Features: Who Really Runs This Town?: Burying Lincoln Steffens

Certainly, the worst of what Steffens saw 100 years  ago no longer exists. There isn’t any widespread, documented voter fraud or disenfranchisement, notwithstanding 1993’s election of Democrat Bill Stinson to the second senatorial district amid allegations of major-league absentee ballot fraud, and the recent
election fraud allegations against Mike Stack Jr., leader of the 58th ward.

But the culture Steffens chronicled still exists. In 1903, Steffens saw a one-party town run by and for 100 or 200 insiders who included party bosses, corporate enablers, lawyers, bankers, union toughs, and for-profit, under-the-radar ward leaders. Today, a different party runs a one-party town by and for 100 or 200 insiders, and it includes party bosses, corporate enablers, lawyers, bankers, union toughs, and for-profit, under-the-radar ward leaders. (For proof, look no further than at how so many of the same names crop up in so many different deals, from slots to Penn’s Landing.) Just as in Steffens’s day, widespread toleration of the status quo pertains.

Recent scandals in Chicago and San Diego underscore that Philadelphia has no monopoly on municipal corruption. But our shoulder-shrugging response to it seems unique. In San Diego, the public outcry forced a mayoral resignation; in Chicago, an ambitious U.S. Attorney’s investigation has made the mayor’s approval ratings plummet and indicted a former governor of Illinois. Here, on the other hand, an ambitious U.S. Attorney’s investigation spurred the election of the administration under scrutiny. Such is life in a one-party town; long ago, we wrote off even the possibility of good government and civic leadership not motivated by narrow self-interest. It was Steffens who observed that in Philadelphia, “The people are not innocent” — today, our town is one of only two cities in America’s 10 most populous with no limit on how much an individual can donate to a politician. And the civic leaders, like the rest of us, have remained largely silent.

 Throughout the past century, the kind of civic shamelessness that Steffens observed has been a constant. Our landscape has been dotted with a series of charming, rogue-like characters whose misdeeds never seemed to relegate them to political purgatory, and who rarely have been held to account by those institution and business leaders who could rein in their more, uh, colorful impulses. Thirty years ago, the late ward leader and state senator Buddy Cianfrani, upon learning that a U.S. Attorney was investigating him, quipped, “If he can’t get anything on me, what kind of investigator is he?” He was also known to brag about how his minions covered his bases throughout the branches of government. (Cianfrani was convicted of racketeering, mail fraud, obstruction of justice and tax evasion in 1977.)

“That is so Philly,” marvels Philly native and political commentator Chris Matthews, with some admiration. “It is one of the few places left where party matters, where titles and position aren’t as important as the role of the machine. Buddy may have been in the State Senate, but his real power was as city boss, delivering jobs and controlling positions.”

And Cianfrani might not have been the best example of how, in Philly, no misdeed requires so much as a mea culpa. Jimmy Tayoun “went away,” as the South Philly pols say (he served more than three years after being convicted of accepting bribes as a city councilman), came back, and penned a book of self-help advice for white-collar types who end up behind bars. Another convicted councilman, Leland Beloff, is also back — often in the company of local Democratic Party chair and Congressman Bob Brady; there’s talk that Beloff may become a ward leader, the same position Cianfrani held for so many years despite the scandals.

No one ever washes out of Philly, as Steffens saw when it came to Mayor Sam Ashbridge in the early 1900s; Ashbridge brazenly announced that he wanted but one term and “I shall get out of this office all there is in it for Samuel H. Ashbridge.” (He did; entering City Hall $40,000 in debt, he left it not only rich, but also a bank president.) In this context, one can easily imagine Steffens’s “I told you so” reaction to the news last winter that Milton Street had been receiving $30,000 a month as an airport consultant — even while a grand jury was investigating patronage at the airport, even while the U.S. Attorney was indicting the Mayor’s aides on public corruption charges, even after it had already come to light that Milton had garnered a lucrative baggage-handling contract at the airport despite having no experience in baggage handling. It was business as usual, and it wasn’t a surprise. Mayor Street, after all, had signaled his support for a city run by and for insiders just over a month prior to his election in 1999, when he promptly pledged to reward his friends and supporters with city business.

We now know that Street looked the other way while friends like Ron White hijacked the public business of the city for private gain, enriching a small band of insiders instead of, as promised, expanding opportunity to those who had been locked out of power. (We can’t ignore the ever-present issue of race, not after an election where it so easily trumped public outrage; if Street had been white, one wonders, would news of the bugging of City Hall have elected challenger Sam Katz, or would Philly have shrugged the way it did when Ashbridge was mayor?)