Historic Philadelphia

he had a German accent and vowed to clean
up City Hall, was dubbed “the Old Dutch
Cleanser.” Mayor Blankenburg indulged in the
unheard-of practice of issuing contracts on
merit without graft, ensuring that he would
be a goner in the next election.
A defector from the Penrose machine who
leaned toward the Vare faction was elected
mayor on his forty-sixth birthday, November 2,
1915. He was Thomas B. Smith, the first
Philadelphia mayor to be arrested twice while
in office, a record that still stands. The first
problem arose in the 1917 elections. Vare and
Penrose candidates were vying for the fifth
ward council seat. At 10 a.m. on the day of the
primary, hired thugs attacked the Penrose candidate
at the polls at Sixth and Delancey. An
assistant district attorney who went to his aid
was blackjacked, and a policeman who tried to
stop the fight was shot and killed. The opposing
candidate, six policemen, five thugs, and
the mayor were arrested. Smith was charged
with conspiracy to commit murder. He was
tried and acquitted. The others were convicted.
Late in 1918, Smith was arrested in his
City Hall office, accused of malfeasance
because he fired Recreation Board members
who refused to uphold an appointment he
made. The grand jury didn’t indict him.
The Philadelphia Athletics won the World
Series in 1910, 1911 and 1913. The Phillies
lost the 1915 Series.
In 1914 Albert M. Greenfield, twenty-seven,
married Edna Kraus, daughter of a competitor
who disliked him. He had built a chain of
motion picture theaters, which he sold for $2
million in 1916. He contributed to the
Republican Party in effort and cash and was
elected to City Council in 1917. In that year, he
began handling the real estate business of the
Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company. He was
buying and selling large downtown buildings
and was a real estate power all over the city.
World War I caused coal shortages that led
to city-declared heatless days, trolleys skipping
every other stop to save electricity, and
shivering citizens raiding railroad coal cars.
Bread was scarce, causing customer fistfights
in bakeries. Butter was scarcer, and
Philadelphians learned to like margarine. The
city’s heavy German-originated population
worried as anti-German sentiment spread.
There were even low-level demands that
Germantown be renamed Libertyville. War
materials were turned out by Midvale Steel,
Baldwin Locomotives, Cramp’s Shipyard, the
Navy Yard, and Frankford and Schuylkill
Arsenals. Hog Island shipyard was erected in
947 acres of swamp in six months, big
enough to build fifty merchant ships at once
in a row that stretched a mile and a half along
the river. The yard turned out 122 ships, and
employed eighty thousand people. Several
✧
Left: James A. Bland died in a rooming
house on Wood Street near Tenth on May 6,
1911. He was an African-American
entertainer whose 1879 composition Oh,
Dem Golden Slippers has been the theme
song of Philadelphia’s Mummers for a
century. Bland graduated from Howard
University in 1873, and organized a singing
group that entertained Washington society.
Next, he starred with two minstrel troupes,
went to England with one of them in the
1880s, and became famous there. Some
accounts say he earned $10,000 a year in
the ’80s, as much as the vice president of the
United States. And he wrote hit songs
including Carry Me Back to Old Virginny
and In the Evening by the Moonlight.
The cause of his eventual decline is not
clear, but he returned to the United States,
broke and sick, and died alone.
COURTESY OF THE MUMMERS MUSEUM.
Right: The Quaker City String Band in the
early days of the Golden Slipper musical
tradition on Broad Street.
COURTESY OF THE MUMMERS MUSEUM.
CHAPTER V
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