Month: July 2016

Of all the things that happened here—appearances by Pope John Paul II, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela; performances by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead; boxing matches featuring Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson, Sonny Liston and Joe Frazier (his pro debut); Atlantic Ten Conference and Big Five basketball games; and concerts on the hall’s monster M.P. Moller pipe organ—of all of these events, and more, what would be the most memorable, the most worthy of being considered a great moment in history?

Civic Center’s 1931 Convention Hall Auditorium also hosted four national political conventions. The Democrats nominated Franklin D. Roosevelt for a second term there in 1936, and in 1940 the Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie. No earthshaking memories there. Then, in 1948, there came conventions of both major parties. Thomas Dewey left as the candidate for the GOP, and the Democrats confirmed their choice of Harry Truman after “a huge floor fight.”

Bingo.

What took place 68 years ago when the Democrats met is worth remembering—big time. The incumbent Truman hoped to sail to his first nomination unruffled. But in working out the party platform issues that would come to define the second half of the 20th century, drama intervened.

Late into the July Philadelphia night, in a proverbial smoke-filled room, Democratic leaders debated the planks of their platform. And the next day, the 37-year old mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, delivered the speech of a lifetime to a packed, tense, hall. It’s considered one of the top moments in American political convention history.

“Because good conscience, decent morality, demands it—I feel I must rise at this time to support…the great issue of civil rights,” declared Humphrey.

He later filled in the story of the night leading up to his speech. “All we knew was that we, a group of young liberals, had beaten the leadership of the party and led them closer to where they ought to have been… I had taken on our establishment and won. It was a heady feeling.” But some delegates reacted to Humphrey’s speech with significant grumbling on the convention floor.

Now let me say this at the outset that this proposal is made for no single region.” He continued: “Our proposal is made for no single class, for no single racial or religious group in mind. All of the regions of this country, all of the states have shared in our precious heritage of American freedom. All the states and all the regions have seen at least some of the infringements of that freedom—all people—get this—all people, white and black, all groups, all racial groups have been the victims at time[s] in this nation of—let me say—vicious discrimination.”

“We have made progress … But we must now focus the direction of that progress towards the… realization of a full program of civil rights to all.”

“Friends, delegates, I do not believe that there can be any compromise on the guarantees of …civil rights…” Humphrey’s handwritten addition on his typescript, seen in this .pdf of what he wrote and read that day, conveys raw exuberance. He added powerful phrases, made them extra-large, and emphasized them with single and double underlining.

“My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of Civil Rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this Civil-Rights program is an infringement on States’ Rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of States’ Rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of Human Rights. …This is the issue of the 20th century,” declared Humphrey.

“I ask you for a calm consideration of our historic opportunity. Let us do forget the evil passions and the blindness of the past. …we cannot and we must not turn from the path so plainly before us. …now is the time to recall those who were left on that path of American freedom.” …

“My good friends, I ask my Party, I ask the Democratic Party, to march down the high road of progressive democracy.”

A contingent of Southerners objected to the party’s position demanding anti-lynching laws, school integration, anti-discrimination in employment and universal access to restrooms.

NPR’s Ron Elving  later told what happened next: “The Mississippi delegation walked out in its entirety, about half of the Alabama delegation. About three dozen delegates in toto walked out of the convention and vowed to nominate their own Dixiecrat candidate for president, Strom Thurmond from South Carolina” with their own Dixiecrat platform. Knowing this, and knowing how the issue is still very much with us, it’s riveting to hear Humphrey’s delivery.

This wouldn’t be the first time, nor would it be the last, when a major, memorable speech on race and rights was set in Philadelphia, a place whose associations with freedom and independence always seem to flavor the rhetorical stew. Humphrey’s masterpiece—he never had another quite like it—ranks with other great oratorical moments on the subject in Philadelphia. They include presidential candidate Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech delivered at the National Constitution Center in 2008. And we cannot forget another, by Angelina Grimké at the opening of Pennsylvania Hall in 1838. As Grimké spoke, Pennsylvania Hall was under siege by a mob opposing her convention’s anti-slavery position. And a few days later, they’d burn the building to the ground.

The 1948 the drama looked different, but the confrontation about civil rights as human rights was eerily similar.

The two front doors on Randolph Street were locked tight. They said this was “partly to keep intruders out, and partly to keep the male hands in” during work hours. You know, to “prevent their slipping around the corner to get a drink.” Worst of all, in spite of the three-year-old law requiring fire escapes, the five-story mill building had not a one.

On the night of October 12, 1881, when fire struck Landenberger’s Dress Goods Manufactory, destruction multiplied into horror and death.

A little before 10pm, neighbors heard the “shrieks of agony and despair…issuing from the building.” They looked to the windows on the third and fourth floors to see “the forms of men and women gesticulating frantically and screaming for aid, their retreat being cut off and the flames sweeping around them.”

“Don’t jump,” someone on the ground shouted. “We will get ladders.”

The fire spread faster. As an eyewitness described it, “the first thing we knew, down came a girl, and then another and another. When the first was picked up it was found that she had broken her back over the railing of the iron steps. The next leaped from the fourth story and was crushed out of shape upon the pavement. And so the work of desperation went on until nearly a score of victims had been cruelly and in most cases fatally injured.”

Mattie Conlan was somewhat luckier, “let down by a shawl from the third story window.” The smoke “rising round her and the flames streaming upward”—and she let go. Conlan’s injuries weren’t fatal. Kate Schaeffer and Annie Brady “jumped hand-in-hand from the third floor window. Brady died instantly.

What became of the 35 others working the night shift? According to newspaper reports, no one even knew exactly who they were. “Landenberger’s people positively refused to furnish the list of those who were in the building when the fire broke out.” And without a list, loved ones were at loose ends: angry, confused, and grieving.

The following morning, as the coroner searched the ruins, relatives “begged pathetically to be allowed to enter the building and look for missing husbands or sons.” Five victims were retreived that day, including the 16-year old Elizabeth Franck, who had lived with her family at 1706 Waterloo Street. Her funeral services would be held at St. Jacob’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, 3^rd and Columbia (now Cecil B. Moore). “Six young ladies clad in white” were Lizzie Franck’s pallbearers.

Even two days after the fire, searchers worked all day looking for bodies— “but discovered none.” James McMunn’s wife waited nearby, sadly watching. So was Joseph Glazer’s mother. Annie Straub’s brothers looked on “with anxious hearts.”

At the morgue, George Matheson barely recognized the body and polka dot blue and white dress of his 15-year old daughter, Mary. He had her remains transferred home to 1419 Hope Street. Later the same day, authorities sent a contingent by “to see whether the body was not really that of the missing Annie Straub.” Matheson angrily turned them away, refusing access to Mary’s body. What he expected was a visit by Charles Landenberger, who, Matheson snapped to a reporter, “might have come to see the family, as any gentleman would have done.”

“The feeling around the neighborhood was intense, and many people, while they unreservedly condemned the owner of the building, Joseph Harvey,” they also challenged Landenberger’s denials of culpability. He knew the upper floors were dangerous. He claimed to have urged Harvey, time and time again, to install fire escapes. So, they asked, “Why did he send so many people up there to work?”

Surrounding streets filled up with expressions of distress. “Knots of employees of other mills were grouped here and there earnestly discussing the sad event, and strongly denouncing the false economy which failed to provide suitable means of escape from the burned mill.”

“Popular sentiment, urged on by the atrocity of this case, with its ugly exposure of indifference to human life and human suffering and sorrow” led to the organization of an “indignation meeting.” About 600 people crowded onto the lot adjacent to “the scene of slaughter” at Randolph and Columbia.

The coroner’s inquest into the fire and the nine deaths it caused produced an undisputed verdict: “…the fire was caused by the improperly constructed and inefficiently managed apparatus for lighting the building; …Joseph Harvey, owner of the mills, is criminally responsible for the loss of life, in neglecting to furnish proper means of escape in case of fire; …the city of Philadelphia is responsible for not enforcing the laws in compelling Joseph Harvey to erect proper fire-escapes.”

In fact, the Randolph Mill Fire turned out to be a pivotal disaster. A specially appointed committee of the Franklin Institute examined technologies and design possibilities for fire escapes and elevators and, as historian Sara Wermiel tells us, made “farsighted recommendations” leading to “an important advance in the field of life safety.”

So, PhillyHistory people, we ask ourselves: Do we remember and recognize any of this at the site today?

[Sources Include: Sara E. Wermiel, “No Exit: The Rise and Demise of the Outside Fire Escape,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Apr., 2003), pp. 258-284; “Report of Committee of the Franklin Institute on Fire-Escapes and Elevators,” The Journal of the Franklin Institute, (Philadelphia, 1881), pp. 408-414; and in The Philadelphia Inquirer:  “Another Horror. Fatal Result of a Mill Fire,” October 13, 1881; “A Holocaust. The Mill Fire Disaster,” October 14, 1881; “Around the Ruins,” October 14, 1881; “At the Hospitals. How the Wounded Are Faring,” October 14, 1881; The Man-Trap. More About the Mill Disaster,” October 15, 1881; “Last Week’s Horror. The Disaster and Its Results,” October 17, 1881.]