The Dark Winter Is Ending
Enfoque
22 February 2007 | Share:
William Penn’s utopia – do you see it through the grim post-industrial cityscape?
No, not the mythological “Greene Country Towne,” but rather Penn’s radical experiment in tolerance, openness, and liberty. Our founder sought not to conquer but to befriend, not to coerce but to free, not to close doors but to open them.
Today, for the first time in nearly a century, we can say those doors are finally open again. The dark winter of our history, during which Philadelphia functioned as a kind of closed society, appears finally to be ending.
Most importantly, the open doors give us the opportunity to reassert, in this age of ethnic hatred and violence, those original values.
In early Philadelphia political, legal, cultural, and moral boundaries were thrown to the wind. German, Portuguese, French, Spanish, English, and Lenape mixed on those streets in what may have been the most fertile moment in the western world since the Inquisition wiped out the Jewish-Muslim-Catholic nexus of Renaissance Spain. Here the first abolitionists mingled with the first black and female entrepreneurs, and women found in their new liberty unprecedented sexual freedom and power.
The documents this society produced – the Germantown anti-slavery manifesto, the first constitution of Pennsylvania, Paine’s Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence – are the markings of a society so open it seethed with brilliant possibility.
And thus our city harbored the awakening and the enlightenment all at once.
If the founding of our nation was our fiery summer, then the first winds of autumn blew sometime in the 1820s, when the Philadelphia port, some 110 miles from the Atlantic, could no longer compete with those of New York or Baltimore. In response, turning inward, we found markets for our goods in the south and built the railroads, to phenomenal profit, to get them there. But riots against blacks and Catholics suggested that Penn’s utopian experiment might be over.
The growth of industry – an Indian summer – calmed the ill winds. Publishing, manufacturing, the arts, and science (remember the Gross Clinic?) attracted thousands of immigrants every month, and Philadelphia flourished for all the skills it now possessed.
After the Centennial, when John Welsh installed the sculpture “Toleration” above the Wissahickon, Penn’s genius seemed restored. Soon after, Philadelphia reached the peak of its cultural influence when Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams found each other in the Quadrangle and sowed the seeds of modern poetry.
But since 1910, when about one of four Philadelphians was foreign-born, Philadelphia has slowly, steadily, through the dark winter of our history, closed its doors.
By 1980, immigration had nearly stopped: fewer than one in fifteen of us were foreign-born. In the parlance of psychology, we had stagnated. Our civilization, as any that is effectively closed to the world, had withered; our greatest hope became Moses Malone.
Turning further inward, angrier and more desperate, in 1985 we took to bombing our own citizens.
And yet, as if that MOVE explosion shook hard enough to bust the lock, folks began to come again. For the first time since 1910, the percentage of Philadelphians who are foreign-born began to increase, now to its highest level since 1950. They come from all over the world – Viet Nam, the Philippines, China, Mexico, Nigeria, the Ukraine, Ethiopia. Are they aware that they, like the rest of us, are the inheritors of Penn’s utopian experiment? It seems unlikely. They wish only to survive, save for the future, send money home. But on the street, on Castor Avenue, on Snyder, on Baltimore, on Passyunk, they bring energy, opportunity, ideas — the possible signs of our second spring.
This de facto openness has much at least in spirit to do with the current brimming sense of possibility. There are more plans, more ideas, more schemes for the reinvention of this city than during any previous period in my memory. City Hall is being slowly pried open; it is almost astonishing to realize that an entire reform slate of candidates will compete for Council this year.
Yet with one of four living in poverty and an equal proportion of 16-24 year olds jobless or out of school (that’s something like 50,000 idle young people), I’m hesitant to pronounce the arrival of spring. I can only say, as Thomas Paine did in 1776, “The sun
never shined on a cause of greater worth.”