The firsts did not begin with Ben Franklin.  Philadelphia was a vision before it was a city, and its grandest innovations were in place before Franklin was even born.  The ideas that revolutionized the West, religious freedom and political democracy, were proclaimed by William Penn and put into practice by the first sturdy settlers of his colony.

Franklin did do mighty work.  But he never did it alone, and the work went on after he left the city and even after he died.  Together, in the years before 1800, Philadelphians organized almost all the essential institutions of the modern America that emerged in the nineteenth century.  They created the country’s first banks, first insurance companies, and first stock exchange.  The first daily newspaper, the first magazine, the first political cartoon, and the first public library.  The first patent and the first trade show.  The first turnpike and the first steamboat.  The first non-sectarian college and the first university, and the first night school.  The first hospital, the first medical school, and, maybe more tellingly, the first asylum for the insane.  The first law firm and the first formal teaching of the law.  The first labor organization and the first strike.  The first protest against slavery, the first anti-slavery society, and the first independent African American church.  The Army, the Navy, and the Marines, and for that matter the nation itself, and its first flag besides.

The pace of invention scarcely slowed after 1800.  In the nineteenth century, Philadelphia claimed America’s first automobile, electric car, advertising agency, collegiate school of business, museums of science and of art, telephone, photograph, professional schools for women, books and magazines for the blind, municipal waterworks, Newman Club, rabbinic college, religious newspaper, YMCA, and more.  In the twentieth century, it had the country’s first radio license, television station, modern skyscraper, airmail delivery, scientific management, black-owned-and-operated shopping center, computer, and more.

And the city birthed not only those great engines of progress but also inventions of delight: the nation’s first circus, balloon flight, merry-go-round, ice cream, soda  (and then, inevitably, ice cream soda), pencil with eraser, Girl Scout cookie, western novel, bubble gum, zoo, movie, revolving door, Slinky, uniforms with numbers to identify players, and more.

Still, the census did announce that New York surpassed Philadelphia in population in 1800, and Washington did displace Philadelphia as the national capital at the same time.  Later commentators have speculated with numbing regularity that Philadelphians developed an incorrigible inferiority complex after those losses and that the sense of inferiority came naturally to a city of Quakers.

But those speculations are rubbish.  Philadelphia was never a city of Quakers – by 1800, Friends were less than a tenth of its population – and Quakers were never so modest.   In William Penn’s portrait, he wore a gleaming suit of armor.  He turned to Quakerism to temper his pride and try to turn it to love.  And the non-Quaker majority was never modest either.  Ben Franklin expected that Philadelphia would become the capital of the British Empire and that king and Parliament would in time relocate from the Thames to the Delaware. 

When the 1800 census counted more people in New York than in Philadelphia, arrogant Philadelphians simply refused to credit the count.  Even in 1810, when the next tally found New York’s advantage increasing, Philadelphians still maintained that their city was larger.  By 1820, they did finally concede that New York might have more inhabitants, but they insisted that Philadelphia excelled its upstart rival in law, medicine, science, art, architecture, and every other amenity of cosmopolitan culture.

Philadelphians did eventually grow discouraged competing with the emerging colossus to the north.  After decades, even generations, of primacy, they did ultimately reconcile themselves to second place in the American urban pecking order.  And when they did – when they gave up measuring themselves against New York – they launched on their most distinctive and most marvelous innovation of all.

Others cities followed New York, and in boosting and boasting they still do.  Long before the nineteenth century was out, Philadelphia ceased to be an American city in that sense.  It gave up braggadocio as a way of life.  

It did, to be sure, mount the Centennial of 1876.  It did send the Liberty Bell on promotional tours of the nation for decades.  But it did so in its own chastened way.  As observers as different as Henry James and Lincoln Steffens said, it became a city peculiarly contented with itself.   It did not imbibe modesty from its Quaker founders, but it did not imbibe the American disease of belief in divine blessing from them either.  Quaker egalitarianism precluded  such a sense of chosenness.  Quakers considered themselves merely a people among peoples.  They lived well, but they did not trumpet that they lived better than anyone else.

In the nineteenth century, in New York, the Four Hundred  made fabulous fortunes while the Four Million scrambled to escape the city’s tenements and slums.  In Philadelphia, the American Dream that Franklin first formulated actually touched the masses.  As one observer put it, in 1877, the city “exceeded in comfort within the reach of the poorest classes any other city in the world.”  At a time when barely a fifth of New Yorkers did, most Philadelphia families owned their own homes.   The city’s people were skilled workers who made good wages, not de-skilled employees whose labor made their bosses rich.  In significant numbers, they even had vacation homes in the mountains or down the shore, a full generation or two before unions and the New Deal brought such benefits to workers elsewhere.

When Philadelphia ceased to be the first city, it took to itself the title of city of firsts.  The title was at once a harmless expression of pride and a profound expression of identity.  It signified a place that could look backward and appreciate its past as New York never did.  A city civilized in an un-American way.  A city urbane as well as urban.  A city of well-being as well as wealth.   A city that could be an object of affection as well as an arena of ambition.  Perhaps, as Penn hoped, a city of love.  Certainly, a city to love.

• “City of Firsts” – Thursday, January 19, 6:30-8 p.m., at the Franklin Institute.
• “Philadelphia, the Place That Loves You Back” – Wednesday, February 22, 6:30-8 p.m., at the Independence Visitor Center.
• “City of Neighborhoods, City of Homes” – Wednesday, March 28, 6:30-8 p.m., at the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent.

For information on all programs and to register in advance, please visit http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/events.
We look forward to your participation in this unprecedented exploration of Philadelphia’s history and experience.

Industry boomed to meet the demands of the war, and citizens were asked to do their part by conserving resources. (Works Progress Administration Poster Collection, Library of Congress)

The war had sometimes contradictory effects. For example, defense needs created more unity in the region than had existed since the early twentieth century.  People mobilizing for a war against Nazism in Europe and against Japanese expansion in Asia shared a common purpose, and they were further united by the effects of federal regulations governing work, consumption, and even entertainment. But the war also created social upheavals and it reduced local autonomy. Philadelphia’s Republican government, which had resisted President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, now found that Washington controlled almost all aspects of city and regional affairs. For example, the federal government treated the area as a single entity for air patrols and air raid drills, and the air command for the whole region was located in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Because of a labor shortage, the War Manpower Commission controlled the allotment of workers to industries in the whole metropolitan area. Other federal agencies with headquarters in Philadelphia managed many aspects of economic and social life in the region. The Office of Price Administration determined retail prices for most consumer products and allotted gasoline and heating oil for individual use. 

When the war broke out in Europe, Philadelphia, like the rest of the United States, had high unemployment and many empty factories caused by the Great Depression. After France fell to German armies in June 1940, the Roosevelt administration began a rearmament program that immediately boosted the city’s economy. By the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Philadelphia industry had revived enough to mask a long-term trend of industrial decline.

Most immediately, the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, which had been in existence since 1801, benefited from the president’s commitment to building up the Navy. In 1940 and 1941 the Naval Yard also engaged in a clandestine reconstruction of British and other Allied ships damaged by enemy attacks in the Atlantic. The shipyard grew from a few thousand workers in 1939 to 58,000 workers at its peak. The yard even had a naval air field where workers produced aircraft and participated in the development of the first atomic bomb.  The Naval Yard’s rebirth benefited suppliers in the metropolitan area, and their work was supplemented by a number of shipyards on the Delaware River including the Cramp Yard in Kensington, the New York Shipbuilding Yard in Camden, and the Sun Shipyard in Chester. In 1944, these shipyards employed more than 150,000 workers and were the largest employers in the metropolitan area. The ships built on the Delaware River were the area’s most important contribution to the war effort.

Because Philadelphia and its suburbs had played such a prominent role supplying munitions in World War I, Washington turned to many of the same facilities for the new conflict.  The Frankford Arsenal, which dated from the early 1800s, hired 20,000 workers to manufacture small arms, ammunition, and optical devices.  It also engaged in munitions research. Local clothing manufacturers met the needs of the Army Supply Depot, and government turned to other Philadelphia industries to produce tanks, railroad equipment, and heavy weapons. The Baldwin Locomotive Company produced railroad equipment for the Allies and retooled some of its plants to make tanks. The Budd Company in Northeast Philadelphia, which in peace time produced bodies for automobiles, turned out armored cars, tanks, and other equipment.  Midvale Steel in Nicetown made armor for the Navy yards. The Radio Corporation of America in Camden, one of the area’s most important electronic companies, produced radios, radar, and other electronic and communications equipment needed by the military. 

At the Quartermaster Depot in Philadelphia in 1942, a woman stitches sleeves on an army overcoat. (Office of War Information Photograph, Library of Congress)

Roughly 350,000 Philadelphians engaged in defense work, and many thousands more worked in other parts of the region. Camden in New Jersey and Chester, Montgomery, and Bucks Counties in Pennsylvania had large defense contractors. Almost every able-bodied adult who wanted to work found a job, but racial, gender, and ethnic divisions affected when and where individuals found employment and their pay levels. African Americans, who had the highest rate of unemployment during the Depression, found opportunities especially after President Roosevelt issued an executive order prohibiting discrimination in defense hiring. The reluctance of employers to hire African Americans was reinforced by the opposition of labor unions. By the middle of 1943 the actions of the local office of the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) forced some of the largest defense contractors to reverse their policies. Since the jurisdiction of the FEPC extended over all of Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey, the largest defense contractors in the suburbs began hiring blacks. American Telephone and Telegraph, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Radio Corporation of America revised their hiring practices.

Discrimination remained entrenched at the Philadelphia Transit Company (PTC), which ran the buses, trolleys, and subways.  Despite repeated pressures from the federal government and local civil rights groups, the company and its union refused to allow blacks to work as drivers. In August 1944, when PTC finally hired seven African American drivers, the union called a strike that tied up the city for a week.  President Roosevelt sent in the military to run the transportation services so workers could get to defense jobs, and the government threatened to revoke union members’ draft exemption unless they ended the strike, which led to them returning to their jobs. Before the strike’s conclusion, many Philadelphians feared a race riot similar to the violence that had occurred in Detroit the previous year. But quick action by the NAACP and white civil rights groups, with the cooperation of the newspapers, prevented such an action.  Foreshadowing civil rights efforts that would continue after the war, black activism succeeded in pressuring government to end discrimination across the country, actions that were made possible because the nation needed African Americans’ labor and support. To challenge discrimination, black organizations worked with white civil rights groups to stage street marches and a newspaper campaign fostering the “Double V,” victory over the Axis abroad and victory over racism at home.

Employment discrimination was only one of many humiliations African Americans suffered during the war.  Like other cities, Philadelphia faced an acute housing shortage because of the influx of people looking for work.  This affected working-class areas especially as multiple families crowded into small houses, but African Americans lived in the most dilapidated houses of all, often without indoor plumbing.

Throughout the war, as more women entered the workplace, controversy raged over the “proper” place for women and the war’s effects on gender roles. For cultural, ethnic, and social reasons, many Philadelphians worried that letting women work in war plants would threaten the social structure. Several religious organizations charged that working mothers endangered their children. The conservative Republican city government echoed such concerns by refusing to create public day-care centers until near the end of the war. But the shortage of workers ultimately led the War Manpower Commission to recruit women for factories.  By 1945, 35 percent of Philadelphia’s women worked outside of the home. Most continued to fill jobs traditionally held by women, but many worked as welders, mechanics, and chemists in ship yards, in the Frankford Arsenal, and at the Pennsylvania Railroad.  Before the PTC agreed to hire African Americans as drivers, the company had employed a number of women in that position. 

In a more traditional role, women volunteered to keep Philadelphia’s charities going.  The United Service Organizations (USO), which entertained military men in Philadelphia in such centers as the Stage Door Canteen in the basement of the Academy of Music and an open dance floor near City Hall, employed thousands of young women.  The USO reached out as well to numerous regional military bases and hospitals, including Fort Dix and the McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey and military hospitals in suburban Philadelphia. Women were active in bond drives and in raising money for social organizations through the United War Fund.  In so many ways, women’s involvement in the war gave them their own money to spend, new responsibilities, and new confidence – all of which broadened their social, economic, and political expectations. At war’s end, most women lost or gave up their jobs to returning servicemen and many women settled into family life, sometimes with the benefits of the GI Bill and other federal programs that opened up developing suburbs. Despite a loss of influence that came when women were no longer “needed” in the workplace, their wartime experience laid the grounds for their demands for equal rights in subsequent years.

Although federal propaganda agencies emphasized unity as a necessity for victory, that unity was often missing in Philadelphia. Besides African Americans, other groups experienced discrimination during the war. During the Depression era, Jews often suffered job discrimination and even physical attacks.  These attacks increased from 1939 until 1941 during the debate in Philadelphia over whether the United States should remain neutral or provide aid to England and other Allied nations.  Opponents of aid charged that the Jews were trying to get the United States involved in another European war.  As the debate heated up, Jewish stores were often vandalized, Jewish children often were attacked coming home from school, and there was an arson attack on the home of a West Philadelphia rabbi. Even after Pearl Harbor, Jews continued to face discrimination from groups spreading anti-Semitic literature and practicing job discrimination. Despite service to the war effort on many fronts, Jews continued to face discrimination for years afterwards.

Although no massive relocation occurred on the East Coast to match the forced removal of Japanese from California, Congress classified recent immigrants from Germany and Italy who had not taken out citizenship papers as enemy aliens.  The FBI searched their homes and confiscated radios, telescopes, and other instruments regarded as potentially dangerous.  Several hundred enemy aliens were held for a time in a facility in southern New Jersey. Enemy aliens were not allowed to work in a defense facilities, which limited their employment opportunities.  Despite such restrictions, labor shortages resulted in an unusual occurrence in Cumberland County, New Jersey, as 2,500 Japanese Americans from internment camps in the West were allowed to settle in 1944 to work on the Seabrook Farms and frozen foods factory.  Some of them stayed after the war and formed a nucleus of Japanese presence in the region.

Labor strife proved to be another area in which federal efforts to maintain unity often failed.  Although nationally unions had agreed to a no-strike agreement, Philadelphia gained a reputation for strikes. During the Depression strikes in textiles and metal manufacturing were common and usually violent. This pattern continued through the war and affected private shipyards, steel mills, and aircraft factories.  City workers also went on strike for higher wages.  With the support of the War Labor Board, most disputes were settled by arbitration. Attempting to prevent inflation, the War Manpower Commission instituted a wage stabilization program capping wages at 1942 levels. Nevertheless, with full employment and with the average laborer working 48 hours or more a week, Philadelphia workers enjoyed a prosperity that was in sharp contrast to the Depression.  To circumvent government wage guidelines, unions often secured fringe benefits such as paid vacations and health benefits which lasted after the war.

With all kinds of government controls and interference in Philadelphia’s affairs, the autonomy so valued by Mayor Bernard Samuel and the city’s Republican leadership largely disappeared. Decisions made by military commanders stationed in the city largely overturned local authorities. Because of the housing shortage and the refusal of the city government to build public housing, the commandant of the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard ordered the construction of the Tasker Homes in South Philadelphia near the base. By the end of the war, the city reluctantly agreed to build several public housing projects. The same disagreements occurred over civil defense. At first the city government was reluctant to play a role in civil defense, but right before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor it established a Defense Council headed by Mayor Samuel.  Particularly in the first two years of the war, the city was on high alert in expectation of an attack from the air. Periodically air raid drills tied up the city as air raid wardens cleared cars and pedestrians from the streets. A general blackout kept homes, stores, and businesses from displaying lights at night.

By early 1945 some of the industries with the highest employment began to lay off workers as the federal government prepared for the end of the war.  The shipyards were the first to face retrenchment. The Philadelphia Naval Shipyard reduced its workforce to almost pre-war levels. The Sun Shipyard closed much of its facility and threw thousands of African Americans out of work.  When the war ended in August 1945, almost every defense contractor laid off workers. The city never recovered. Many companies, such as Baldwin Locomotive and Budd, survived for a few years but lost out to competitors or in the case of Baldwin to changes in transportation that cut demand for railroad locomotives. The textile industry also collapsed.  There were a number of reasons for this failure. During the war the federal government had decentralized its purchases of cloth for uniforms by building factories in the South, where labor costs were lower. While hurting the city, decentralization benefited some of the Philadelphia region’s suburbs, where the War Production Board created new facilities in order to achieve maximum production.  For companies seeking factories after the war, this meant a better supply of more efficient facilities in the suburbs than in the city. After World War II Philadelphia’s reputation for labor strife also worked against it.  Philadelphia’s dominance in shipbuilding also disappeared.  By the time the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard closed in the 1990s all the other major shipyards in the Delaware Valley had shut down. Only one private shipyard survived in the early twenty-first century.   

The city of Philadelphia reached its population peak in 1945, but with fewer industrial jobs, its population declined.  Regionally, many new jobs were in suburban defense industries such as the Navy’s research center at Willow Grove or the Lockheed-Martin Manufacturing Company in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, or in the RCA facilities in suburban New Jersey. In the 1950 census Philadelphia had 2,071,605 people as a consequence of the war. By the 2000 census the population had declined to 1,517,550, a reduction of about 34 percent in 50 years. Although the 2010 census recorded a slight increase to 1,526,000, the longer-term loss in population made Philadelphia a smaller part of the nine-county metropolitan area surrounding it in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  The city’s share of the population dropped from 60 percent in 1950 to less than 30 percent in 2000. In some ways the suburbs came to look upon the city as their poorer cousin, while the counties outside Philadelphia provided the dynamic economic growth for the region to remain viable.

Although World War II war caused many dislocations and cost the lives of 3,500 servicemen from the city and 1,500 dead from the Pennsylvania counties adjoining Philadelphia, many people look back on this era as a “golden age.”  They remember the city’s prosperity, the high wages, and the opportunities the war provided.  They remember wartime unity, however illusory, as a marked contrast to the racial and labor conflicts that followed.

Steffens’ reports helped launch a period of investigative reporting that President Theodore Roosevelt labeled “muckraking” in a moment of pique, but the phenomenon was otherwise quite compatible with his own reform orientation. Muckraking faded with the reform era itself, but the impression never fully disappeared that Philadelphia deserved the label Steffens had given it.  Several months ago Inquirer columnist Karen Heller invoked Steffens in connection with reports of political pressure to direct $50 million to a favored candidate to operate a charter school. Can so little have changed?  Is Philadelphia still corrupt and still contented?

Steffens was in the business of selling magazines, and no doubt he heightened his account for effect. There’s no evidence, really, for the story he recounted of a “party of boodlers” divvying up their graft in unison with the ancient chime of Independence Hall. His account of  misfeasance was well enough documented to leave a lasting effect, however. Despite a number of good government efforts, some of which continue today, including the Committee of Seventy dating to 1904, the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, which started as the Bureau of Municipal Research, and the Fels Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, the suspicion lingers that the public remains all too acquiescent in a political system riddled with conflicts of interest and hidden from adequate public scrutiny.

The system Steffens described had its roots in the nineteenth century. Some blamed election day improprieties and the exchange of political favors on the bad effect of masses of newcomers to the city, many of them immigrants with little experience with democratic practice. Anti-immigration sentiment reached a peak with the mid-century rise of a nativist movement, which attempted to extend the waiting period for citizenship to 21 years for the foreign born and to discipline immigrant workers through the prohibition of alcohol. The year this movement reached its peak, in 1854 with the election of a nativist mayor, the city consolidated with the county, and a very different political dynamic ensued.

An expanded city needed a variety of public services. The provision of new streets, gas and water mains, and public transportation all generated opportunities for money to change hands. As permits were issued, as charters were granted, as the number of city workers expanded to 15,000 by the time Steffens wrote, the lines between public power and private profit converged.  Something had to hold this fragmented system together, and taking a cut—“honest graft’ as Tammany Hall’s George Washington Plunkitt famously labeled the practice—seemed to be part of the necessary price. But that price could be exorbitant too. The traction magnates William L. Elkins and Peter A.B. Widener consolidated so much money and power for themselves, they formed the model for Theodore Dreiser’s own muckraking trilogy, beginning with The Financier in 1912.

Scaffolding rising around City Hall, shown under construction in 1881, indicated the scale of opportunity available in the political system that Lincoln Steffens labeled "the most corrupt and the most contented." (PhillyHistory.org)

One  monument to the system not matched in any other city Steffens examined was Philadelphia City Hall. Covering fully four acres at the heart of the city where William Penn had laid out four squares to form a central park, the massive structure took thirty years to build and cost $24 million, fully $14 million in overruns. Politicians shepherding the project extracted a host of benefits for themselves, all the time keeping thousands of city workers employed.      

The political machine Steffens described had only recently consolidated, following a reform effort that culminated in passage of a new city charter in 1887. What he described was the aftermath of such efforts, when the “morning glory” reformers, as their critics liked to call them, retired from public life to take up their private pursuits once again.  Given even greater power under the new rules, partisan politicians again emerged triumphant, supported by continued growth in patronage positions that reached 23,000 in the 1920s, second only to New York City. 

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal failed to unseat the city’s Republican political machine, but spurred by many of the reforms instituted at the national level in the 1930s, Joseph Clark, together with Richardson Dilworth, brought the Republican reign to an end with their elections as mayor and district attorney respectively in 1951.  Not incidentally, their election coincided with passage of a home rule charter, which instituted a professional managing director for the city and required civil service exams for many jobs that had been previously doled out as political patronage.  

It might be too much to accept Karen Heller’s implication that the Clark-Dilworth years represented only a short hiatus between 85 years of entrenched and calcified Republican rule and 60 years of entrenched and calcified Democratic rule. Whatever good intentions or formal mechanisms were instituted in the 1950s, however, they clearly did not prevent the practice we routinely describe as pay-to-play from infecting public governance, not just in Philadelphia but throughout the region. The central features of the ward system Steffens described in 1903 remain in place today in the city, and in the suburbs service contracts can be repaid quite legally in the form of political contributions to the party controlling the bidding.  Occasionally a politician will step far enough over the line to be punished under the law. Vincent Fumo and Wayne Bryant come most readily to mind. For the most part, the system prevails in forms that would be still recognizable to earlier generations.

It was Steffens’ belief that his reports would arouse public opinion sufficiently that it would ultimately cleanse the system.  That tradition continues with investigative journalism and widespread use of the Internet to expose corruption. It’s just possible that the Tea Party and Occupy Philadelphia each manifest signs of an awakened electorate. Like Steffens, however, we should not be blind to the obstacles to reform. Transparency and accountability need mechanisms for their sustainability. It won’t be enough to reign in political excesses like DROP (Deferred Retirement Option Program) or to assure that only verified voters cast their ballots.  If this is to be yet another Progressive era, voters need to pressure both political parties to make far more effective use of public revenues, even while acknowledging how important those investments are to the modern metropolis.

For those who are attending Wednesday, we are pleased to let you know of a couple of added features for the event.  First, light refreshments will be available prior to the program, so feel free to arrive anytime after 6 p.m. and enjoy some food and informal conversation prior to the program.  Also, we will conclude the evening with the short film about Tacony, “Bridging Yesterday with Tomorrow,” which was produced as part of Scribe Video Center’s Precious Places Community History Project.  Looking forward to another informative, enlightening, and enjoyable discussion of Philadelphia’s history and experience!

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.

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.)

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.