Punching Below Weight

Ann de Forest reviews Paul Kahan’s “Philadelphia: A Narrative History.”

By Ann de ForestDecember 28, 2024

• History

• Politics

“PHILADELPHIA’S NOT as bad as people say it is,” declares a bumper sticker that wryly acknowledges (or affectionately mocks) the city’s rude and slovenly reputation. Once a W. C. Fields punch line, it’s now a Donald Trump punching bag: “Bad things happen in Philadelphia,” he muttered during a 2020 campaign debate. Philadelphia’s louche avatars include the unlettered Rocky Balboa as well as Gritty, the chaos-agent mascot of the NHL hockey team. “Nobody likes us, and we don’t care,” said another local hero, football player Jason Kelce, when the Eagles won the Super Bowl.

Philadelphians, I realized when I moved to this city 40 years ago, love to complain—about trash piles, potholes, sinkholes, unplowed streets, slow public transit, and asbestos-ridden public schools—while simultaneously claiming Philly’s mess as a badge of honor.

For much of its history, as Paul Kahan relates in his ambitious, impressively researched new volume Philadelphia: A Narrative History, the City of Brotherly Love (and, as locals add, Sisterly Affection) was the preeminent American city—the young country’s political, cultural, and commercial capital. Known as the “Athens of America” in the 18th and 19th centuries, the country’s most populous city became synonymous with innovation, elegance, and the high quality of its manufactured goods.

Not all of this lasted: New York City surpassed Philadelphia in population around 1800, the state capital transferred west to Harrisburg, and the United States capital, briefly located in Philadelphia, moved first to New York and then to the purpose-built Washington, D.C. Yet Philadelphia continued to be “a City of Firsts”: first public library, hospital, university, penitentiary, waterworks, steamboat, turnpike, and more.

One example of the city’s significance is the fact that, when he was preparing for his journey west, Meriwether Lewis came to Philadelphia for instruction on botany, zoology, and geology from the country’s leading scientists and departed with a wish list of specimens. And when a New York food manufacturer invented a new spreadable cream cheese, he branded it “Philadelphia” to signify excellence.

During the 19th century, Kahan relates, “the city became a bona fide tourist destination,” as much for its “cutting-edge technological and architectural achievements” as for what Mark Twain, who lived and worked in the city in 1853 and 1854, called its “Revolutionary associations.”

Today, Philadelphia’s fame centers on its role in the birth of the United States. Celebrated as the “Cradle of Liberty,” Philadelphia is the city where the Declaration of Independence was drafted, the Constitution was signed, and the Bill of Rights was forged. Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, the National Constitution Center, and the Museum of the American Revolution help draw 25 million tourists a year. As a “potent […] symbol,” Kahan writes, Philadelphia plays an outsized role in the American consciousness.

One of Kahan’s goals in writing his book is to “construct a broader narrative history” that looks beyond the colonial and revolutionary past. Yet Kahan is most insightful when he showcases the “variety of sometimes contradictory political and social causes” that have “mobilized the city’s history and historical buildings to promote their own agendas.” Throughout the book, politicians and dissidents alike gravitate to Independence Hall (which people began calling the old Pennsylvania State House in the 1820s) and the Liberty Bell (mute and disregarded until abolitionists embraced it as an emblem of “liberty for all”) as backdrops for their diverse campaigns.

On George Washington’s birthday in 1861, Abraham Lincoln stopped at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on the way to his inauguration and “ceremonially raised the US flag on the building’s flagpole [in] a symbolic rebuke to the Southern states” and their secession. Influential figures from Susan B. Anthony to Stokely Carmichael make cameo appearances throughout the book, rallying in Philadelphia precisely to point out the hypocrisies inherent in the founding documents. And in 1854, Philadelphia’s nativist party, which then controlled the city government, opened a museum to the Founding Fathers on the ground floor of Independence Hall “to marshal support for anti-immigrant policies.” Several such events in Kahan’s account “seem eerily contemporary even though they happened decades or even centuries ago.”

Perhaps because the ideals nostalgically attached to Philadelphia’s and the nation’s origin stories are malleable enough to be easily co-opted and manipulated by vested interests, Kahan downplays, and even debunks, any pretense of high-minded principles throughout his book. He is particularly dismissive of William Penn and the founding myth of Pennsylvania and the City of Brotherly Love as a “Holy Experiment,” a utopian colony that espoused religious tolerance and was open to anyone, regardless of race or creed. Instead, Kahan smartly and provocatively begins his book before Philadelphia’s official 1681 founding, with the first European settlements in the Delaware Valley in the early 17th century. He makes the case that the scattered polyglot and deracinated trading settlements of the Swedish, Dutch, Finnish, Scottish, English, and Welsh, co-existing with the native Lenape, laid the groundwork for the diversity that “has always been the defining characteristic of Philadelphia.” The immigrants who flocked to Penn’s newly minted colony from all over Europe merely “continued the de facto tolerance that had prevailed over the preceding half century.”

Penn’s Holy Experiment, in Kahan’s view, was always doomed to fail: “[T]olerance had its limits,” he writes, “and far from the peaceable (and profitable) kingdom Penn hoped to establish, Pennsylvania was riven by cultural and political conflict.” He particularly condemns Penn’s celebrated and, at the time, unusual gridded plan for what was then called a “greene countrie towne,” carefully sited by surveyor Thomas Holme between Philadelphia’s two rivers as “an attempt to shape Philadelphians’ behavior through the manipulation of space.”

This jaundiced view goes too far. Because Philadelphia first developed along the Delaware River waterfront, rather than extending west toward the Schuylkill—and because the lots that Penn envisioned, with ample space for gardens and trees, were quickly subdivided to accommodate the population influx—Kahan claims that Penn’s plan “utterly failed.” Upon Penn’s death in 1718, the city was nearly as crowded, filthy, and fetid as the London he had left behind. But nowhere in the book does Kahan say that, over the next centuries, Philadelphia’s Center City ultimately did adhere to Penn’s original vision: a symmetrical grid divided into quadrants, each with a gracious public square at its center that continues to support and adapt to the city’s vibrant life today.

Kahan also minimizes the accomplishments of Philadelphia’s other lionized local hero, Benjamin Franklin, who, like Penn, comes off less as a visionary genius than as a pragmatist who was dependent on the fickle political fortunes of his mentor and was thwarted by an obstructionist state assembly. Franklin founded such innovative institutions as the colonies’ first volunteer fire department and the first public hospital, but according to Kahan, these were merely “a response to the city government’s inability to provide services concomitant with Philadelphia’s needs.”

Indeed, throughout the book, Kahan counters nearly every lofty intention with accounts of the miserable daily life of most Philadelphia residents—and of the inept governments and often corrupt interests that contributed to those conditions. In the early chapters, I often felt like I was immersed in the narrative equivalent of a Bruegel cityscape, in which “the great men,” like Benjamin Franklin or Alexander Hamilton, are arguing over the future direction of the new nation while drunks are vomiting in the trash-strewn streets, prostitutes are luring visitors down dark alleys to rob them, the air and water are filthy, and disease and poverty run rampant.

All of which would make for a captivating urban portrait if Kahan had the literary skill to equal Bruegel’s artistry. Unfortunately, his prose style is serviceable at best, and his chapters, for the most part, proceed as a breathless parade of information that leaves little room for perspective, insight, or analysis. Tasked with compressing more than 400 years of history into a mere 278 pages, Kahan perhaps could not avoid such density. The result, however, can be head-spinning and exhausting.

To illustrate this tempo, I randomly selected a two-page spread and landed in the chapter “The Revolutionary City, 1765–1800.” A passage about the founding of seminal Black churches casually name-drops Richard Allen and Absalom Jones without naming their contributions as visionary activists, then careens to the next paragraph, an account of Philadelphia’s “active season of dances, balls, and other entertainments,” which leads in turn to Philadelphia’s role as “one of the world’s leading publishing centers” and a long list of publications and publishing houses. Kahan’s tendency to rattle off names and dates with the speed of a patter singer can yield strange juxtapositions. He recounts the country’s first hot-air balloon ascent in 1784, then segues into reporting that “the city continued offering seamier amusements, most including alcohol or sex,” which is followed by a new paragraph that begins “Life in Philadelphia remained filled with unexpected deaths and random misfortunes.”

From the subtitle, “A Narrative History,” I expected the story of Philadelphia to be told either through a cast of intriguing characters, like Russell Shorto’s engaging study The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America (2005), or by an engaging authorial voice, as Steven Conn adopts in a less overtly scholarly but ultimately more illuminating 2006 history, Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of the Past (also published by University of Pennsylvania Press). Instead, Kahan lays out his points with the dutiful clarity of an AP history student, beginning each new chapter with overly obvious topic sentences like: “Without a doubt, the most important event in nineteenth-century US history was the American Civil War.”

Still, within this book lies an intriguing, if anarchic, analysis of how cities are formed, not just by the top-down imposition of constitutions, charters, and “plans” that dictate spatial layout, nor by backroom deals and competing special interests. Throughout Kahan’s narrative, happenstance, miscommunication, and fecklessness lead to unintended consequences—from Philadelphia losing out on New Deal funding because the Republican mayor, J. Hampton Moore, wanted FDR’s plans to fail (an unpopular move that ended the Republican machine’s stranglehold on city politics) to the tragic MOVE bombing of 1985.

Yet Kahan expresses hope in his introduction that readers will leave the book with an understanding that history “is driven by individual choices made at a variety of levels. […] Philadelphia’s current reality did not just happen; it is the result of choices. A better future requires understanding the decisions that created the present.” He restates this same point in his final paragraph: “Nothing about contemporary Philadelphia and the challenges it faces are inevitable or preordained. Recognizing that fact leads to the inescapable conclusion that the city’s future is not set in stone.” He urges readers to understand the steps that led us to today in order to “see better, more just outcomes,” but I found myself at a loss for what particular lessons he wanted me to glean.

The aspect of Philadelphia: A Narrative History that I enjoyed most was discovering new trivia about my adopted hometown (like the origin of Philadelphia brand cream cheese). Otherwise, I came away depressed by the sense that Philadelphia started out a dysfunctional, contentious, and stagnant mess and continues to be so today. Plus ça change is a conclusion of sorts, but does little to open minds or inspire “just outcomes.” As antidote, I turned to Nathaniel Popkin’s 2008 book The Possible City: Exercises in Dreaming Philadelphia. No less clear-eyed about Philadelphia’s flaws than Kahan is, Popkin (like Steven Conn before him) nevertheless believes that Penn’s utopian ideals set Philadelphia apart: “We—all of us—thrown together in this most intimate of cities, are forced to negotiate difference, forced daily to confront the consequences of poverty and ignorance, forced to wonder if, at the end of the day, Penn’s utopia will ever be possible.” In Popkin’s Philadelphia, “tolerance presents itself as another beguiling dream.”

The experiment, in other words, is not yet over. The City of Brotherly Love, like its iconic Liberty Bell or the Bill of Rights, offers us an idea, not yet achieved but promised, a promise worth striving for.