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How will they know? How will future generations of Philadelphians have any inkling that their city once thrived as a premier manufacturing center, the fine products issuing from its shops, mills, and plants prized by customers around the nation and the world?
There are few traces left of this history—abandoned factory buildings here and there—and the acres and acres of empty lots that form the landscape of decaying neighborhoods that once brimmed with industrial sites and jobs give no clues. The curious onlooker might ask: What was here? What happened? Delving into the past is to find that the decline of Philadelphia manufacture is directly related to its rise, flip sides in effect of the same coin: of the strengths and weaknesses of a particular kind of industrial system that graced the city, one that rested by and large on the production of quality goods.
A rich agricultural hinterland, an enterprising merchant community, and ready markets for the products processed and crafted in the city transformed Philadelphia into a major commercial entrepôt within a half century of its founding by William Penn in 1681. By the time that delegates convened in Philadelphia in 1776 to write the Declaration of Independence, the city had become second only to London in both the volume and value of the goods that entered and left its port. Philadelphia’s commercial fortunes plummeted, however, in the early nineteenth century as the city lost trade to its chief rival, New York. Rather than enter a long-term period of economic stagnation, Philadelphia fortunately embarked on a new direction that would mark its history for the next 150 years: prospering as a major manufacturing center.
Chronicling Philadelphia’s rise to industrial supremacy is difficult since no single invention, businessperson, event, or circumstance can be designated as a prime mover. Thousands of initiatives occurred as a steady mushrooming of varied enterprise. The individual efforts do add up to a whole, and at least four features characterized Philadelphia’s industrial structure in its heyday.
[caption id="attachment_2296" align="alignright" width="300" caption="During World War II, a Philadelphia worker gauges a ship propeller on a lathe at Baldwin Locomotive Works, which also produced tanks and locomotives for the war effort. (1942 photograph, Office of War Information, Library of Congress.)"]
[/caption]First is product diversity. Never a one or two-industry city, Philadelphia became known for its fine textiles and garments, boots and shoes, hats, iron and steel, metal items, machine tools and hardware, locomotives, saws, rugs, furniture, shipbuilding, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, glass, cutlery, jewelry, paints and varnishes, printing and publishing, medical instruments, and so much more.
Second is diversity of work settings. Goods were made in homes, craft shops, sweat shops, small manufactories with hand and foot-driven machinery, water and steamed-powered mills, and multidimensional plants. In their manufacture, some products even passed through several of these settings from initial processing of raw materials to final finishing.
Third is specialization in processes and products. Philadelphia manufacturers did not prosper by competing with mass producers of goods in other parts of the country, but rather by operating in niche markets fashioning high-quality wares or by concentrating in single aspects of production (in textiles, for example, separate establishments emerged respectively to spin special fibers, weave fine clothe and dye elaborate fabrics). Even in the case of Philadelphia’s famous (but relatively few) large firms, such as Baldwin Locomotive, Stetson Hat, and Midvale Steel, specialty production remained the hallmark. Baldwin rarely made two engines alike, meeting particular orders of rail carriers for locomotives with highly specific dimensions and powers; Stetson produced the finest of felt and straw hats and sold them in beautifully-made boxes with silk insides and adorned with the renowned Stetson logo; and Midvale produced a specialty grey steel and took orders for specialty castings and forgings (unlike its other Pennsylvania rivals, U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel).
Fourth is the prevalence of small-to-medium-sized, family-owned-and-managed manufacturing concerns that were reliant on highly skilled workforces. Large, corporate enterprises with armies of mass assembly workers did not form a part of Philadelphia’s economic skyline.
A number of factors contributed to Philadelphia’s particular industrial history. An abundance of skilled labor allowed for specialty production. The absence of a powerful river-way with waterfalls initially limited the building of large-scale, fully mechanized factories. Philadelphia custom producers further chose not to compete with manufacturers of cheap, standardized products in other cities; their small size afforded a flexibility that allowed them to shift into new product lines and profit in niche markets. Finally, Philadelphia’s elite tended to invest in banks, canal and railroad construction, and mining rather than in local industry; this created a capital scarcity for manufacture in the city, another limit on large-scale ventures, and a vacuum that enterprising native-born and immigrant skilled men could fill in establishing their relatively small custom manufactories.
Although the first use of the label “Workshop of the World” cannot be precisely determined, by the first decade of the twentieth century, the phrase was regularly attached to Philadelphia in journals and books and in the pronouncements of business and civic leaders. However, the success and prosperity that marked Philadelphia industry crested in the 1920s when declines occurred in textile and garment manufacture and in shipbuilding—although new production of radios and electrical appliances sustained employment. The Great Depression saw retrenchments everywhere as unemployment at its peak reached more than 40 percent of the city’s work force. Military orders during World War II then boosted production, but a massive enduring decline in industrial jobs occurred thereafter. At a postwar height in 1953, 359,000 Philadelphians were employed in manufacture, 45 percent of the city’s entire labor force; in our own times, the number of industrial jobs has dramatically fallen to below 30,000, 5 percent of the total. These figures reflect the greater deindustrialization of the United States, though the downward spiral for Philadelphia far exceeded the nation as a whole; since the early 1950s, overall manufacturing jobs have declined from a high of 19.4 million to 14 million, from 32 percent of all employment to 10 percent.
As Philadelphia’s industrial ascent had a particular cast, so did the descent. Philadelphia did not lose manufacturing jobs because national corporations purchased and liquidated the facilities of local firms to undo competition; nor because financiers breezily bought, broke up and sold firms to make paper profits; nor because of foreign competition and the flight of businesses to low-wage areas in the U.S. and abroad—as happened in other American cities and regions over the course of the twentieth century. Rather, Philadelphia’s manufactories closed their doors because of changes in consumerism. Synthetic fibers, for example, wiped out Philadelphia’s famed silk hosiery trade; parquet flooring and wall-to-wall shag carpeting decimated the city’s tapestry rug industry; men stopped wearing fine felt hats to the detriment of Stetson; and cheap hardware merchandized by Sears Roebuck and other mass distributors cut deeply into the sales of the magnificently crafted and durable saws of the Disston Saw Company.
Mass production and marketing systems promoting shifts in consumer preferences to inexpensive disposal products proved the death knell of Philadelphia industry as the city’s custom manufacturers—slow, unable or unwilling to react—failed to compete with standardized producers of goods elsewhere in the county and across the globe. The loss was great not just for the city and its citizens; greater awareness and respect for workmanship and quality was lost as well.
Walter Licht is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Getting Work: Philadelphia, 1840-1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).
Philadelphians snort at the idea that a building in Boston—Faneuil Hall, a marketplace and meeting place--should presume to be called “the cradle of liberty” just because James Otis gave a fiery anti-British speech there in 1761. How can that compare to a city where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States were drafted, debated, revised, and signed—both in a brief period of eleven years?
Pride of place, if we can be generous for a moment, can be shared. Mark Twain once called Switzerland the Cradle of Liberty because alpine-born democracy had roots there too. Indeed the world is full of cradles of liberty, and some are now being violently rocked by young people hooked into social media as the Arab Spring turns the Middle East upside down.
Yet, Philadelphia is a special cradle of liberty.
It not only was where the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention did their epic work. Indeed, a century and more before, it was the city imagined by the visionary William Penn as a place where people of all classes, cultures, and ancestral backgrounds would learn to live together. Penn and his Quaker followers were determined to establish a unique colony free of the violence, intolerance, and corruption that were widespread on both sides of the Atlantic. Just a generation before, Puritans in Massachusetts were hanging Quakers on the Boston Common, and only a few years before Penn arrived they were bent on eradicating Wampanoag people from the Bay Colony
Philadelphia—to be called the “city of brotherly love”—never entirely lived up to its visionary founding principles; but nowhere else in the hemisphere did colonizing Europeans display such substantial toleration for religious and ethnic differences and such peaceful relations with Native Americans. “I deplore two principles in religion,” Penn wrote memorably; “obedience upon authority without conviction and destroying them that differ with me for Christ’s sake.” Most European visitors were astounded at such words and at how they took hold.
For a while, Penn’s vision of “putting the power in the people” was realized in good measure. And then, nearly a century after Penn’s arrival, Philadelphia was the place where those stirring words that ricocheted around the world—“inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and “we the people”—were written and enshrined. For generations to come, a storm of strangers would cherish Philadelphia as the place where these founding documents were written and ratified.
But many of the strangers came unfree and involuntarily. From Africa, they would wait a long time before they saw Philadelphia as a cradle of liberty. But they insisted that liberty should be theirs as well and were not shy about invoking the principles espoused in the nation’s founding documents. “Search the legends of tyranny and find no precedent.” thundered James Forten, accomplished sailmaker, businessman, church leader, and philanthropist, in 1813. “It has been left for Pennsylvania to raise her ponderous arm against the liberties of the black, whose greatest boast has been that he resided in a state where civil liberty and sacred justice were administered alike to all.” Shaking the cradle of liberty, he warned, in his effort to ward off vicious laws restricting free black men and women, that “the story will fly from the north to the south, and the advocates of slavery, the traders in human blood, will smile contemptuously at the once boasted moderation and humanity of Pennsylvania.”
Two decades later, when “the cradle of liberty” motto was gaining currency, abolitionists in Boston and New York, seizing on the words from Leviticus inscribed on the brim of Philadelphia’s old State House bell, “Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof.” Rechristening the bell as “the Liberty Bell,” they shamed Philadelphia for lagging behind in the crusade to cleanse the nation of its deep-dyed sin of chattel bondage.
This put Philadelphia on the defensive, its cradle of liberty motto under attack. “Shame on you,” shouted one abolitionist pamphlet with the Liberty Bell on its cover. “Is it to be tyrants amid slaves that Americans, with liberty glowing on every page of their history, and the glorious Declaration of Independence upon their lips, have been found willing to degrade themselves?” Another charged: “Hitherto, the bell has not obeyed he inscription: and its peals have been a mockery, while one sixth of all inhabitants are in abject slavery.”
And with that, the bell tarnished, the cradle of liberty needed repairs. That came as Philadelphians of different political persuasions paraded their own brand of liberty—Protestant nativists who put the Liberty Bell on a pedestal, literally, in Independence Hall in 1855 while attacking Catholics; pro-labor advocates such as the wildly popular journalist George Lippard, who fought to protect blue collar liberty from exploitative capitalists; and black Philadelphians struggling for social justice and the right to vote. In a fast-growing, immigrant-filled city many wanted to claim part of the cradle.
In time, the city cemented its claim as the cradle of liberty. The millions who thronged to celebrate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence in1876 had plenty of encouragement in reaffirming that Penn’s green country town was the cradle of liberty. Ownership of the cradle was strengthened as surging crowds paraded down Broad Street for the centennial of the Constitutional Convention in 1887.
Then into the twentieth century people of all political persuasions came to Philadelphia to embrace the Liberty Bell as the preeminent talisman of freedom. Among them were women suffragists during the Great War for whom the “cradle of liberty” terminology was dishonestly used while women were denied the suffrage.
Similarly, when he was working to establish a National Freedom Day on which Americans could annually measure the distance between the nation’s glittering ideals and the somber realities on the ground, Richard R. Wright Sr., who had been born in slavery, knew just where to come. By laying a wreath in 1942 at the feet of the Liberty Bell, he furthered the notion of mending a splintered cradle of liberty. Civil rights activists repeated this ritual in the 1960s and 1970s by conducting sit-ins and demonstrations at Independence Hall
After World War II, leaders from newly independent countries—David Ben Gurion from Israel, Jomo Kenyetta from Kenya, a Ghanaian delegation, and many others—came not to New York or Boston but to Philadelphia, where they stood in Independence Hall and before the Liberty Bell to honor freedom’s birthplace that inspired their own quests for freedom. Cold War statesmen followed: Albert Tarchiani, the Italian ambassador to the U.S. in 1948; Ernst Reuter, mayor West Berlin, and Mohammed Mossedeq, premier of Iran, in 1951; Clement Atllee, prime minister of England in 1952; Nicholas Kallay and Mario Scelba, premiers of Hungary and Italy respectively in 1955.
The stream of international figures coming to pay their respects to Philadelphia as the cradle of liberty continues to the present day as they partake in the city’s historic role in building the nation. Yet the cradle still has cracks and blemishes. Perfecting it and keeping it in good repair requires an ongoing commitment to shoulder the responsibility of living up to the motto. This is the work of citizens, organizations, institutions, and politicians. Boasting about Philadelphia as the cradle of liberty is one thing; cradling liberty is another.
Gary B. Nash is Professor of History Emeritus at UCLA and the author of many books, including First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
What might you do if you found yourself with almost 50,000 square miles of seemingly virgin land in a place you have never seen, far from home? In 1681, when William Penn - entrepreneur, scholar, religious mystic, Enlightenment intellectual - acquired Pennsylvania, he had a ready answer.
Primed with forward-looking ideas about equality and shared community resources from Thomas More's Utopia, and inspired by the Quaker vision of George Fox and Thomas Loe, Penn was convinced that he could construct a "Holy Experiment" with a well-planned settlement and a rational government. He aimed for a social contract that would bind and respect all residents, based not on coercion but on the principle of "what love can do."
By the time he was 22, Penn understood coercion. He had been exiled from Oxford University for boycotting Anglican services and for taunting fellow students who acceded to Oxford's religious practices. Returning home, the young Penn - new to Quakerism - was beaten by his father, Admiral William Penn, who sent his son traveling in hopes that he would mature into a more reasonable adult.
But the admiral did not succeed in dampening his son's religious fervor. Instead, two stints in prison (as a result of unconventional behaviors stemming from his religious zeal) gave the young man time to read, and to contemplate, consolidate, and write down his Quaker ideas.
A man of his times, Penn saw his identity as a member of the British upper classes. He had servants, and he owned slaves. But Penn's religious faith led him to want to do good in the world.
[caption id="attachment_1729" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Located at the corner of 4th and Arch Streets in Philadelphia, the Arch Street Meeting House, completed in 1804, was built according to the Quaker principles of plainness and simplicity by master carpenter Owen Biddle. Courtesy of Partners for Sacred Places."]
[/caption]He wanted to put into practice his conviction that in an unsullied environment, "that of God in each person" would emerge triumphant. In No Cross, No Crown, written in prison, he had concluded that some suffering (the cross) was a necessary part of reward or salvation (the crown). No Cross, No Crown was also a play on words, suggesting that one aspect of an unsullied environment would be a principled refusal to knuckle under to the false authority of the established church or to the king.
But Quakers were accustomed to persecution for eschewing "worldly" conventions, and Penn had no illusions that it would be easy to create that perfect environment. Hence, in devising his New World utopia, Penn spent many months recruiting men of conscience to populate his new province. He also drafted a "Frame of Government" to provide the scaffolding for community, and secured approval from other Quakers who read the document.
A businessman as well as a man of deep religious faith, Penn also wanted a return on his investment. He dreamed of a "great towne" - a bustling commercial center that would command a place of respect in the Atlantic World. On the other hand, however, Penn wanted a bucolic "greene countrie towne" befitting an English country gentleman. So he hired surveyor Thomas Holme to lay out a grid to accomplish these contradictory goals. Parks would serve for neighborhood gathering places, and a central marketplace would help to cement a community and an economy based upon morality, integrity, and mutual compassion among citizens.
The "Frame of Government," based upon England's Magna Carta, also affirmed Enlightenment ideas of equal justice for all who would consent to live within the laws. From this premise flowed the idea of toleration and fair treatment for people of diverse religions and cultures - a principle that extended to offering contractual relationships for acquiring land from the local Indians.
But in these aspects also the wily businessman merged principle with expedience. At first he was leery that Catholics' allegiance to the pope might compromise their loyalty to local law. But he eventually concluded that religious persecution interfered with the smooth operation of commerce and property, and therefore Catholic residents should be allowed to pursue their religion and community life, as long as they abided by the civil laws.
Penn's colony early welcomed Jews, as well as Anglicans, Mennonites, and the Lutherans who established "old Swede's" Church by the end of the seventeenth century. That atmosphere of religious openness also paved the way for the world's first African American Christian denomination - the African Methodist Episcopal Church - and for myriad religious groups who reflected the city's continuing diversity.
Through three centuries of growth and change, Philadelphia has retained much of Penn's vision, and has returned repeatedly to his ideas of community and tolerance. Four of the five community parks remain in Center City as important markers of neighborhood unity. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the city government reaffirmed Penn's vision by purchasing country estates to create Fairmount Park - a resource used and valued by various residents.
Philadelphia is still known as a "City of Neighborhoods," but the tensions that were evident in its founding continue. The public city parks have often been sites of contention over who has the "rights" to define their use. And just as Penn was suspicious of Catholics, anxieties among diverse religions - Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and more recently Muslims - have peppered the city's political, geographic, and economic life, even as some residents continue to celebrate the traditions of diversity and tolerance.
Last year, after nearly a decade of negotiation among these diverse people, Philadelphians unveiled a memorial to the city's years as the nation's capital (1790-1800). This historic site, the President's House, takes a hard and honest look at the place of slavery in the development of the nation's early history. Nearby, a new National Museum of American Jewish History also opened its doors. These are but a few of countless examples of the enduring influence of the "Holy Experiment" that invite Philadelphia residents to turn "diversity" into "community.
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William Penn worked to build his province on two levels—with practical plans for land use and governance, and with prayer for Divine Guidance. His 1684 prayer for his “great towne” captures much of his mood:
"And Thou Philadelphia the virgin settlement of this province named before thou wert born, what care, what service, what travail have there been to bring thee forth and preserve thee from such as would abuse and defile thee. O that thou mayest be kept from the evil that would overwhelm thee, that faithful to the God of thy mercies in the life of righteousness, thou mayest be preserved to the end. My soul prays to God for thee that thou mayest stand in the day of trial, that thy children may be blest of the Lord and thy people saved by His power."
Emma Lapsansky-Werner is Professor of History Emeritus at Haverford College, where she was Curator of the Quaker Collection.
We are pleased to welcome the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Encyclopedia's Civic Advisory Board. Staff members from the Museum's Center for American Art participated in the Civic Partnership and Planning Workshop that launched the project, and we look forward to working with them next year on a public program to explore Philadelphia's reputation as "Athens of America."
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