The Democrats are holding their national convention, as the Republicans did in 2000, on the home turf of one of Philadelphia’s fabled politicians, William Vare. Vare and his two brothers were born and brought up on a pig farm on land where the Wells Fargo Arena, site of the conventions, and the nearby Financial Field and the Citizens Bank Park now stand.
His parents died when he was a child, and with the help of Philadelphia department store owner and Republican politico John Wanamaker (after whom a nearby street is named), he attended the city’s famed Central High School. According to Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love, Vare and his two older brothers “made their first fortune on a municipal contract to collect garbage. Early on they learned the value of access to government work, which brought them into politics.
By World War I, the Vares were consolidating South Philadelphia’s wards into a unit that would send them and their allies to both the statehouse and the Congress and allow them to control local government for the next twenty years. Ward leaders and municipal employees were the machine’s bedrock. They showed utter loyalty to Vare and did anything necessary to turn out the Republican vote. ‘My platform is short, sweet and easy to say,’ Freddie Lunt, a ward leader, told anyone who asked. ‘I am for William S. Vare.'”
Vare was elected to the House of Representatives from Philadelphia in the days when it usually sent an entirely Republican delegation and served from 1912 to 1927. In 1926 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, but the election was challenged on vote fraud grounds by a rival Republican, Gov. Gifford Pinchot, and the Senate refused to seat him in December 1929.
According to his interestingly favorable Wikipedia biography, “He supported the abolition of child labor, the federal income tax, the rights of unions to bargain collectively, and voting rights for women and the ending of segregation on passenger rail cars. … Vare repeatedly pursued the repeal of Prohibition because of the cruel police state it imposed, and was actually able to show, statistically, that alcohol-related crimes increased threefold in Philadelphia during the first years of Prohibition. It was a testament to his moral character that he argued this way, as it has been inferred that the Philadelphia Republican Party machine relied on alcohol-related revenues to fund its core activities, and Vare thus stood to lose much of his financial backing by pursuing Prohibition’s repeal.”
In any case, the Democrats are nominating their presidential candidate as the Republicans did in 2000, on turf with a fragrant political history, a former pig farm once undoubtedly fragrant with hog waste which became the basis of a political machine that most locals have long forgotten.
