With the Republican party holding its national convention in Philadelphia this week, civic boosters have been serving up endless testimonials to the city’s glorious past and glimmering future. But conveniently absent from these testimonials has been any recognition of Philadelphia’s rich political tradition. “Enriching” might be the better word. Few cities in America can claim a political class more consistently crooked, and colorful, than Philadelphia’s.
A century ago, journalist Lincoln Steffens went to Philadelphia for a book he was writing on major American cities. He found that while “all our municipal governments are more or less bad . . . Philadelphia is simply the most corrupt and the most contented.” Steffens based his conclusion on Philadelphia’s 19th-century politics, and the city’s 20th-century shenanigans more than validated it. Consider:
P So many local politicians have been sentenced to Allenwood Federal Prison that it’s known as Philadelphia’s “70th ward.”
P In 1926, the leader of Philadelphia’s Republican machine, William Vare, was elected to the U.S. Senate, but one of his opponents challenged the outcome. The Senate found Vare guilty of “appalling” vote fraud and, in 1929, denied him the seat.
P In 1985, Philadelphia’s Democratic mayor, Wilson Goode, ordered city police to bomb a group of black radicals who were holed up in a West Philadelphia row house, killing 11 people — five of them children — and destroying 61 homes.
P In 1985, the FBI began surveillance of a roofers’ union in Philadelphia, and picked up conversations indicating union officials were paying off local judges. By the time the investigation ended, 15 judges had resigned or been convicted.
P In 1994, Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell, during an interview with a local journalist, described how he thought she’d perform in bed and said she should find his appraisal “flattering.” He eventually apologized for his bawdy talk, but later would concede only one mistake: “I should have said right at the beginning, everything is off the record.”
P For many years, fistfights were such a regular feature of city council meetings that Fodor’s guide to Philadelphia listed the meetings under “Local Entertainment.” In one incident, a young black councilman marched around the chamber complaining of racism while brandishing a large metal object, threw ice water on his colleagues, and then exchanged punches with one of them until security guards intervened.
That councilman, John Street, is now the mayor of Philadelphia. As the following vignettes show, Street will need more than an occasional scrum if he’s going to become a first-tier member of Philadelphia’s political Hall of Shame.
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“The Quaker city of Philadelphia has suffered from the virus of virtuous materialism for about three centuries, and its best men on the whole have seldom sought public office.”
E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (1979)
In 1973, Philadelphia’s Democratic chairman, Peter Camiel, accused first-term mayor Frank Rizzo, a Democrat, of offering him a bribe in a hotel bathroom. Rizzo vehemently denied the charge, and the Philadelphia Daily News suggested both men take a lie-detector test. Camiel went first, and passed. Rizzo followed, declaring that “if this machine says a man lied, he lied.” He, of course, failed, and later fessed up: “What’s the big deal about lying in a bathroom?”
Such candor explains why Rizzo remains Philadelphia’s most celebrated politician of the 20th century. He was the voice of the city’s white ethnics, a culturally conservative bloc bearing racial resentments straight out of the Deep South. Before being elected mayor, he gained fame as a tough-as-nails police chief from central casting (six-feet two, 250 pounds, with a 20-inch collar and, as one reporter put it, “fingers the size of frankfurters”). In August 1970, his men raided a local office of the Black Panthers, paraded 14 of them outside to the street, and stripped them naked.
Rizzo was a reporter’s dream. Shortly before becoming mayor, he told a crowd, “I’m going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.” As for meting out justice, he said “the way to treat criminals is spaco il cappo,” which translates as “break the head.” Fearing protests at the city’s July 4, 1976, bicentennial celebration, he requested 15,000 federal troops from Washington (the request was denied and thousands of potential tourists stayed away). Eight years earlier, he had forestalled violence following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. by sending black police officers disguised as clergymen into black neighborhoods.
Last year, Rizzo was rated by a group of academics as the fifth worst big-city mayor between 1820 and 1999. Philadelphia’s population declined by 13 percent during his tenure, and the city lost 140,000 factory jobs. Near the end of his second term, a Washington Post editorial branded him a “national embarrassment.”
Perhaps, but one that many Philadelphians treasured. When he died in July 1991, he was coming off an upset victory in the mayoral primary — this time as a Republican — and thousands lined the 10-mile route traveled by his 169-vehicle procession. In its grandeur, the event was more befitting a head of state. His supporters waved signs reading “Rizzo Forever.”
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“I know a man who is making a history of the corrupt construction of the Philadelphia City Hall in three volumes, and he grieves that he lacks space.”
Lincoln Steffens, Shame of the Cities (1904)
When James J. Tayoun, a Democrat, was running for reelection to Philadelphia’s city council in 1987, he made the kind of statement seldom heard anywhere but Philly: “There’s never been another like me. There never will be.”
During his 25-year political career, Tayoun jumped back and forth between the city council and the state House (he was defeated in two bids for Congress), and in both jobs his constituent service was legendary. “In a city bursting with talented neighborhood pols,” wrote the Philadelphia Daily News in 1991, “the tireless Tayoun may be No. 1.”
The profile called Tayoun the master of “the Little Fix,” which the paper defined as “the use of political influence and inside knowledge to get things done that a citizen is entitled to anyway.” Indeed, one of his opponents dubbed him “the Monte Hall of City Hall.”
While temporarily out of government in the mid-80s, Tayoun opened a lobbying operation where he could put his Little Fix skills to work. The only problem was that he never quite divorced himself from it after he returned to the city council. When lobbyists approached him as a councilman, he’d often route them to his “former” firm, James J. Tayoun Associates, and then collect a portion of the fees they paid for the firm’s services.
This led to a two-year probe by the FBI and the IRS, which found he’d paid bribes, accepted bribes, and cheated on his taxes. When he met with prosecutors one day in April 1991, they presented him with audio tapes of his incriminating conversations, and the gig was up. “That’s it,” said Tayoun. “I’m guilty. You found the smoking gun. . . . You got me.”
Tayoun was sentenced to 40 months in prison — the judge said “lying, cheating and scheming were a way of life for him” — but the one-time journalist found he could turn the experience to his benefit. While locked up, he wrote a book entitled Going to Prison?, which was designed as a do’s and don’ts for white-collar criminals unsure of what to expect in the big house (it’s in its fourth printing).
In a recent profile, Tayoun asked, “What do you do with a guy who’s 70 and has a prison record?” Become a newspaperman, naturally. Last September, Tayoun launched a free weekly called The Philadelphia Public Record that serves his old South Philly constituency. The paper covers politicians, but Tayoun admits it’s not exactly a vehicle for muckraking. “I don’t write anything bad because there’s nothing bad to write about them. . . . They’re all doing their jobs.”
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“There’s a culture that’s grown up in this city, a culture of corruption, and it comes from both sides. People seem to feel that to get anything from this government, you need to give a tip or a bribe.”
Leon Wigrizer, Philadelphia’s first inspector general, 1992
When federal anti-fraud investigators launched their Abscam probe in 1978, they wanted to discover one thing: How difficult would it be for Arab businessmen to bribe elected officials to do legislative favors for them? If the officials were Philadelphia Democrats, the answer was “not very.” Five were convicted, and the Justice Department sued a number of them following their convictions because they refused to return the bribe money.
A black eye for Philadelphia, right? Not quite. Four of the five continued as Democratic party ward leaders. One, a congressman named Raymond F. Lederer, was reelected even after being indicted for accepting a $ 50,000 bribe from undercover FBI agents. He resigned from the House only after the Ethics Committee recommended he be expelled.
No less ham-handed was another Philadelphia congressman ensnared by Abscam, Michael “Ozzie” Myers. Like Lederer, he accepted a $ 50,000 bribe from undercover FBI agents. But he insisted, “I didn’t do anything wrong and didn’t intend to do anything wrong and didn’t break any laws.” This after he’d complained to the agents that he was “entitled” to an additional $ 35,000 because he’d shared that much of the original with other officials.
Myers maintained this defiant pose even after his conviction. He forced the House to vote on his expulsion — they approved it overwhelmingly — and he became the first congressman since the Civil War to be banished from the House. He nonetheless kept campaigning for reelection and lost by a mere three percentage points. “If I hadda had money,” said Myers, “I would’ve won this thing hands down.”
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“W. C. Fields said ‘All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.’ On Election Day, it seems so would a lot of people who don’t live there and may not even exist.”
Deborah Phillips, The Voter Integrity Project, an Arlington, Virginia, election watchdog group, July 2000
The stakes couldn’t have been higher in a November 1993 special election to fill a Pennsylvania state Senate seat. A win for the Democrat, William Stinson, would keep Democrats in control of the Senate. And that meant generous appropriations for Philadelphia from the $ 15 billion state budget.
The Senate district was in the northeastern part of the city, and Democrats outnumbered Republicans there two-to-one. But Stinson was a laggard campaigner. When the ballots were counted, he’d lost to the Republican, Bruce Marks, by 564 votes. But then the absentee ballots started pouring in — 1,757 in all — and Stinson had won 79 percent of them, swinging the election in his favor.
Republicans were suspicious about the high number of absentee ballots, as was the Philadelphia Inquirer. It launched a massive investigation, and found widespread violations of election law. In the weeks before Election Day, Stinson’s campaign had deployed workers throughout the district, though primarily in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. The workers employed a variety of deceptive tactics to persuade voters to fill out absentee ballots on the spot. Some of the people didn’t even know they were voting, while others said the workers completed the ballots for them.
Hundreds of absentee ballots were opened by poll workers before the voting booths had closed for the day. One of those who admitted tampering with the voting machines and helping count the votes was none other than Stinson, the Democratic candidate (in true Philadelphia fashion, his son also helped count votes, and his mother was an election judge).
Marks and the Republicans challenged the election’s outcome. It didn’t take a district court judge long to conclude that Stinson’s campaign had “conducted a widespread and deliberate scheme through the Latino and African American areas . . . to illegally obtain absentee ballot votes.” More important, he ordered that Marks replace Stinson in the state Senate.
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A local journalist, James Smart, once observed that “only outsiders think Philadelphia has an inferiority complex. Most Philadelphians believe it really is inferior.” A century ago, the man who controlled Philadelphia’s thoroughly corrupt Republican machine, Israel Durham, was asked how he got away with his graft year after year. “If we did any of these things alone,” he said, “the papers and the public could concentrate on it, get the facts, and fight.” But by corrupting every part of the government, Durham explained, the machine made such a fight hopeless. “We know that public despair is possible,” he said, in another one of those only-in-Philly comments, “and that that is good politics.”
BY MATTHEW REES
