Quaker City
Philadelphia : Holy Experiment. By Struthers Burt. (Rich and Cowan. 25s.)
AFTER visiting Philadelphia King Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, is said to have remarked : "I met a very large and interesting family named Scrapple and I discovered a rather delicious native food they call biddle." Notwithstanding this royally inaccurate reporting, the impression remains that the Prince of Wales had a good time in Philadelphia. As an Englishman he must have felt very much at home in a city where soccer, cricket and fox-hunting are known if not popular sports' where fashionable military companies parade in plumes and jack boots, debutantes curtsy low and men's clubs abound. The tempo is slower than in other American cities. The inhabitants tend to be content with solid, old and slightly shabby surroundings. They entertain at home, rather than in restaurants. "They are given to amused understatement and to enjoying jokes
. about themselves." Philadelphia, like Boston, enjoys a maturity of outlook as a result of its traditions and its pervading sense of past achievement.
For Philadelphia's past is greater than its present. Once the Quaker city was the capital of the United States, its first 'port, its chief banking centre, its most metropolitan city. But all this was over a century ago, and since that time other and more go-getting cities have overtaken it as centres of national power, leaving it in compensation a settled prosperity in which to cultivate he virtues of conservatism. An English bishop is said to have remarked that Philadelphia was one of the few Tory cities left in the world, Birmingham being the other. Philadelphia's most characteristic institution today is the Trust Company.
This is indeed a far cry from the "Holy Experiment" of William Penn's imagination and from the "green countrie towne " between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers which flourished as a colonial metropolis in the eighteenth century. The sense of dedication which pervaded the city in the early days of its Quaker domination has been inevitably diluted by later and more mundane influences. Yet the especially Quaker virtue of toleration which from the beginning had been such a feature of Penn's design, and which ensured that Phila- delphia should be the centre of America's eighteenth-century Enlightenment, can be traced through most of the city's history, and remains an essential part of its temperament.
This must be assumed to be the main idea behind Mr. Struthers Burt's book, Philadelphia : Holy Experiment. The author' who is a novelist by trade, has concerned himself mainly with the earlier periods of the city's existence together with some account of the present day. He has taken pains to disclaim any pretensions to being a historian. But it is not possible with such a subject to abdicate completely from this function, and the book suffers from the lack of a consistent aim and of a mature historical perspective. It contains a great deal of information and anecdote, much of it of more than local and antiquarian interest : for instance, the account of the Library Company; of the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 ; of the early ironmasters of Pennsylvania ; of the port of Philadelphia ; the sketch of Stephen Girard, banker' the discussion of machine politics in modern Philadelphia. But the material is put together in such a scrappy way that one is left with a confused picture of the city's growth. As a novelist Mr. Burt appears to be most at home in describing the characteristics of his fellow-citizens, and some of the best chapters of the book are those dealing with the lighter side of contemporary Philadelphia life.
Philadelphia has suffered in a literary way from its slow drift away from the main stream of American enterprise. John B. McMaster called attention to the fact that American history is written by New Englanders and there is always a tendency to under-stress the part played by the middle states. A new book on Philadelphia is particularly welcome for the general English reader who, if be has visited the United States in recent years, is more than likely to have been carried urgently past the city on a New York-Washington train. The present volume fills a gap. It is disappointing that more has not been made of the opportunity to write a popular history of the city of more lasting value.
The illustrations are below the high standard set by many recent American books on topographical subjects such as the guides of the
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