street. It may have had interiors designed by architect Frank Furness.

Yet Widener and Gibbs’s paths diverged by the early 1900s.  Widener invested in companies for the long term, branching out into steel, oil, and steamships (including his friend Clement Griscom’s International Mercantile Marine — owner of Britain’s White Star Line ).  By 1912, when Widener lost both his son George and grandson Harry in the Titanic disaster, he had a highly-diversified portfolio worth over $100 million. William Warren Gibbs, on the other hand, remained a serial entrepreneur, and had little interest in active management in his start up’s affairs after it went public.  He became known — perhaps somewhat mockingly — as the man who sat on more boards of directors than any other man in America.  One his more far-fetched schemes was financing the construction of a massive bridge across the Hudson River at Poughkeepsie. Although the structure was a wonder of engineering, the bridge company itself went into receivership and left Gibbs $100,000 poorer, and had “cost lots of big men big fortunes.”   This misadventure probably deepened Gibbs’s lack of respect for engineers.

The Drexel-Gibbs mansion at 1733 Walnut Street, when it was one of the grandest homes in the Rittenhouse Square area. It was torn down in 1913 and replaced by an apartment building.

By 1900, William Warren Gibbs had amassed enough clout (and a $15 million fortune) to purchase a mansion from banker Anthony Drexel Jr.  at 1733 Walnut Street, on the northeast corner of Rittenhouse Square.  The house, built in 1847 when Rittenhouse Square was on the edge of the countryside, was now surrounded by some of the finest homes in the city,  Gibbs and his made their own lavish improvements to the house, which already boasted ceiling frescos, plaster moulding, solid walnut doors, and gold and silver leaf stenciling.  They also added a high iron fence, gate, and a new stone port-cochere at the rear of the house, and a raised portico at the Walnut Street front door.  Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs, as well as their five children still living at home, enjoyed the most modern amenities: electronic service bells to summon five live-in servants, steam heat, hot and cold running water, and gas lighting.  He joined the Union League, his wife threw lavish parties at hotels, and his young boys William Francis and Frederic Herbert learned how to play tennis at prestigious suburban country clubs.  Their eldest daughter Augusta May married the son of a prominent banker in 1899, and a local paper described her as “a splendid musician [who] paints beautifully and rides and drives well.”

Yet Gibbs’s inability to invest in a company for the long-term finally caught up with him.  He invested in more and more peculiar ventures — dye, gunpowder, and cellulose battleship insulation —  and seemed more interested in playing the market than creating sustainable companies that actually made things.  The Philadelphia Inquirer observed in 1901 that, “the days of skylarking for these stocks are over, and lacking the support of Mr. Gibbs, each issue is heavy in the market.  Not, so far as is known, are they likely to receive any support which will make them attractive as speculative issues, stocks which a person may buy and sell quickly at a handsome profit…” The same article also noted due to some suspect financial activities, “It is quite likely that some of the shareholders of record of the Alkali Company unite in a defense and make a test case.”

In 1902, Gibbs’s wheeling-dealing caught up with him, when one of his companies, the American Alkali Company, was found out to be little more than a stock-jobbing scheme in possession of worthless patents.  The company went bankrupt, and Gibbs was accused of concocting a “fraudulent scheme,” in which he illegally pocketed  over $350,000 in cash.

The 2100 block of Pine Street. The Gibbs family lived in the building on the right during the late 1910s.
It took another eight years for the downfall of William Warren Gibbs to reach its tragic finale. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted snarkily a few years after the Alkali scandal in its “Clubs and Clubmen” section that, “W.W. Gibbs is said to have made half a million in diamonds.  He collected a big bag of them, laid them aside in his safe until the price went up 50 per cent, and then sold them out.”   In 1910, the family suddenly deserted their enormous house and retreated to a small cottage on the Main Line.  Creditors swiftly foreclosed on the house for nonpayment of two mortgages.  Three years later, the deteriorating mansion was torn down and replaced by a luxury apartment building.
The Gladstone Hotel, just prior to demolition in 1971.
The Widener family does not appear to have offered assistance following this very public downfall.  The Gibbs family kept on the move, taking up residence at an apartment building at 21st and Pine, and then in the Gladstone Hotel at 11th and Pine. Despite his best efforts, William Warren Gibbs never made a come-back. The once-wealthy and powerful financier died in abject poverty in 1925 while residing in a North Philadelphia sanitarium.

 

His son William Francis Gibbs (1886-1967) dropped out of Harvard following his father’s financial ruin.  He moved to New York and rose to became America’s greatest naval architect, even though his father considered engineers inarticulate and financially inept.   The man who designed the fastest, safest, most beautiful ocean liner in history — the SS United States — said that he “never would have amounted to anything” had his father not gone bankrupt.

 

Note: Steven Ujifusa is the author of A Man and His Ship: America’s Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the SS United States, published in July 2012 by Simon & Schuster.  To learn more, click here.

Sources:

“Allege $20,000,000 Fraud,” The New York Times, October 4, 1903.

Philadelphia and Popular Philadelphians (Philadelphia, PA: The North American, 1891), p.166.

“Elegant Wedding at St. James: Miss Augusta M. Gibbs Becomes the Wife of Mr. W.H.T. Huhn,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 9, 1899.

“New Suit Against Alkali,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 12, 1902.

“Now Seeking a Receiver,” The New York Times, October 29, 1891.

“Skylarking Over; Now for Business,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 9, 1901.

“Suit Against W.W. Gibbs,” The New York Times, April 20, 1902.

Alfred Dupont Chandler, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1990, p.403.

Winthrop Sergeant, “Profiles: The Best I Know How,” The New Yorker, June 6, 1964, p.73.

Stuart Wells, “The Residence at 1733 Walnut Street,” HSTVP 600 Documentation and Archival Research, Dr. Roger Moss, December 12, 1986, Collection of the Philadelphia Athenaeum, HR 86.4., p. 8.

John Russell Young, Memorial history of the city of Philadelphia from its first settlement to the year 1895 (New York: New York History Company), 1895-1898, pp.457-58.

 

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When Navy Dragged Army Through the Mud

The Army-Navy Game at Franklin Field, December 1, 1934.

“Bands, crowds, spectacles, chevrons and gold lace, brass hats, officials, politicians and dignitaries and still just a football game,” wrote Paul Gallico in the days leading up to the annual Army-Navy game the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 1934. “Of all the thousands of football games played all over the country from October to December, this is the one game that really matters…”

“Borries and Buckler, two star backs, are playing their final game and both should throw a party worth attending,” read folks as far away as Los Angeles. The day before the game, Gallico urged ticket-holders to “take a look at Midshipman [Buzz] Borries tomorrow as he fades back to make a pass. Note how cool and unflustered he is; how with a quick glance he takes in the situation and adapts himself to it immediately. Ten years from now, Borries will be a commander, perhaps in charge of a destroyer, or a sub, or a nest of war birds.”

The game took place midway between West Point and Annapolis, in Philadelphia, but the game-day scene unfolded in Washington, D.C. as “seven special trains pulled out from Union Station at an early hour carrying hundreds of members of Capital society, clad in… their best furs and smartest sports clothes… women wearing either the navy’s yellow chrysanthemums tied with huge blue bows, or the Army’s knots of black, gray and gold.”

Franklin Field couldn’t begin to accommodate all of those who wanted in. Leading up to the game, according to The New York Times, 40,000 were turned away. With all 78,079 tickets sold, prices “rocketed to $40, $50 and $75 a pair, as scalpers began to infest cigar stores, shoe-shine parlors and restaurants.”

After all the anticipation, excitement and expense, the final score had Navy on top by 3, a single field goal kicked by “Big Slade Cutter, the Middie’s right tackle.” Did a mere 3-0 score dampen the day’s excitement? Not hardly, claimed Gallico, who wrote: “Of all the Army-Navy games I have seen this was by far the most beautiful and the most awesome.” And he wasn’t talking about the game.

“Wind and weather and nature set the scene,” Gallico wrote in an article titled “Weather on Parade at Big Service Game.” Here, “inside the giant fortress of the field, the entertainment was the “storm tortured sky to the west seen over the grim ramparts of the stadium…while to the east, the sun still sent slanting rays to the earth and illuminated the massed throngs in the east stand like a stage set lit by spotlights from the balcony.”

“With the first…dash of rain the massed thousands on the sides of the stadium turned themselves into a tapestry woven of colors as the women donned their colored rain capes against the downpour. Powder and marine blues were the prevailing colors, with sprinklings of reds, greens, yellows and whites. The west stands…resembled a tulip bed in Holland in springtime. The colors were so sharp and well defined.”

“There was one weird moment of flatness such as I have never seen before,” Gallico continued, “in which, due to the way the light struck from the storm overhead, and the mud that covered the football men from head to toe and rendered them all an even, ghostly grey, the whole scene resembled nothing so much as a photographic negative. Everything was inverted. Blacks were while, whites were blacks, and the gray men running on the field shining with mud and water looked like the negative film one sees run thorough in the cutting rooms of the newsreel studios.”

“Football in the mud is a much more fluid and rhythmic game to watch than on a dry field because …the 22 men do not come to a stop as abruptly as they do where the turf is solid and sure. The pileups dissolve in the grease and the ball carriers move to come sort of completion, either forward or backward, depending on how hard they are hit until they skid gently to a stop.  Blockers, too …slide gracefully on their chests for 5 and 6 yards at a clip… “

If you don’t believe Gallico (who quit sports writing two years later for a prolific and successful career as a novelist) see for yourself in this vintage video when Navy dragged Army through the mud—and vice versa.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC6ggT4ByDs&w=550]

 

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Behind the Scenes Historic Sites Neighborhoods

Gothic Ruins: A Last Glimpse Inside Northeast Manual Training High School

Northeast Manual Training High School, September 15, 1906.

The former Northeast Manual Training High School looks as if it had been plucked from the Princeton campus and dropped into the middle of North Philadelphia.  Constructed in 1903 at the intersection of North 8th Street and West Lehigh Avenue, the “Collegiate Gothic” building has walls of granite, traceried windows, and gargoyles sprouting from the central tower.  The auditorium boasted a magnificent pipe organ. This was not a school for the rich and privileged, but for the sons of working class Philadelphians.  The School Board believed that traditional beauty could be a form of uplift for the students, most of whom lived in tightly-packed, tree-less neighborhoods, befouled by smoke from the surrounding factories. Architect Lloyd Titus followed his client’s wishes, and created a dignified structure that loomed dreamily above the neighborhood’s squat rowhouses and warehouses.

It is an edifice built to last.  Over a century after its completion, there is not a crack in the foundations and walls are still plumb and level.

Yet on August 3, 2011, the school caught fire and the upper floors were completely burned out.  Nothing short of a total gut-renovation could make it fit for reuse.  The school, most recently known as the Julia DeBurgos Middle Magnet School, had been closed two years before the conflagration.  Because it was not properly sealed, the old school became a magnet for squatters, drug-addicts, and vandals, and quickly fell into ruin.  The four-alarm fire, possibly the result of arson, was the coup de grace.

Last Tuesday, I stood with demolition superintendent Devon Jackson in the groin-vaulted Gothic vestibule of the school’s auditorium, just as demolition started.   It was a dreary, gray day.  Rain spat through the vacant windows, and bright construction lights shone through the swirling dust.  Piles of rubble filled the courtyard. A few weeds still clung tenaciously to life, poking through the debris.

“The toughest part of the demolition is removing all the wood from the structure,” Devon explained.  It was not just in the floor planks and joists, but also buried behind plaster walls. Much of the wood that escaped the fire was either water-damaged or had succumbed to rot.

I asked Devon if it was OK for me to step into the auditorium.  It was a cavernous space, two stories high. The stage, surrounded by crumbling plaster moulding, still remained.  A tattered blue curtain shung from the proscenium. The seats had already been removed, the flooring material ripped up.  The pipe organ once stood behind the stage.

The pipe organ at Northeast Manual Training High School on December 18, 1934, damaged by fire.
Guion Bluford, a Philadelphia native and the first African-American astronaut, being honored on the auditorium stage, November 1983.

Eric Smith, Jackson’s supervisor at A.T. Russell Construction (the company in charge of demolishing the school), was alerted to the long-sealed organ shortly after demolition started, but by the time he arrived to photograph it, his workers had dismantled the instrument.  While wandering through the school, Smith saw pitiful reminders of the squatters who used the squalid structure as their home.  One illegal tenant had set up a suite of sorts, using a room for discarding his soiled clothes, one as a closet, and another as his bedroom.  Since the building had no working plumbing, he poked a hole in a chair and used it as a toilet.  Bottles he used for urination lay scattered around the space.

Taking down such a massive structure is no easy task, yet Smith predicts that his team of about 20 men will demolish it in a mere three months.  The first task is to gut the interior and salvage anything of value. Unusable wood components will be shredded into mulch, and sheetrock pulverized into gypsum fertilizer. The 10-inch veneer of exterior granite, as well as the gargoyles, cornices, and window tracery, will be sold to architectural salvage dealers, who have found a brisk market for such elegant pieces of history.  Men wielding sledgehammers and a swinging wrecking ball will then knock down the brick-and-masonry structural walls.

Smith knows he has a job to do and that economically the building is probably beyond saving.  Yet he still regrets its destruction.  “It’s a shame to see a building like that torn down,” he said. “You take a school hat’s been around for 110 years and then replace it with a Save-A-Lot, Burger King or a sneaker store. Change is necessary, but it would be nice if there was a better way to preserve structures like that. Even if you tried to save a portion of the building and preserve the history of the site.”

Note: to read Ken Finkel’s 2011 post about the former Northeast Manual Training (Thomas Edison) High School, click here.

To about read Steven Ujifusa’s May visit to the William S. Shoemaker Middle School in West Philadelphia, click here.

 

The burned-out shell of the former Northeast Manual Training High School. Photograph by Steven B. Ujifusa.
Stair tower. The railing have been removed. Photograph by Steven B. Ujifusa.

 

The rubble-filled courtyard. Photograph by Steven B. Ujifusa.
Auditorium vestibule, with plaster groin vaults. Photograph by Steven B. Ujifusa.
Exterior bas-relief above the south entrance to the high school, part of an Art Deco addition. Photograph by Steven B. Ujifusa.
Auditorium. Photograph by Steven B. Ujifusa.
Gothic buttresses and windows. Photograph by Steven B. Ujifusa.

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Standing His Ground: Abraham Lincoln in Philadelphia

President-elect Abraham Lincoln raising flag in front of Independence Hall in honor of admission of Kansas to the Union, February 22, 1861. Photograph by Frederick DeBourg Richards.

Weeks after Abraham Lincoln won the presidency on November 6, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union. And in the months before his inauguration in Washington, D.C. in March, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana followed. Jefferson Davis would be elected and inaugurated as the Provisional President of the Confederacy.

A burdened Lincoln timed his trip to the Capital, and to his presidency, with a visit to Philadelphia on Washington’s birthday in 1861. At Independence Hall, he raised a flag with 34 stars, one for each recognized state plus a new one for the recently-admitted Kansas. And as he raised the flag that cold February day, Lincoln spoke of the nation’s dire situation:

“I am invited and called before you to participate in raising above Independence Hall the flag of our country, with an additional star upon it. I propose to say that when that flag was originally raised here it had but thirteen stars. . . . under the blessing of God, each additional star added to that flag has given additional prosperity and happiness to this country until it has advanced to its present condition; and its welfare in the future, as well as in the past, is in your hands. . . . I think we may promise ourselves that not only the new star placed upon that flag shall be permitted to remain there to our permanent prosperity for years to come, but additional ones shall from time to time be placed there . . .”

During his lifetime, Lincoln visited Philadelphia four times. And this visit on February 21-22, 1861 was by far the most meaningful. He arrived from New York via Newark and Trenton about 4PM on the 21st to stay at the new Continental Hotel at 9th and Chestnut Streets. There he talked with advisers about the rising tensions and learned of a newly-discovered assassination plot. The following morning, Lincoln went to Independence Hall to ceremoniously raise the nation’s new flag. He hadn’t prepared a speech but spoke to the issues of the day, and of his own demise:

“I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here, in this place, where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live. … in my hands is the task of restoring peace to the present distracted condition of the country. …  all the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn, so far as I have been able to draw them, from the sentiments which originated and were given to the world from this hall. I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here, and framed and adopted that Declaration of Independence. I have pondered over the toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army who achieved that Independence. … It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the motherland; but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men. This is a sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world, if I can help to save it. If it cannot be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.”

Lincoln’s Funeral Procession on South Broad Street, April 22, 1865. (Credit: The Library Company of Philadelphia)

Then Lincoln spoke clearly of the coming war:

“Now, in my view of the present aspect of affairs, there need be no bloodshed and war. There is no necessity for it. I am not in favor of such a course, and I may say, in advance, that there will be no bloodshed unless it be forced upon the Government, and then it will be compelled to act in self-defense.”

Lincoln turned to go to the platform outside on Chestnut Street, raised the 34-star flag and left for Washington, D.C. and his presidency. Before he arrived, Texas had voted to approve secession. Five weeks after his inauguration, Southern forces bombarded and captured Fort Sumter. The Civil War was underway.

Lincoln visited Philadelphia one more time—to support fundraising efforts for Army Hospitals in June, 1864. In another year, the assassinated President’s remains would ceremoniously, somberly return to Independence Hall to lay in state, before a final trip to Springfield, Illinois.

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“The Cliffs”: Fairmount Park Ruins with a Link to Joseph Wharton

Joseph Wharton (1826-1909). Source: Wikipedia Commons.

During the winter months, drivers along the Schuylkill Expressway may notice the broken shell of a house near the Girard Avenue Bridge.  Its battered, honey-colored walls are marred by bright graffiti. Its roof is gone, windows vacant.

This forlorn ruin, once known as “The Cliffs,” was long ago the childhood home of one of America’s great industrialists, whose name is known throughout the world today.

Joseph Wharton was born in 1826, the scion of a wealthy Quaker family.   Despite his privilege, his parents put a damper on  extravagance.  They were members of the progressive Hicksite Quaker sect, founded by itinerant preacher Elias Hicks.  Along with a strict doctrine of simplicity, Hicks preached the abolition of slavery, and argued that the guidance from “Inner Light” was more important that strict adherence scripture.  Hicks wrote that, “the Scriptures can only direct to the fountain from whence they originated – the spirit of truth: as saith the apostle, ‘The things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God;’ therefore when the Scriptures have directed and pointed us to this light within, or Spirit of Truth, there they must stop – it is their ultimatum – the top stone of what they can do. And no other external testimony of men or books can do any more.”

Hicks’s radical theology lead to a split between conservative “Orthodox” and progressive “Hicksite” Philadelphia Quakers in the 1820s. Among the leaders of the Philadelphia Hicksite community was Lucretia Mott (1793-1880), who worked closely with 19th century civil rights activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass.

As a child, Wharton was deeply shaped by the Quaker faith, especially its doctrines of simplicity and practicality. His boyhood summers were divided “The Cliffs,” his mother Deborah Fisher Wharton’s family country house on the Schuykill River, and “Bellevue,” the Wharton river estate to the west. Built by his great-grandfather Joshua Fisher in 1745, “The Cliffs” was a Georgian house in the classic “Quaker plain” vein, an informal retreat where the Fishers escaped the city’s miserable, disease-ridden summers.  “Bellevue” was a somewhat more spacious and elaborate structure, compete with a ballroom that, according Wharton’s daughter Joanna Wharton Lippincott, “served the young Quakers as a delightful place for games of various kinds.”

Fireplace at “The Cliffs,” 1971.

Yet a life of leisure was not for  Joseph Wharton.  Choosing not to go to college, he apprenticed himself to an accountant to learn the basics of business.  After marrying fellow Quaker Anna Corbit Lovering in 1854, he struggled in his early ventures.  Then, working with master craftsmen, Wharton learned the new science of metallurgy, and prospered forging zinc, nickel, and iron.

Wharton didn’t stop there. He kept his eyes peeled for the next big thing, which was the metal of the future: steel: Under his management, Bethlehem Steel became one of America’s largest integrated steel and mining ventures.  Wharton crisscrossed Europe looking for the newest and best technologies, and built personal relationships with his managers. Supplying steel for skyscrapers, ships, and bridges made Joseph Wharton a millionaire many times over, on par with Rockefeller and Carnegie.

Something of an amateur scientist, Wharton also published a number of well-received articles — including ones on the Doppler effect and another on the global spread of volcanic pumice from the eruption of Mount Krakatoa near Manila.  He also tried his hand at verse. His daughter Joanna claimed that Ralph Waldo Emerson once praised his poem “Ichabod” (written in honor of Daniel Webster) at a dinner for Atlantic Monthly contributors:

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn

Which once he wore;

The glory from his gray hairs gone,

For evermore.

Like many self-taught businessmen, he remained intensely interested in the day-to-day workings of his enterprises. As an old man, he led a canoe trip down the Colorado River to inspect one of his Nevada silver mines, and insisted on being lowered down the mineshaft in a bucket to inspect it.

A good Quaker to the end, Wharton believed that wealth was not just an end in itself, but should be used as a force for good in the world.  In 1881, he set aside $100,000 to start a school that would be the first of its kind — a business school — and chose his native city’s University of Pennsylvania as the beneficiary.  Wharton realized that America’s corporations needed trained professionals to guide them through the complex industrial economy that he had helped create. As Penn’s medical faculty trained future doctors, business scholars could train future business executives.

What wisdom did Wharton want to impart to his new school’s graduates? Business to him did not mean routine, but turbulence and change, and he hoped that his school would prepare them for, as he said, “immense swings upward or downward that await the competent or the incompetent soldier in this modern strife.”  The best schools, he observed, “have endeavored to do more than keep up the respectable standard of a recent past; they have labored to supply the needs of an advancing and exacting world…”

Yet it appears that Wharton became disappointed with the business school he founded. As he grew older, Wharton became more involved with Swarthmore College, a Hicksite Quaker liberal arts school that he co-founded in 1869   Unlike the Wharton School, Swarthmore College was a coeducational institution and was not strictly vocational.  It’s possible that Wharton, who did not receive a college education himself, lived vicariously through this school, frequently addressing the student body at commencement. “Not only, therefore, will you by obediently following your inward guide find for yourselves the right path,” he addressed one graduating Swarthmore class. “Each of you may thus be the grain of wheat or the dock seed, corn, or weed, to bless or ban future generations.  Therefore, as George Fox said, ‘Friends, mind the light.'”

Wharton died in 1909.  The two schools he founded continue to thrive, but the two country houses where Wharton spent his childhood summers did not fare as well.  In the 1870s, the city of Philadelphia confiscated “Bellevue” and “The Cliffs” and integrated them into Fairmount Park as part of the plan to protect the Schuylkill River from pollution.  “Bellevue” was demolished around 1900 and replaced by rowhouses.  “The Cliffs” remained intact until the 1960s, and then suffered from neglect and vandalism. In 1986, fire gutted it.

Today, the stone ruins of “The Cliffs,”still poke above the trees on the east bank of the Schuylkill River, just north of Girard Avenue.

Two women in front of “The Cliffs,” 1971.
The burned-out shell of “The Cliffs,” 2006. Source: Wikipedia.

References:

Joanna Wharton Lippincott, Biographical Memoranda Concerning Joseph Wharton, 1826-1909. (Philadelphia, PA: J.P. Lippincott Company, 1910). Collection of the Pennsylvania Historical Society.

Samuel M. Janney, “The Doctrines of Elias Hicks,” The History of the Religious Society of Friends, from Its Rise to the Year 1828. (Quaker Heron Press, 2008, originally published 1869. http://www.quaker.org/pamphlets/hicks.pdf

“Wharton School of Business: A Brief History.” http://www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/features/schools/wharton.html

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Historic Sites

When Myth Prevails and History Fails

Independence Hall, Rear View, June 24,1931. Photograph by Wenzel J. Hess.

Philadelphia, we too-often think, has a corner on history when it comes to Liberty, Freedom and all that was right with America. We have historical sites to prove it, so it must be true.

But what happens to the sites that tell the downside of history, sites that contradict the prevailing and preferred narrative? Well, those sites tend to disappear from the cityscape and from the public imagination. They become forgotten, and so are their stories—even when those stories would be valuable to illustrate a point.

Take, for example, the turning point in Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, his March 18, 2008 “A More Perfect Union” speech at the National Constitution Center. The constitution, said Obama, was “stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery.” “In a hall that still stands across the street,” he explained, “a group of men gathered and … launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy.” Obama was referring to Independence Hall, which is actually two blocks from where he spoke. The hall across the street that the President didn’t know about, but would have wanted to, was Pennsylvania Hall. It, too, was an embodiment of an “improbable experiment in democracy”—and a failed one, at that. But Obama had no idea about this sordid chapter in American intolerance. He made do with what he could point to.

Unlike Independence Hall, Pennsylvania Hall no longer stands.  It lasted only three days before a rioting mob burned it down. Pennsylvania Hall doesn’t stand, and isn’t remembered. You won’t find an image here at PhillyHistory.org and you don’t often find it talked about in the Philadelphia narrative of freedom, liberty and independence. And we didn’t hear about it in Obama’s speech.

The destruction of Pennsylvania Hall flies in the face of the preferred Philadelphia mythology. But the fact that the building doesn’t survive to remind us of its story is no  excuse. The lack of a site doesn’t make the incident any less true, or less potent. What we have in the story of Pennsylvania Hall is nothing less than a  reality check in a city where the past is sometimes framed in myth more than fact.

The Burning of Pennsylvania Hall, May 18, 1838. Credit: The Library Company of Philadelphia.

And what are those facts? Advocates for the abolition of slavery had been turned away from every other meeting place in the city, even those run by Quakers. So the abolitionists raised funds and built their own meeting hall. On May 14, 1838, Pennsylvania Hall opened on Sixth Street, south of Race. Free speech ran rampant as men and women of both races met and conversed in a place devoted to American ideals.

As discussions took place inside, angry crowds gathered outside. Night after night, the mob grew. On May 18th, shouts and threats gave way to rocks and flames and the mob set Pennsylvania Hall on fire. Philadelphia’s fire companies came out—but only to douse the roofs of nearby properties.

In the Spring of 1838, and for years to come, every American knew what happened in Philadelphia that night. The Athens of America had fallen. Pennsylvania Hall’s charred ruins stood for years as an eloquent scar in the now ironically intolerant City of Brotherly Love. Visitors at Independence Hall looked up Sixth Street and saw the ruins. The burning of Pennsylvania Hall would forever be associated with Philadelphia, or so it seemed.

Today, the ruins are long gone and their memory has faded. At the site of Pennsylvania Hall, where WHYY stands, we make do with the terse message cast on a blue and gold historical marker. But real, resonant history calls for more than a sentence on a sidewalk. Pennsylvania Hall has a story that deserves to be remembered.

Categories
Events and People Snapshots of History

When Presidents Come to Town

By Yael Borofsky for the PhillyHistory Blog

Jimmy Carter stops off in a classroom in pursuit of a re-election bid.

Although Philadelphia’s days as the nation’s capital were glorious, but short-lived, that hasn’t stopped commanders in chief from stopping off in a city that practically oozes with symbols of democracy. As election day and all the associated controversy approaches (make sure to vote!), we wanted to give you a look at a few of the former Presidents who have come to Philadelphia — to campaign, rally support, sign legislation, and otherwise attempt to harness the force of Philadelphia’s great political history — and a reminder of what they said.

Technically, President Jimmy Carter isn’t campaigning in this 1980 photo, but he might as well be. Here, Carter is on a trip to Philly which took him to the Italian Market and beyond in his effort to drum up support for his re-election bid. Things didn’t work out for Carter, who lost out to President Ronald Reagan that year. Still, it’s nice to know that picture perfect visits to elementary schools are not a new thing.

President Gerald Ford shared a table with then-Mayor Frank Rizzo [Photo], likely during or after the dinner celebrating the reconvening of the first Continental Congress on September 6, 1974. Ford celebrated the city in his remarks that day, saying “Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, was the cradle of American liberty. “Love” and “liberty” are two pretty good words with which to start a nation.”

Nixon looks out his car window onto Independence National Mall.

About three years after President Richard Nixon took office in 1969, the president of privatization and Watergate infamy came to Philadelphia to sign a revenue-sharing bill — the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act of 1972 — at Independence Hall. The bill redirected tax revenue to states and municipal governments who could manage the money as they needed. Nixon, in his remarks given at Independence Square, said:

“The signing today of the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act of 1972–the legislation known as general revenue sharing-means that this new American revolution is truly underway. And it is appropriate that we launch this new American revolution in the same place where the first American Revolution was launched by our Founding Fathers 196 years ago-Independence Square in Philadelphia. It is appropriate that we meet in this historic place to help enunciate a new declaration of independence for our State and local governments.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson came to Philadelphia in 1967 [Photo] to visit the Philadelphia Opportunities Industrial Center at 19th and Oxford St., which had recently been opened by Reverend Leon H. Sullivan in 1964 to offer job training and educational support to minority groups in the city.

President John F. Kennedy at Independence Hall in 1962.

In his remarks at the POIC, Johnson lauded the work of the institution to lift up Philadelpia’s African American and minority population during a time when discrimination and inequality were destroying the fabric of cities across the country:

“Now when you really talk about what is right, you don’t appear to be nearly as interesting as you are when you talk about what is wrong. But I have seen so many things that are right here this morning that I wish everyone in America could not only see them, but emulate them–and follow them … What I have seen here with Reverend Sullivan is not just an institution–it is a unique training program. I have seen men and women whose self-respect is beginning to burn inside them like a flame–like a furnace that will fire them all their lives.”

On July 4, 1962 President John F. Kennedy was celebrating Independence Day in arguably the most important place to celebrate the holiday — Independence Hall. In an address to Philadelphia city leadership and the 54th National Governors Conference Kennedy remarked:

“Our task–your task in the State House and my task in the White House–is to weave from all these tangled threads a fabric of law and progress. We are not permitted the luxury of irresolution. Others may confine themselves to debate, discussion, and that ultimate luxury-free advice. Our responsibility is one of decision–for to govern is to choose.

Thus, in a very real sense, you and I are the executors of the testament handed down by those who gathered in this historic hall 186 years ago today.”

President Herbert Hoover addresses a crowd in Reyburn Plaza.

It’s not possible to see President Herbert Hoover in this picture taken in Reyburn Plaza at City Hall in October of 1932, but the scene is impressive. Hoover was stopping off in Philadelphia that day as part of a campaign tour through the mid-Atlantic region on his way to New York City and drew what looks to be a sizable crowd. Hoover, however, was not to be reelected.

This somewhat famous photo of President Abraham Lincoln [Photo] (JFK referenced it in the speech mentioned above) raising the American flag in front of Independence Hall could only be made better if you could actually see the man whom nearly every American could recognize with hesitation. Here, on February 22, 1861, Lincoln came to Philadelphia to welcome the state of Kansas to the Union in front of a crowd on the ground and in the trees.

References:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/carter-election1980/

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=4692

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/nixon-domestic/

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=3636&st=revenue+sharing&st1=Philadelphia

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=28329

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8756

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=23314&st=Philadelphia&st1=