A Few Deft Touches for Back Streets

And Suddenly People Want to Walk There

So what do you do with a blind brick wall? Paint a few doors and windows, or maybe just rectangles. And call it art. Because it is.

The scene above is on South Hicks Street, the location of my new favorite coffee shop, called Suprema (actually the entrance to Suprema is on Pine). Somewhere behind that wall are two small theaters, tucked into the old ballroom of the Drake apartment building, which fronts on Spruce and runs quite a distance down South Hicks. (I found this information online.)

So if you're thinking that the facade treatment above looks like a stage set, I'm thinking you wouldn't be wrong.

Not too hard to do, really. Once you have the idea. 

I've been writing about Philadelphia's alleys and small streets for a number of years, and I'm pleased to say that more and more people seem to be getting ideas. They don't have to be big ideas. Here's a provisional reworking of a small passageway on 16th Street, between Spruce and Locust, last summer.

The decor went away in the winter, but the passageway seems to be making a comeback now that the warm weather is here again.

And here's a temporary installation, also on 16th just north of Spruce. Call it eye candy, but it works. The alley is no longer invisible. It is a place.

I think one of our little streets with the greatest potential is Moravian, just north of Walnut. One of the reasons I like Moravian is that its current situation varies block by block, from depressing to catastrophic. Here's a shot at 17th Street.

This is a little unfair, because of the digging in the road, but I've taken too many pictures of long rows of greasy dumpsters, and I need something to motivate me to take a picture. So forgive me.

The upshot of upgrading is that you make the space more useful. Here's an alley behind the Atlantic building, in the 1400 block of Spruce. This space was a mess that you may not remember, because it was usually closed off with a sagging chain-link gate backed by some opaque plastic tarpaulins. 

Now, as you can see, it's open, it looks nice, and there are some parking spots and an entrance to the building that can be used by residents as well as staff.

Look at this side entrance to the Bellevue. Somebody decided to care. And it shows.

The easiest little streets to spruce up are the residential blocks. These streets provide access to the homes, but generally have very little through traffic. Other blocks are everybody's rear door. They're basically places to stow cars and stash trash, and they look it.

And many of them are a lot cleaner than they used to be. But still they tend to be colorless, and lacking in a sense of cohesion.

I wish someone would care a bit more about the 1400 block of Moravian. It's just west of Broad; on the north side lies the Union League, and on the south side are a number of very nice older buildings, including Drexel and Company on 15th and, in the mid-block, one of the former homes of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. (I've written about this block before; to see the story, click here.)

This block used to be a filthy mess. It's now much cleaner and neater than it used to be, but I think the people looking after things here should not rest on their laurels. Take this street to the next level. Put the dumpsters inside, and move the sheriff's-office parking to one of the many, many large garages in the area. A few of the facades on the south side of the street need some restoration. And then you can go for a pedestrian-priority street with outdoor dining.

Here's a taste of the payoff. This slice of the Union League is tucked away in the mid-block, waiting for its audience to show up and have a cappuccino.

See also Small Streets Are Like Diamonds, Streets Without Joy, City Beautiful Sprouts on Cypress Street, What We Lost, Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets?

What Does a Clean Street Look Like?

And How About a Metric for Trash Collection?

Leaving a rally a few weeks after the Parkland massacre, Society Hill, 2018.

I've been doing some thinking about trash. It's actually a pretty boring subject. Almost as boring as parking, and the subject lacks a Donald Shoup, the man who revolutionized thinking about parking. Not that there haven't been important innovations in the past few decades - recycling, and designing products for their full life cycle come to mind. The concept of minimizing the amount of trash from inception through final disposal is very useful. There's even a mantra for these ideas - reduce, reuse, recycle.

In addition to the 3 Rs, deep thinkers have come up with the 7 Rs - Rethink, Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle, and Rot. This last being a nod to composting. The only problem with the 7 Rs, from my point of view, is that I am never able to remember them all. 

But I'm looking at a slightly different problem - how we collect and remove trash in a way that gives us clean streets. 

Normally, when I think of street trash, I see two things: First, household and commercial trash that is placed out for collection, a portion of which always seems to wind up on the street and not in the truck. Second is trash dropped by street users - dog walkers, cigarette smokers, people who are eating a candy bar, someone who has finished reading the newspaper, a motorist discarding a banana peel - who decide not to use a trash can.

I'd like to expand that definition of trash to a definition that includes fallen leaves and what I call road schmutz. So, street trash, leaves, and road schmutz.

Three Issues

Let's start with leaves. I clearly remember a brisk autumn day, decades ago, when my young daughter and I were returning home. As we turned the corner onto our block we saw, stretching into the distance, a series of large, neat piles of fallen leaves. They had undoubtedly been made by the street sweeper, a City of Philadelphia employee who appeared on the block from time to time, with a broom and a barrel on wheels, and swept the sidewalk. As we approached the first pile, Alicia couldn't resist, and she jumped into it feet first. Just then I saw the street sweeper, who had been standing back by a stoop. The look on his face turned from shock to benign amusement when he figured out that my daughter was too small to scatter the pile of leaves very much. 

Yes, the City used to sweep sidewalks, and even pick up leaves. One day I noticed that our guy hadn't been around for a while, and later on I figured out he wasn't coming back. I was helped along on this path by attending a meeting where Rina Cutler, who was in charge of streets and other things at the time, told us that the street sweepers had gone away and weren't coming back.

And so now it's up to us, the residents, to sweep the leaves each fall and bag them appropriately and set them out at the right time for collection.

Second, let's do road schmutz. This is the grimy particulate matter that quietly darkens your sidewalk. It also shows up on your window sills, and happily gathers in abundance in the gutter, nestling up to the curbstone. My understanding is that this material is mostly hydrocarbon particulates coming out of the tailpipes of passing motor vehicles. 

We all seem to be remarkably accepting of it, but it definitely alters the appearance of our streets, much as the smoke from a fireplace can alter the appearance of a Rembrandt painting that hangs above the mantle. Hues are darkened and subdued, and images lose their original clarity.

I haven't hosed down the sidewalk in front of our house for quite a while, but I know that if I did that, the sidewalk would be a much lighter, brighter color. 

Are the effects of grime a big deal? Well, people who restore old Frank Furness buildings seem to think so. Cleaning the facade of the Furness Library out at Penn revealed a building that is a startling, vivid shade of red. Who knew?

Finally, to the stuff we all think of as trash. I confess I live in a charmed world, just a few blocks from Rittenhouse Square. The local civic group, the Center City Residents' Association, partners with the Center City District, which primarily looks after the central business district, to have its street cleaners come along on trash day, after the City trash collection trucks have been through, and pick up the stuff that didn't quite make it into the truck. This makes a huge difference in the amount of trash hanging around on my block and many others. 

Other neighborhoods are not so fortunate. The City publishes a litter index, which color codes neighborhoods on a map, using red for very trashy, followed by the progressively less dire colors of orange, yellow, and green. Most of Center City is green, with a few areas of light yellow. Large parts of the city are red, particularly in the north, south, and west. The far northeast and northwest look very green. 

How Clean Is Clean? And, Do We Care?

Cleanliness is actually a controversial topic in Philadelphia. There are competing priorities. 

There is, for instance, strong resistance to bringing back alternate side of the street parking, which requires parked cars to clear one side of a street to allow for street sweeping to clear the gutter. Many people just hate this idea, and they have effectively blocked it for years. Before the pandemic hit, there were some actual signs of movement. We'll see what happens. (For a pre-pandemic story, click here.)

What lies under the parked cars. Wash West, 2021.

And then there's the Italian Market, where two recent efforts to organize a business improvement district have created almost a textbook case of misgovernment. Certain people don't want things to change, and they have the power to enforce their will. It's quite similar to what is going on in the U.S. Senate today. (I'm not going to get into the weeds here, but if you'd like to see some stories, click here and here and here and here and here.)

Finally I suppose there are some who may question whether a focus on cleaning streets is essentially a distraction from more important issues, like saving the planet. Well, I think substituting electric cars for cars that burn gasoline would be good for the planet; it would also reduce pediatric asthma; and it would result in visibly cleaner streets. So maybe spending time on clean streets adds a new battalion to the army fighting against global warming and poisonous air.

Two Strategies

It seems to me that the City is pursuing two basic strategies as it seeks to grapple with the issue of clean streets. The first strategy is to increase capital invested per worker; the second strategy is to push work onto the customer.

1. The idea that capital spending can increase worker productivity is an old one. After all, a carpenter can surely do more work with power tools than with hand tools. This isn't the only way to increase productivity, but it has been reliably effective.

2. An early example of pushing work onto the customer came when grocers decided they were tired of pulling cans of beans off the shelf, and told the customers to do the picking themselves. And of course self-service could be sold as empowering the consumer. I personally think this is a weak argument, but it has been remarkably effective over the years, allowing grocers to sell more beans with fewer workers.

At the Streets Department, both of these strategies appear to assume that the basic issue is a manpower shortage caused by budget constraints. As I started working on this story, I was inclined to agree with this analysis. After all, I've been watching the workers disappear for decades. And of course I read the newspaper stories about the City's budget difficulties.

Looking for a Metric

But can we prove that the problem is not enough workers? This thought led me down a rabbit hole. I had a look at the City's 2021 budget. (I looked at the 2019 actuals, to steer clear of the pandemic. When the 2022 budget came out, I checked, and the numbers are consistent, when you allow for the pandemic.) 

In the budget there's a metric for total tonnage hauled, but that number by itself doesn't tell you very much. You need to know how many workers are hauling those tons. I looked for the workers who actually throw the trash and drive the trucks and found some numbers. I think I got them all, but I'm not sure.

Then I went looking for another city to benchmark against. A lot of cities are very close-mouthed about how many people work in their sanitation departments. New York, of course, loves to talk about numbers, and so I used it as my test case. 

Just for fun I started by looking at workers per square mile; then I compared workers to the city's total population. And I looked at workers per street mile. 

-The number of square miles in New York City is only about twice the number in Philadelphia, so it's not surprising that, with its larger workforce, it has about five times as many sanitation workers per square mile.   

-When it comes to total population NYC has about twice as many sanitation workers per thousand residents as Philly does.

-On the other hand, NYC has about three times the number of miles of streets that Philly has, so it's not surprising that Philly has more than twice the sanitation workers per mile of street.

When I got to comparing tonnage hauled per worker, Philly actually did substantially better than NYC.

But I could hear some alarm bells ringing quietly in my ear. New York has more workers per square mile, and more workers per thousand residents, but Philly has more workers per mile of street. I think this means that Philly's collection network is much denser than New York's, which would help explain its better performance on tons of trash hauled. But I was very uncertain. This problem is more complicated than I had expected it to be.

So I sat and I thought.

Moravian Street, 2017.

A Few More Variables

While I was thinking I reached out to a convenience sample of well-informed New Yorkers and asked them how often their trash got picked up. 

My daughter lives in a small apartment building in Brooklyn. She has three trash pickups per week. Plus a separate pickup for recycling once a week. There used to be another pickup - for composting - but that went away during the pandemic.

My brother lives in a large apartment building in Manhattan, and he reports two trash pickups and one recycling pickup per week.

This brings up an interesting point. New York City collects trash from large apartment buildings. Philadelphia does not - it requires these buildings to hire private trash haulers. 

Commercial Buildings

Both cities require commercial buildings to hire private trash haulers, but New York is in the process of establishing Commercial Waste Zones to rationalize the current helter-skelter system of private collection. As the NYC Sanitation Department's website puts it, "more than 90 different private carters crisscross the city each night to service the city’s 100,000 commercial businesses, driving long, overlapping and unsafe routes.

"The CWZ program will divide the city into 20 zones, each served by up to three carters selected through a competitive process. Five citywide contracts will also be awarded for the collection of containerized waste and compactors. This approach will reduce truck traffic associated with commercial waste collection by 50 percent, eliminating millions of heavy-duty truck miles from NYC streets every year, while strengthening service standards and allowing for customer choice." (For more on NYC's Commercial Waste Zones, click here.)

Next to the Union League, 2017.

Tonnage per Truck

Back to the large residential buildings. The fact that NYC picks up - and Philadelphia doesn't - strikes me as a big deal. It means that these two cities are conducting very different operations. One might even say non-comparable, but I have further thoughts on that. 

One more complicating factor. My casual observation also suggests to me that the size of the crew serving a truck is variable, at least in Philadelphia. There may be good reasons for this -  some routes may work better with more people; others with less. The amount of trash put out may vary over the course of the year. And so on.

So, what metric might allow us to compare the efficiency of trash collection in Philadelphia with the performance of other cities? There are so many variables that need to be filtered out. After a while I came to tonnage per truck. 

And I looked for the number of trash trucks in Philadelphia's fleet, and I couldn't find it. 

A man's got to know his limitations. I gave some thought to filing a Right to Know request, but I frankly think assembling and analyzing all this information is a job that is beyond me. Remember, our most appropriate peer cities aren't necessarily more communicative about their trash operations than we are.

Tonnage per truck should allow us to filter out frequency of pickups, size of truck crew, and differences in the types of buildings where the public sanitation service picks up trash. Will it filter out variations in network density? I'm not sure. But I think that's a rabbit hole within a rabbit hole, and this story is already too long. 

If tonnage per truck does filter out all - or at least most of - the noise in the system, we should be able to use this metric to compare the efficiency of trash collection in Philadelphia with the performance of other cities. 

Perhaps this comparison would tell us that we simply need to hire more people. After all, when you compare Philly and NYC staffing by square mile or total population, you're tempted to say Philly is understaffed. 

But what if tons per truck doesn't tell us we're understaffed? Then perhaps we should look more closely at peer cities that perform well, and see if they're doing things that we might want to bring to Philly.

Of course, it's possible that Philly's Streets Department has a tonnage per truck metric, along with other internal metrics that might prove useful to outsiders trying to analyze the Sanitation Division's operations. But if such internal metrics are not there, somebody is going to have to roll up her sleeves and build them from the base data. Time for our city's controller, Rebecca Rhynhart, to do another one of her famous performance audits.

In Sum

Here we are at the end. So what I have I learned? 

I think we're stuck with the Streets Department's two main strategies - push work to the customer, and increase investment per worker. What this means is that richer neighborhoods are going to be a lot cleaner than poorer neighborhoods. I personally think that is a suboptimal outcome. And even the richer neighborhoods are going to be dirty. The rotting leaves in the gutter can be hard to get to (parked cars), and many homeowners are content to stop their cleaning at the curb. And the road schmutz will continue to make the fabric of our built environment darker and murkier than I would like.

I think progress is possible, but many powerful constituencies are defending their perceived interests in ways that will make progress difficult.

Years ago, a friend of mine had moved to a nice block in Fairmount that was extremely short of street trees. She decided to organize a petition requesting that trees be planted, and she started going door to door asking for signatures. She remembers one older lady answering her door and listening patiently to the spiel. Then the old lady said this: "You want trees? Trees are dirty. If you want trees, move to the country!"

Don't assume that other people see the world the way you do.

Personally, I prefer Gordon Cullen's approach. Years ago, he wrote this: "... today the tree is more usually accepted in its own right as a living organism which is pleased to dwell among us."

Is it too much to ask for both trees and clean streets?

Recycling bins, Prague, 2013. Sklo means glass in Czech.

See also Barnacles at the Curb, Scavengers and Scow Trimmers, Gordon Cullen and the Outdoor Floor, Measuring the Health of a Parking System.

The War Over MLK Drive

Where Have I Seen This Movie Before?

Near Manchester, Vermont, 1988.

My favorite range war drives the plot in the movie Shane, which came out in 1953 and is my personal pick for Best Western Ever. The structure of the movie is fairly simple. Basically the sodbusters are moving in - President Lincoln's Homestead Act, you know. They're bringing their families with them and - gasp! - plowing the land and planting crops. 

The cattlemen are aghast - particularly the ranch owner, who at one point gives a speech in defense of the open range, claiming that he has a superior right to the land because he had come to a place that was wilderness and made it fruitful. 

The sodbusters aren't terribly interested in conforming to the expectations of the cattlemen. They keep on plowing and - gasp! - even building fences to keep the cattle away from the crops. 

The rancher boss decides it's time for sterner measures, so he brings in a gunslinger played by Jack Palance, who delivers a performance that is a distillation of pure evil. I remember as a child practicing putting on gloves the way Jack Palance did.

Unfortunately for the cattlemen, Alan Ladd has been working as a hired hand for one of the sodbusters. He's also a gunslinger, but he's been trying to retire.

And things go on from there.

So what does all this have to do with MLK Drive? Simply that the struggle over MLK, which has been going on for decades now, is a range war. 

On one side we have the people who live in neighborhoods adjacent to Fairmount Park, where Martin Luther King Drive is located. On the other side we have people from all over the city - and the region - who come to walk, bike, run and otherwise make use of the space. 

There's a nice story in PlanPhilly entitled "Change is hard." A resident of Wynnefield told the reporter that traffic on Belmont and Parkside avenues is up as people try to avoid the Schuylkill Expressway. This person also mentioned that local residents like the convenience of using MLK Drive to get to Center City and added  that older neighbors, in particular, want to avoid the Schuylkill. I don't blame them. I hate the Schuylkill.

But underneath all this, I sense a deep feeling that was memorably formulated by my son when he was two years old: "I want it the way it was."

That's simply not going to happen. The world is changing. 

I have no desire to push octogenarians onto the Schuylkill Expressway. But there are better solutions than a knee-jerk reversion to the status quo ante. 

I understand that members of City Council, like all politicians, have a strong interest in reelection, which involves a strong focus on pleasing constituents.

However, in public life there used to be an interest in balancing politics with policy. Many current politicians seem to have moved away from that formula, to the detriment, I would say, of both our country and our city.

See also Is It a Park, or Is It a Traffic Sewer?

Flexible Vanderbilt

Open Streets Brooklyn-Style

Yes, that's a parked car. No need for Inspector Javert.

Call it Vanderbilt 2.0. On a chilly Saturday recently, I had a look at the Open Streets installation on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn's Prospect Heights neighborhood. It's been there for a while, but this was my first visit.

The thing that struck me right off the bat was the two-way bicycle lane on the east side of the street. This is a temporary lane. It's only there when Vanderbilt is Open - Friday, 5 to 10 pm, and Saturday and Sunday, noon to 10 pm. 

This section of Vanderbilt runs from Atlantic Avenue to Grand Army Plaza, which is the front door to Prospect Park. (As Philadelphia's traffic engineers redesign Eakins Oval in front of the Art Museum, they could look at Grand Army Plaza for things not to do.) 

Prospect Park is Brooklyn's version of Manhattan's Central Park. Both parks had the same designers - Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux - and some people think Brooklyn has the better park. I love both parks equally. 

Like Central Park, Prospect Park is a mecca for bicyclists. And many of the cyclists heading to Prospect Park from places like Fort Greene and Clinton Hill seem to favor getting there (and back) by way of Vanderbilt. However, I hasten to add that my impression of the bicyclists on Vanderbilt is that many of them are not out for a recreational spin, but rather using their bikes as utility vehicles to get from one place to another. I judge this largely by their dress and the bikes they're riding.

My sources tell me the two-way lane is a relatively recent innovation. When Vanderbilt first became an Open Street, I'm told, it simply maintained the two separate bike lanes next to the parking lanes on each side of the street. This apparently led to some conflicts between bicyclists and pedestrians and diners, which were resolved by creating the two-way bike lane on the east side of the street, leaving the rest of the area for pedestrians. Here's a view of the current setup on the west side of the street. 

Even booksellers love the outdoors.

Vanderbilt is a wide street, and at some point in the past a street designer had the lovely idea of including a median strip, something I'd like to see more of in Philadelphia. Little islands like this have their uses, and people seem to pick up on this flexibility pretty quickly.

Another use of the median is storage of the barriers when Open Streets is on hiatus.  I managed to get out on Sunday morning and got this shot. I also bought some fabulous pastries at a French patisserie named Mille Feuille, 622 Vanderbilt. My four-year-old grandson just loved the raspberry croissant.

And here's a shot of the one-way bike lane on the west side in operation. The expression on the face of the first bicyclist may have something to do with the hill that he's climbing. This area is called Prospect Heights for a reason.

Some people may question why Vanderbilt is only an Open Street on weekends. I instead am impressed by Vanderbilt's flexibility, which shows itself in several ways.

First, separating pedestrians and bicyclists palliates the conflicts between people on bikes and people on their feet that bicycle advocates often seem reluctant to talk about. Certainly the conflicts are less dangerous than those created by motor vehicles, but still they exist, and here Vanderbilt has taken steps to reduce conflict.

Second, motorists also have a right to the street, and in this neighborhood I think parking is probably a bigger issue than passage. There is remarkably little off-street parking in Prospect Heights, and there are a lot of cars. In this respect, the area is very different from Center City Philadelphia, where we are so overbuilt for off-street parking that many garages are being demolished and replaced by residential construction.

And I do like that there is tolerance for the occasional laggard car that's still at the curb when the Open Street opens. No need to tow. We can work around it.

Although I don't suppose I'd be opposed to a parking citation. 

See also Fitting the Solution to the Problem,  Don't Tell Me That Peace Has Broken Out!

The Roots of the Republic

Unearthing the Reality

Annin Flag Co., Verona, N.J. Marjory Collins/OWI, March 1943.

I recall two parts of American history that I didn't learn much about in school - the time before the Revolution, and the decades after the Civil War.

After I got out of school I made a few stabs at filling some of the gaps that any education contains - there is, after all, only so much time.

I did read William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (my copy is from the sixteenth printing of Samuel Eliot Morison's 1952 edition, which I bought in Plymouth, Massachusetts). Bradford served quite a few years as governor of the Plymouth colony; when he wrote he had not only his personal experience but also access to documents. 

I was stunned by his description of the Pequot War, and particularly of the Mystic massacre in 1637, which involved the burning of a fortified Pequot village near the Mystic River in what is now the state of Connecticut. 

"It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire," writes Bradford, who adds, "and horrible was the stink and scent thereof" (Bradford, p. 296). 

What had the Pequot Indians done to deserve this wholesale slaughter? It's a complicated story, but basically the Pequots and the English were neighbors, and they kept stepping on one another's toes. This led to violence, and in time the English decided they had had enough. The ensuing war led to the virtual destruction of the Pequot tribe; those who were not killed were incorporated into other tribes or enslaved, with a number apparently being sent to Bermuda. 

All of this doesn't exactly square with my childhood images of the first Thanksgiving. Which is probably why it is one of the many lacunae in our school books. 

Another thing I recall from my childhood exposure to American history is the occasional abrupt transition. Where, for instance, did the doctrine of Manifest Destiny come from? As I recall, it was presented to me as a last-minute cobbling together of novel ideas coupled with some brilliant phrase making. But what if there was nothing last-minute about it? What if Manifest Destiny - the term was coined in 1845, just before the war with Mexico - has firm roots dating back to the beginning of the English colonies, shortly after 1600? 

Gaps and twists can be signs that facts are being adjusted to fit a theory. But my thinking about the flaws in our national narrative didn't go much beyond Hey, I think there's a problem here. And then my son gave me Aziz Rana's The Two Faces of American Freedom (2010). Rana thinks American society has two basic issues that are tying us in knots today, and they have their roots, in North American soil, in the early seventeenth century. 

Our two problems are tension between an ingroup and several outgroups, and an insatiable lust for land, which has, over time, manifested itself in various ways. They are related problems, and Rana, who is a professor at Cornell's law school, brings them together in the term settler empire. (Rana, pp. 3, 12-14, 109-111. I think this term is basically a koan. The more I think about it, the more I see in it.) 

Rana traces the development of these two ideas in American history from the seventeenth century up to today. 

I'd like to suggest these two cultural constructs are not unique to America, but in fact occur spontaneously in human society. One has to do with defining a group, and the other has to do with defining the space from which the group gets its food.

Ingroups, Outgroups

Sociologists have been studying ingroups and outgroups for decades. Perhaps the most famous early experiment is known as Robbers Cave, from 1954. And the most vivid description of the ingroup-outgroup dynamic that I know of is the 1954 Lord of the Flies, which William Golding apparently wrote independently of the research literature. (For my understanding of ingroups and outgroups I rely heavily on Lilliana Mason and her 2018 book Uncivil Agreement, which was another eye-opener for me. Here's a link to the story I wrote in 2018.) 

Ingroups and outgroups are a complicated subject. For an example from American history, let's look south for a minute, to Virginia, where the first English arrived in 1607. Like the Puritans up north they immediately encountered their first outgroup, the Indians. And then, in 1619, a new outgroup showed up, the Africans. 

And here is where it gets interesting. The outcome for the Africans - centuries of slavery and oppression - was not foreordained. The social situation in Virginia in its early days was actually rather fluid. Many of the whites in the colony were also in an unfree status as indentured servants. These whites had an advantage over the black slaves in that their servitude came to an end after a defined number of years. It became an accepted practice to do the same with the Africans, freeing a slave after a number of years of service. 

And the former slaves had rights. Notes Rana, "In Virginia, free blacks were able to acquire property, vote, hold minor office, take legal action against Anglo settlers, and even own their own white indentured servants." They could also own slaves, and sometimes did. 

And those free blacks could and did marry whites. However, the most famous case of interracial marriage in early Virginia was between an Indian, Pocahontas, and a white man, John Rolfe, in 1614. When it comes to early Virginia, that was the main thing that I learned in school. 

And then things changed. It appears that the people at the top found their situation a little bit wobbly, and they found it convenient, among other measures, to develop a program of racial discrimination. Rana observes, "Perhaps the very first such law was passed in 1670 and denied free blacks in Virginia the right to own white indentured servants." Virginia's ship of state had changed course, and the Africans were excluded from the ingroup. It didn't have to be that way. 

In the seventeenth century, decisions were made by a small group of white men in Virginia that have dramatically affected the course of American history to this day. (For the situation in early Virginia, see Rana, pp. 43-45, 47-48.) 

Expansion

When it comes to both outgroups and the impulse to push boundaries, the Puritans would have had a ready-made roadmap for their journey - the story of Moses and Joshua leading the chosen people to the promised land. (For more on this, see Abortion and the Bible.)

And all the English colonists had pretty much a free hand defining and pushing around outgroups and expanding their territory as they saw fit for about a century and a half. Then, in the 1760s, things began to change. 

What changed was not the colonists, but the central government in London, which was facing what is sometimes called a problem of success. During the worldwide struggle known as the Seven Years' War (1756-1763, known as the French and Indian War in North America), the English beat the tar out of the French. The war cost France Canada and effectively ended French power in India, where the English began the slow process of absorbing the entire subcontinent. 

Until the Seven Years' War, the British Empire had been largely focused on the North American colonies and a number of islands in the Caribbean that produced sugar cane and rum. All of a sudden London no longer had an empire composed of colonies run by people whose roots lay in England. Instead it had the immediate challenge of figuring out how to incorporate some truly exotic societies into its empire.  

In the aftermath of the Seven Years' War the two places of greatest concern were Bengal and Quebec. Quebec was populated almost entirely by French Catholics, who were unlikely to become Protestants and who would certainly resist switching out their laws for the English common law. (There were an estimated 75,000 French and 400 Anglo-Protestants.) In Bengal the situation was, of course, even more extreme. Turning Bengalis into Englishmen was recognized as a non-starter. As Professor Rana puts it, "sheer demographics required the English use of local authorities and practices." (See Rana, pp. 72-74.) 

In their planning, the British were informed by their experience in Ireland. The English (and their Norman rulers) first showed up in 1169. Talk about a slow-moving train wreck. Anyway, by the sixteenth century, English control had largely been limited to the Pale - Dublin and its immediate surroundings. In 1565 England started to move out from the Pale, attempting to reestablish control over the whole island. Once again, things didn't go very well, but the English did use the occasion to refine their approach to the problem. 

In particular they evolved techniques and rationales for the expropriation and removal of indigenous populations. This approach reached its apogee in Ulster, the northern part of the island, in 1609 - two years after the English arrived in Virginia. In that year King James I reserved 80 percent of Ulster's land for English and Scottish settlers, thereby setting a precedent as the colonial project moved to the New World. (For Ireland, see Rana, pp. 28-30.) 

Working with this background, London in 1763 set about reorganizing its imperial apparatus to handle "a massive and culturally diverse empire," as Professor Rana puts it on page 72.  This involved a balancing act, because some of these populations had conflicting interests. Whether it wanted them or not, London found itself with 100,000 American Indians who were living in the territory of the empire, and it had to find a way to keep the English settlers and the Indians from squabbling with one another. Removing the Indians would be difficult and expensive, and so, in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, London drew a line at the Appalachian Mountains, reserved the land west of the line to the Indians, and told the English settlers not even to think of moving across the line. (See Rana, pp. 65-69.) 

(There's an interesting parallel here with Teddy Roosevelt, who is sometimes called the conservation president. He established 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reserves, and five national parks, along with a number of other things like game preserves and national monuments, protecting more than 230 million acres and creating a conflict with settlers like Cliven and Ammon Bundy that persists to this day.) 

The ban on western migration enraged the English colonists. The poor people wanted to move west so they could get land of their own. And the wealthy, including people like George Washington (p. 69), saw a great deal of money to be made by speculating in western land. On a deeper level, London's move ran against the two basic beliefs in the concept of settler empire. First, the settlers were no longer being viewed as an ingroup. Instead they were being treated as an outgroup, relatively equal to the Indians and the French Catholics in Quebec and even the people in Bengal. Second, since their founding, the colonies had taken continuous territorial expansion as an article of faith. Not only was it important economically. It was also a big part of their identity. (Remember Moses and Joshua in the Bible.) 

From here, the path to the American Revolution is familiar - estrangement, attempts at reconciliation, and finally a lengthy divorce proceeding from 1775 to 1783. 

Fast Forward

Now let's fast forward to today. ... Wow, that was a tumultuous trip, which Professor Rana describes in detail (this is a very rich book, brimming with remarkable insights).

On 6 January 2021 a lynch mob stormed the Capitol looking, among other things, to hang Vice President Mike Pence by the neck until he was dead. They even set up a gallows outside the Capitol. 

Why did this happen? The seeds of 6 January were planted before the Revolution.

The people who say that we are a white Christian country aren't entirely wrong. Our founders saw their country as one that was ruled by white Protestant English men. In time, because there was a shortage of English men - George Orwell worked as a police officer in Burma, for God's sake - we became a country where the ingroup was white Christian men. And since then other groups have achieved at least formal membership in the ingroup through such devices as legislation and Constitutional amendments. It's possible that some of these admissions have been provisional, or notional.

And it is certainly true that some people refuse to accept any revision of the original setup, except of course for the first revision - the one that expanded Protestant to Christian and English to white.

Here's the nub of the issue: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Is it possible that Jefferson, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, was feeling his way to a future he did not see clearly? I think so. I'd say the same of Lincoln.

History is a dynamic process. That's why it's so important to have a north star to steer by. And good charts, so we know where the reefs and shoals are. Professor Rana has helped me greatly by providing a roadmap to America's colonial history. 

One footnote: Yes, the whaling ship Pequod in Herman Melville's Moby Dick is named after the Pequot tribe: "Pequod, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct as the ancient Medes." (Chapter 16.)

See also Rugged Individualism, Mr. Piketty's Book, Jim Crow Was a Failed State, On Demagogues.

Is It a Park, or Is It a Traffic Sewer?

Arm-Wrestling Over MLK Drive

The Philadelphia Art Commission had a hearing yesterday on the planned reconstruction of the MLK Drive bridge, which is near the Art Museum at the beginning of Martin Luther King Drive. And the Commission basically told the Streets Department to go back to the drawing boards. 

This was the Streets Department's second appearance before the Art Commission on this project. Streets has designed a sidepath that, at the first hearing, was ten feet wide. At the second hearing, it was 10.5 feet wide. This is for a two-way path for both bicyclists and pedestrians. The current bridge design still reflects the existing three lanes for motor-vehicle traffic - one bound upriver, and two inbound, heading towards the Eakins Oval in front of the Art Museum.

There have been proposals for nearly a decade to remove that second inbound lane, and at the hearing Streets conceded that they might well drop a lane after further study. But they asked for approval of the 10.5 foot sidepath. 

The Art Commission did not do that. Instead it approved  the basic design for widening the bridge deck, and told Streets to come back with a new design that paid more attention to the needs of pedestrians and bicyclists.

This is a big win for pedestrians and bicyclists. As you probably know, MLK has been closed to motor vehicles during the pandemic, and usage of the space by pedestrians and bicyclists has skyrocketed during that time. There has been concern for a while that the City was planning to revert to the status quo ante when the pandemic went away, and it appears that those concerns are justified.

There are further proposals for more space devoted to bikes and peds along the full length of MLK Drive, up to the Falls Bridge, but they were not part of yesterday's proposal, which focused solely on the bridge.

Here's a story the Bicycle Coalition posted on yesterday's hearing.

And here's a story I wrote in 2017 that gives more background on the design history for MLK Drive.

See also My Life in Fairmount Park.

On Demagogues

Francis Bacon and Max Weber Weigh In

Lewis C. Levin, by Rembrandt Peale (1834).

Demagogues have been around for quite a while. We owe the word, which translates pretty well as "rabble rouser," to the ancient Greeks, who had their share. One of them was named Alcibiades. He will always be remembered as the fellow who talked the Athenians into something called the Sicilian Expedition, which turned out to be kind of the ancient Greek version of America's Vietnam war. 

(Alcibiades may also have been involved in something called the Desecration of the Herms.  Herms were statues to the god Hermes, the messenger of the gods. He also protected travelers, and Athens had set up many roadside Herms. These fellows invariably were blessed with impressive erect penises. One night, shortly before the Sicilian Expedition began, some person or persons went around and cut off almost all the penises. Alcibiades was suspected of involvement, but not charged.  Eventually he was charged with a related crime and called home from the war zone in Sicily to stand trial, at which point Alcibiades defected to Sparta, which would be a bit like an American general defecting to Russia during the height of the Cold War. Who actually did the crime remains a mystery. A 2,400-year-old mystery. Talk about a cold case.)  

At any rate, demagogues seem to be a regular feature of democracies, something like a car radio - you don't really need it, but it always seems to be there, ready to blab in your ear. And, after their careers are over, demagogues almost always wind up with a very bad press. Indeed, demagogues as a group are generally viewed as a very poor sort of people. 

Bacon and Weber

Recently I was browsing through John Aubrey's Brief Lives, something I had been intending to do for thirty or forty years, but never quite gotten to. As I leafed through the pages, I came across the entry for Francis Bacon (1561-1626). It turned out that Bacon had written an essay on the greatness of cities. I had never heard of it.  I thought it sounded interesting, and I found it under the title "Of True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates." Here's what he has to say about demagogues.

"The speech of Themistocles the Athenian, which was haughty and arrogant, in taking so much to himself, had been a grave and wise observation and censure, applied at large to others. Desired at a feast to touch a lute, he said, He could not fiddle, but yet he could make a small town, a great city. These words (holpen a little with a metaphor) may express two differing abilities, in those that deal in business of estate. For if a true survey be taken of counsellors and statesmen, there may be found (though rarely) those which can make a small state great, and yet cannot fiddle; as on the other side, there will be found a great many, that can fiddle very cunningly, but yet are so far from being able to make a small state great, as their gift lieth the other way; to bring a great and flourishing estate, to ruin and decay. And certainly whose degenerate arts and shifts, whereby many counsellors and governors gain both favor with their masters, and estimation with the vulgar, deserve no better name than fiddling; being things rather pleasing for the time, and graceful to themselves only, than tending to the weal and advancement of the state which they serve."

Around the time I was leafing through John Aubrey, my son sent me an essay by the great German historian and sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920). It's called "Politics as a Vocation" and was originally delivered as a speech in 1918. In it Weber gives his view of the demagogue. 

"For ultimately there are only two kinds of deadly sins in the field of politics: lack of objectivity and—often but not always identical with it—irresponsibility. Vanity, the need personally to stand in the foreground as clearly as possible, strongly tempts the politician to commit one or both of these sins. This is more truly the case as the demagogue is compelled to count upon ‘effect.’ He therefore is constantly in danger of becoming an actor as well as taking lightly the responsibility for the outcome of his actions and of being concerned merely with the ‘impression’ he makes. His lack of objectivity tempts him to strive for the glamorous semblance of power rather than for actual power. His irresponsibility, however, suggests that he enjoy power merely for power’s sake without a substantive purpose. Although, or rather just because, power is the unavoidable means, and striving for power is one of the driving forces of all politics, there is no more harmful distortion of political force than the parvenu-like braggart with power, and the vain self-reflection in the feeling of power, and in general every worship of power per se. The mere ‘power politician’ may get strong effects, but actually his work leads nowhere and is senseless."

On one issue, I'm afraid I have to part company with these two august gentlemen (Bacon was Lord Chancellor of England and, in his spare time, one of the founders of the modern scientific method; Weber was a founder of the discipline of sociology).

The Tools of Rhetoric

Both Bacon and Weber appear to set up a dichotomy between demagogues and statesmen. I don't think there is a clean dichotomy; I think there's more a spectrum, and in a democracy any politician is somewhere on that spectrum. 

Think about it this way. In a democracy the people need to be convinced, and great orators such as Demosthenes or Cicero used the same rhetorical tools as the demagogues. Aristotle wrote a book on rhetoric, where he defined the basic tasks of the speaker as ethos, pathos, and logos. Underlying this structure was an important insight, which may sound obvious: Aristotle thought that people were more emotional than rational. So he counseled the speaker to enlist his listeners' emotions as a primary task. This is called pathos. Of course, many people like to think of themselves as primarily rational, and so Aristotle also counseled the speaker to lay out a cogent decision tree, one that would allow a listener to say to himself that he was deciding the matter at hand in a logical, objective way. This is called logos. Finally, or really first of all, Aristotle said the speaker's bedrock task was to get listeners to like him and to trust him, so they would be comfortable and receptive to his emotional and rational appeals, and inclined to do what he said. This is called ethos. 

Ethos, pathos, logos. Remember that, and think about it the next time you're listening to a speech, or a lecture, or a sermon.

Many people, including many intellectuals, are repelled by the classical rhetorical model, and I think this leads to a generalized contempt for people who practice the craft of politics. Ideas should sell themselves. Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. 

Well, no. That's not the way it works. 

The difference between a demagogue and a statesman is not the tools, it is the ends to which the tools are put. Perhaps it's time to offer a definition of the term demagogue: An orator who uses his powers for evil. 

Controlling Outcomes - Or Not

Of course, this being politics, even the best intentions can lead to a bad end. Demosthenes urged the Athenians to oppose the power of Macedon, and a fellow named Alexander the Great. It seems fair to say things didn't go very well, either for Athens or for Demosthenes, who wound up taking poison to avoid being executed. 

Cicero wound up on the losing side in the civil wars that turned Rome from a republic into an empire. The Second Triumvirate proscribed him and sent a squad of soldiers, headed by a tribune and a centurion, to arrest him at one of his summer houses. Cicero almost escaped, but his pursuers caught up with him. The centurion cut off his head and his hands; these were brought back to Rome, where they were displayed on the rostra, or speaker's platform, in the forum. 

Politics ain't beanbag.

American Demagogues

So neither demagogues nor statesmen are necessarily able to control outcomes. And they use the same tools. And, as I suggested earlier, they exist on a spectrum. Here's another thought: That spectrum may look different depending on who is looking at it.

For instance, what was Tom Paine? It may depend on your perspective. I wonder what the British thought of him.

To my mind, the recently departed occupant of the White House is an extreme example of a demagogue. These pure demagogues are actually rather rare - most politicians at least have a smidgen of interest in the common weal. But while he is extreme, he is not unique, even in America.

In the twentieth century, just to look at the headliners, we had Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, and George Wallace. They each had their moment in the sun, but in the end the road was rocky for them. Long was assassinated, and McCarthy drank himself to death. 

Things went a bit better for Wallace. An assassin's bullet put him in a wheelchair in 1972, but he continued to serve as governor of Alabama, off and on, until 1987. When he died in 1998, the Washington Post ran an obituary that ended this way: "The sad fact is that from first to last, despite the sound and the fury of Wallace's campaigning, little changed for the good in Alabama with his help. Throughout all his years in office, Alabama rated near the bottom of the states in per capita income, welfare, and spending on schools and pupils." 

Inciting Riots in Philadelphia

My favorite American demagogue hails from the nineteenth century. He is the little-known Lewis Levin (1808-1860), America's first Jewish Congressman. (The basic documentation on Levin may be found in a journal article from 1960. For a recent story, see this one in Salon.)

Levin was born and grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and, after an itinerant period, he wound up in Philadelphia, where he became a leader of what would be known as the Know-Nothings. He proved quite adept at inciting riots during 1844, a hard year in Philly, and rode the anti-immigrant tide into Congress (1845-1851). As time passed, his behavior became increasingly erratic, and eventually he was committed to Philadelphia's insane asylum, where he died in 1860. 

My friend Greg Cukor suggested I look into Levin back in 2013, and I did so. [ went to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. I went to Laurel Hill Cemetery and reviewed the file related to the plot where he is buried. In the end I decided I did not have very much in the way of new information, and I did have a number of questions that I was unable to answer. (Example: Several people are buried in the plot, which is rather large. Why are they there?)

So I set Lewis Levin aside, but I remained fascinated by him. And I'm glad he found a home in this story.

A note about terminology. I don't like the words orator and statesman. I've searched for a gender-neutral term to replace statesman, and not found one. And orator strikes me as pompous, and almost archaic. Rhetor, meaning a practitioner of rhetoric, strikes me as obsolete. I do have a personal favorite - englottogastor. I wrote a story about it back in 2013. Just about nobody has heard of this word, which cuts into its usefulness in communications.

See also A Cure for Anger and Greed Is Not Good. It Is a Mortal Sin.