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

Over the past six months, we’ve engaged in frank, off-the-record discussions with the city’s power elite, many of whom appear on our list of the most powerful Philadelphians (page 104). What has emerged from these talks is as clear to us as it was to Steffens: Power in Philadelphia is disproportionately political. That is, business and cultural and media leaders have abdicated their roles as civic referees and have, instead, deferred to elected officials and their cronies. They enabled Ron White (as evidenced by the bankers caught on tape with White and Corey Kemp by the FBI) just as they enabled Ashbridge a century ago. Again, let Steffens state the case: “Philadelphia was one of the hotbeds of ‘knownothingism,’” he wrote, arguing that the heads of educational and charitable institutions “‘go along,’ as they say in Pennsylvania, in order to get appropriations from the State and land from the city. They know what is going on, but they do not join reform movements. The provost of the University of Pennsylvania declined to join in a revolt because, he said, it might impair his usefulness to the university. And so it is with … lawyers who want briefs, real estate dealers who like to know in advance about public improvements, and real estate owners who appreciate light assessments.”

Today, insiders assured us, this narrow self-interest among the cultural elite still exists — and has been exacerbated by a disturbing trend in the past 25 years. Philadelphia has become a branch-office town. Many of the corporate titans who could exert influence have little or no connection here; Citizens Bank, for example, reports to CEOs in Rhode Island — and Wachovia to Charlotte, just as the newspaper of record takes its marching orders from San Jose. The only homegrown corporate power, arguably, is Comcast, whose customers are more national than local in scope.

It wouldn’t take much for cultural leaders to get actively engaged. Brian Roberts or Penn president Amy Gutmann (Penn being the city’s largest private employer) don’t have to get bogged down in the minutiae of government. But one phone call from either of them to the haggling pols who couldn’t get the Convention Center expanded might have sped up the process.

And there are indications that such activism is on the horizon. Whether you support the move or not, the fact that Pew Charitable Trusts head Rebecca Rimel, self-made cable billionaire Gerry Lenfest and Leonore Annenberg teamed up to move the Barnes to the Parkway is a sign that some civic leaders aren’t just waiting for cues from politicians before acting. Then there is the group of civic leaders that has been meeting quietly behind the scenes to mull over ways to affect the status quo; they call themselves “Friends of Fred,” after
Comcast-Spectacor vice chairman Fred Shabel, who initiated the talks. (They’ve even commissioned baseball caps with “Friends of Fred” on the bills.) Lenfest has told people he regrets not paying enough attention in the past to getting good people elected, and has been wondering if the business community could, together, bankroll a mayoral candidate. Parking magnate Joe Zuritsky is said to be asking movers and shakers the same thing. And though this is a notoriously insular town that hardly anybody ever leaves, new civic leaders do occasionally arrive: Hugh Long, Wachovia Bank regional CEO, has issued a clarion call for business leaders to get involved in regional issues beyond the orbit of their own short-term interests, despite the fact he’s been in town only two years and is a de facto branch manager. (Long, who chairs Select Greater Philadelphia, the Chamber of Commerce arm charged with attracting business to the region, says that upon arriving in Philadelphia, he kept asking “Who’s really in charge here?” — and could never get a uniform, satisfying answer.) Joe Torsella’s burgeoning crusade to bring the Olympics here in 2016 has none other than über-power broker David L. Cohen proclaiming to other power types that the level of their support for the bold idea is the litmus test for where one stands on the question of Philadelphia’s future: progress, or status quo. In the political realm, State Representative Dwight Evans pushed through a school reform commission, and even the aforementioned Brady — the consummate insider — has come out in favor of merit selection for judges.

We’d like to help these players jump-start a new era of civic engagement. To that end, in conjunction with restaurateur Stephen Starr (#4 on our list) and Zack Stalberg, the former editor of the Philadelphia Daily News who is now the CEO of the Committee of Seventy — and our town’s last, best hope for reform and positive change — we’ll be inviting five to 10 leaders from our list to an off-the-record dinner at one of Starr’s restaurants. We’re going to start a conversation that spurs a drafting of what we’ll call a Declaration of Re-Independence, an enunciation of principles for engagement on behalf of those who can lead. It will be off-the-record because we want it to be as freewheeling as possible, so that we can actually play a constructive role going forward. But I hope to report back to you on the substance of the discussion.

Encouraging such civic engagement might be the only way to take our region back from the relatively small set of insiders who have called Philadelphia their playground for generations. They rely for their power on the public’s moral inertia, exactly as Steffens observed a century ago.

Indeed, it wasn’t the corruption, per se, that bewildered Steffens; it was the fact of so much of it, the shamelessness of it. “Technically,” Steffens wrote, “it looked like bad politics.”

A local boss privately explained why it wasn’t: “We reasoned that if we [did exactly as we wanted] fast enough, one-two-three — one after the other — the papers couldn’t handle them all, and the public would be stunned and — give up. … We know that public despair is possible and that that is good politics.”

Lincoln Steffens was not naïve. He knew how the world worked, and he painted men of power in decidedly empathetic and unsentimental hues. I’ve found myself thinking of Steffens often these last six months, but at no time more than when I was huddled, recently, in a frank exchange with one particularly likable local power broker. He was bemoaning the levels of calculus and strategy and deal-making that go into getting things done here. “I’ve never done anything illegal,” he said. “But I’ve done some things that are wrong.” He looked at me as though he was seeking absolution. In fact, I suspect he’s helped far more people than even he knows, and that, in the end, he’s done far more good than bad. Steffens anticipated this moment of moral ambiguity, too: “I have had many similar experiences since with big, bad men, and I find that if they are big enough and bad enough, they seem to be as eager to do great good as great evil. They simply are not asked to do good.”

So that’s what we’re going to do, behind the scenes, in this issue and in others to come: ask those who have it in their power to simply do good. Maybe in the act of asking lies the key to beginning to overcome the self-fulfilling prophecy Steffens saddled us with 100 years ago. Maybe we can finally bury Lincoln Steffens.