Historic Philadelphia

THE BICENTENNIAL CITY
WAR & PARTY CONVENTIONS
In 1940 the Republican National Convention assembled again at the old Convention Hall.
Wendell L. Willkie of Indiana, an erstwhile Democrat who became disenchanted with the New
Deal, was anointed to oppose Roosevelt’s unprecedented third term.
In the summer of 1941, Mayor Lamberton died of Lou Gehrig’s Disease, two months after
Gehrig did. He was succeeded by the president of City Council, Bernard Samuel.
News that the Japanese had bombed Hawaii reached Philadelphia on Sunday afternoon,
December 7. Mayor Samuel felt that some local response was called for, and ordered the police to
guard the Schuylkill bridges. No Japanese incursions were reported.
Young men began hustling off to military service. There were thirteen thousand enlistments in
the city by December 11. Factories began working around the clock; Baldwin’s plant had already
shifted from locomotives to sixty-ton tanks, and navy cruisers were under construction at both
Cramp’s and New York shipyards on the Delaware. Air raid sirens were tested on December 12. The
first test blackout was conducted on February 3, 1942. The city’s 33,354 street lights went out when
the air raid sirens sounded at 10:30. Cars pulled over and went dark. Hastily trained volunteer air
raid wardens patrolled every neighborhood. Homeowners had to have black curtains on windows
so lights wouldn’t show, and acquired stirrup pumps and buckets of sand in case the Japanese or
Germans dropped incendiary bombs. Rationing started, of sugar, meat, coffee, gasoline, tires, shoes.
Before the war’s end, nearly 184,000 Philadelphians had served in the armed forces, plus more
than 70,000 from the Pennsylvania suburbs and 50,000 from the New Jersey suburbs. The sixcounty
metropolitan area had more than 5,000 killed, nearly 3,500 from the city itself. In the
metro area, 12,000 men came home wounded, 2,300 had been prisoners of war, and as of the end
of 1945, another twenty-three hundred were still unaccounted for. People partied in the streets
when the Japanese surrender ended the war on August 14. Governor Arthur James declared a twoday
holiday; many industrial workers had been putting in seven-day weeks.
The future was changed in 1945 when Philadelphia native J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and Cincinnati
import John W. Mauchly, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Engineering, led a
team that put together ENIAC, the granddaddy of all digital electronic computers. That first
Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator (ENIAC) took up two large rooms, and depended
on eighteen thousand vacuum tubes which were constantly burning out; a graduate student with
a basket full of tubes was on endless vigil. Eckert and Mauchly formed their own company in
March 1946, gathered some young engineers from Penn and Drexel, and started work upstairs over
a furniture store on Walnut Street near Twelfth to create a Universal Automatic Computer: UNI-
VAC for short. The little company was sold to Remington Rand in 1950. On March 30, 1951, the
U. S. Census Bureau became the purchaser of UNIVAC I. One engineer on the project wrote, “On
that day, the computer industry was born.”
Republicans, Democrats and the new Progressives all held presidential nominating conventions in
Philadelphia in 1948. The GOP arrived in June, and nominated Thomas E. Dewey, widely expected
to be a shoo-in over the Democrat nominee, accidentally incumbent President Harry S Truman.
Former vice president Henry Wallace and some ultra-liberal leaders had whipped up a third
party. The Progressive Party also met in Convention Hall, on the evening of July 23, but the next
night nominated Wallace at Shibe Park before a crowd of twenty-six thousand, with folk singer
Pete Seegar providing some star quality. There was an admission charge, and the ballpark’s vendors
patrolled the grandstands hustling hot dogs and sodas.
Chairman of the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau, and influential in bringing the
two major party conventions to town, was Albert M. Greenfield. His influence on the city had
✧
The area around Independence Hall was
declared a national park in 1951, and
redevelopment created landscaping and new
construction. Old industrial buildings were
demolished to stretch a grassy mall
northward. The run-down residential blocks
south and east of Independence Hall were
restored. The old name, Society Hill, was
revived, and Mayor Dilworth showed his
faith that prosperous folks would move there
by building a house in 1957 on the east side
of Washington Square, next to the
Athenaeum. On the top is Independence
Hall as it appeared in the1950s.
Independence Hall as it appeared in the
1970s, after the mall was created, can be
seen on the bottom.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
CHAPTER VI
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