This Day in Colonial History (Disgruntled But Divided Patriots Open First Continental Congress)

Sept. 5, 1774—Angered by a deteriorating relationship with the mother country, representatives from 12 of the 13 British colonies in North America convened in the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, taking a long but still not inevitable step towards the American Revolution.

Georgia, the lone holdout among the colonies, sent no delegates to the Congress because it needed royal troops to defend against attacks by Native Americans—underscoring the vulnerability that partly motivated Parliament’s increasing resort to taxation over the prior decade.

The delegates gathered in Carpenters’ Hall, home of what today remains, 300 years after its establishment, the oldest craft guild in the United States.

The congress came together in solidarity with Boston, which for the last several months had been punished by the administration of British Prime Minister Lord North for the Boston Tea Party protest of taxation without representation. 

The Coercive Acts (called the Intolerable Acts in the colonies) had ignited further protest by closing Boston Harbor until restitution was made for the dumped tea; abrogating the colony’s longtime charter; allowing British officials charged with capital offenses to be tried in England instead; and gave all colonial governors the right to requisition unoccupied buildings to house troops.

Parliament’s crackdown not just on the colonists’ exports but also their attempts at manufacturing led the delegates to debate how to implement a boycott of British goods.

Two days after the congress opened, Rev. Jacob Duché delivered an invocation--beginning a tradition of prayer in Congress that continues to this day. The delegates must have felt the necessity of it continually, because For much of the time before adjourning on October 26, they debated endlessly without moving much business. 

They were hamstrung from the outset because, as the first time the colonies had gathered for common action, no rules existed even for governing the proceedings.

But the divisions among them were not just deep, but multiple, involving splits:

*between large and small colonies;

*among loyalists seeking an accommodation with Britain, radicals like the Adamses of Massachusetts and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia who were concluding that independence was inevitable, and a more cautious group that wanted to see how events transpired;

*among speakers who had operated within the political environments of their own colonies but were unused to cooperating with others outside them.

Pennsylvania conservative Joseph Galloway, attempting to ward off passage of a resolution calling for boycotting British goods, outlined a “Plan of Union” in which any legislation would require approval by both Parliament and an intercolonial assembly.

At first, it appeared that Galloway’s plan would carry. But opinion shifted when the congress received the Suffolk Resolves transported from Massachusetts by Paul Revere. Patriotic leaders, circumventing the royal governor’s recent ban on town meetings, had gathered in Suffolk County and passed a set of resolutions calling on colonists to ignore the Intolerable Acts, elect militia officers, and conduct weekly drills to defend themselves.

Reconsidering their position on Galloway’s plan, the Philadelphia delegates now rejected his belief that Parliament had the inherent right to tax and govern the colonies. Just before it adjourned, the Continental Congress created a Continental Association that called for a ban on all trade between America and Great Britain of all goods, wares or merchandise.

Nobody who has witnessed the self-interested dickering and nitpicking over proposals that has occurred in our Congress should be surprised to hear that something like the same situation obtained 250 years ago in Philadelphia.

While seemingly far-reaching—it involved not just a ban on importing British goods but also African slaves and tax-bearing commodities from elsewhere in the world—even this ended up watered down by individual colonies’ demands (e.g., Virginia received the right to sell its tobacco for one more year, and South Carolina was permitted to ship rice, one of its most important exports, to Britain).

More significant, though, the delegates left the door open for further action. They agreed to wait to see how Britain reacted, and if there was no improvement in Lord North’s dealings with the colonies, to reconvene the following year.

Ultimately, it was Lord North’s stubbornness in treating the colonies like errant children that forced them to band together.

Great Britain’s refusal to compromise led to armed resistance at Lexington and Concord the following April, and the resumption of delegate business at the Second Continental Congress, only this time with a more drastic—though still not irrevocable—task at hand: how to organize armed resistance to the harsh new measures imposed from across the Atlantic without their content.

The First Continental Congress was notable both for who attended and who did not. Among the latter who would serve on the committee assigned to draft the Declaration of Independence nearly two years later: Benjamin Franklin, making a last-ditch attempt for reconciliation between the Crown and the colonies, and Thomas Jefferson, who, though too sick to travel to Philadelphia late in the summer of 1774, managed to complete A Summary View of the Rights of British America, a tract so acclaimed for its eloquence that it would lead him to be chosen to write the Declaration.

Among those who did attend the Congress: two future military leaders, George Washington, commander of the Continental Army, and, from New Hampshire, John Sullivan, the son of Irish Catholic immigrants, who became a brigadier general in the army.

One name that stuck out for me, from New Jersey, sounded awfully familiar, and that indeed turned out to be the case: Stephen Crane, great-great grandfather of the great American novelist famous for The Red Badge of Courage.

Movie Quote of the Day (W.C. Fields, With a Longtime Target)

[The town mob is about to lynch Twillie.]

Cuthbert J. Twillie [played by W.C. Fields]: “I'd like to see Paris before I die... Philadelphia will do.” — My Little Chickadee (1940), screenplay by Mae West and W.C. Fields, directed by Edward F. Cline

Quote of the Day (John Oates, on the Origin of ‘Philly Soul’)

“Philadelphia was the first major city north of the Mason-Dixon Line, and the first place that many African-Americans settled in. They brought their experience from the deep south, and it combined with the Anglo-Saxon, classical tradition from Europe that was already in the city. So that is how you come to get that sound, of these lush string accompaniments playing alongside an incredible rhythmic groove, which is the soul of the music.”—Singer-songwriter John Oates, quoted in Peter Aspden, “The Making of Philly Soul,” The Financial Times, Oct. 14-15, 2017

Peter Aspden’s interview with John Oates and musical partner Daryl Hall allows those two genre-benders to speak, articulately and passionately, about the whole arc of their careers, including, as here, their formative influences. But I wish the article could have explored in greater depth the producers and musicians who made such an indelible contribution to the music of the 1970s.

So, I’ll take up the task, in a list that is probably woefully incomplete: Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Thom Bell, the Spinners, the Stylistics, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, the O’Jays, Lou Rawls, Jerry Butler, Phyllis Hyman, Patti Labelle, and Billy Paul (whose “Me and Mrs. Jones” was covered by Hall and Oates in a barn-burner of a live performance in 2003).

(John Oates is pictured right with Daryl Hall, in this photo taken and pasted on Flicker by Gary Harris, Oct. 1, 2008.)

This Day in Scientific History (Franklin and Son’s Kite Experiment)

June 10, 1752—In the kite experiment with lightning that made him a transatlantic hero of Enlightenment science, Benjamin Franklin relied heavily on his son, a young man increasingly favored by his father despite the stigma associated with his illegitimate birth.  Two decades later, however, father and son received a shock worse than anything they encountered in their experiment when they found themselves on opposite sides in the colonies’ break with England.

No matter what your age, there’s a good chance that your image of Franklin comes from a painting or illustration showing him holding the kite aloft while William Franklin, a boy, watches in wonder. In fact, on that June afternoon in Philadelphia, William was the only witness to the event.

But much of the rest of the visual impression, like much of what we know about Benjamin Franklin, is enshrouded in myth. (That wouldn’t have surprised his jealous Continental Congress colleague John Adams, who, with time on his hands and frustration building as Vice-President, vented, in his often hilariously grouchy vein, to his friend Benjamin Rush: “The history of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the earth and out sprang General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod – and thenceforward these two conducted all the policies, negotiations, legislatures, and war.”)

For starters, William wasn’t a young boy but a 22-year-old man who had already distinguished himself for bravery in the colony’s militia. And he wasn’t a mere observer:  According to biographer Willard Sterne Randall, he had designed the kite himself, then run around in the pasture three times holding the kite. (At 46, Ben was in little condition to carry out the experiment himself; he was already putting on the weight that would, in old age, leave him painfully gout-ridden.)

In fact, this was not his first involvement with his father’s thinking about all of this. In the past several years, as Benjamin segued from the printing business that had made him rich and famous into an equally busy retirement as an inventor and politician, he had assigned William the task of gathering in glass bottles electricity from thunderstorms passing overhead.

William was there when his impatient father didn’t want to wait around in the summer of 1752 for completion of the steeple of Christ Church in order to conduct an experiment with lightning. A kite flying high in a storm, he reasoned, would serve just as well.

Call William a mere lab assistant, if you want, but that particular experiment wouldn’t have been done if he hadn’t been willing to put himself in harm’s way so his father could observe how the whole thing turned out from the safety of a shepherd’s shed.

None of this is to take away what Benjamin accomplished, with what he considered his most important invention: a lightning rod that saved countless colonial buildings and lives from the longtime hazard of fire. Making an impact on the international scientific scene should have been daunting for someone so advanced in age, lacking in formal education, and an ocean away from the Royal Academy of Science. Yet Franklin proved more than equal to the task. His achievements are memorialized in Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute Science Museum.

When I visited the museum several years ago, the cries of delighted children reverberated throughout, in no small way because of a dozen interactive exhibits. Many of the permanent exhibits revolve around subjects that fascinated Franklin: meteorology, communications, even sports. But the heart of the museum is the Franklin National Memorial—America’s official tribute to the Founding Father.

James Earle Fraser’s 20-foot marble high statue of Franklin dominates the museum’s rotunda. Surprisingly for such an epitome of bourgeois ideals, Franklin here resembles a Greek or Roman god. But perhaps it’s not entirely a fanciful notion: as the man who first fully explained electricity, then invented a life-saving lightning rod, Franklin was sometimes regarded as the American Prometheus, the tamer of nature’s most mysterious and terrifying power.

In loving, and frequently surprising, detail, Memorial Hall not only displays items associated with Franklin but delights in true arcana about the man. Many of Franklin’s possessions have been collected here, notably an odometer he used in establishing postal routes, a sword and scabbard he wore at the court of France, his composing table, and many of his original publications.

The focus, however, is on Franklin’s scientific achievements. Everyone knows about Franklin’s experiments with lightning and electricity, but he achieved many other scientific and technological “firsts”— first American printer to make molten type; first to invent bifocals; first to propose daylight savings time; even first to eat a French fry!

Puckishness, combined with an ever-questing curiosity, produced Franklin’s triumphs. He loved to play parlor tricks to show off recent discoveries. (Not that these demonstrations couldn’t embarrass Franklin--once, in checking equipment, he accidentally shocked himself, then begged the recipient of his letter not to disclose this secret.)

The modern world continues to benefit from Franklin’s innovations in ways he never conceived. His “long-reach arm,” for instance, allowed him to reach books on top shelves in his study without stepping on a ladder. In the twenty-first century, the “long-reach” cuts branches and pulls down merchandise in grocery stores.

The least introspective of men, Franklin often showed more interest in the natural world than in his own psyche. As soon as he saw a problem, nothing could stop his relentless search for a practical solution. 

While sailing back and forth from England in 1753, he wondered why there was a difference in the general ocean current and that of the Caribbean. As a result, he became the first to explain the existence of the Gulf Stream, leading to voyages from England to America being shortened by several weeks. He developed bifocals because he tired of carrying two pairs of glasses around all the time. His swim fins and flotation vests originated in his love for swimming. His stove used heat and fuel far more efficiently than those built up to that time.

In science as in business, Franklin frequently attained the most by working through others rather than by himself, however. One Memorial Hall exhibit highlights his crucial role in publicizing the first organized American observation of the Transit of Venus in 1753. He acted as influence and example to Philadelphia’s other great colonial scientist, David Rittenhouse.

America’s first internationally acclaimed scientist had high hopes of working most productively through his own son. After the lightning experiment, William became an important ally of Benjamin’s in promoting a plan for a united colonial effort to defend against attacks in the French and Indian War, as well as in transferring control of Pennsylvania from the descendants of William Penn to the crown. Benjamin watched with pride as his son apprenticed himself to a prominent Pennsylvania lawyer, then won appointment as royal governor of New Jersey, where he impressed many with his administrative ability.

Then, when Benjamin fell out with the crown over his conduct as London agent for the colonies, he was shocked to find that William had become a Loyalist. William, seized by the patriots and thrown into prison for a few years, suffered so badly in body and mind (his wife died while he was incarcerated) that even George Washington was moved to write on his behalf. But Benjamin refused to intervene, the Continental Congress dropped any notion of intervention, and William continued to languish in prison.

A couple of years after the war ended, father and son met for one last time in London, but the atmosphere resembled a tense business meeting more than a family reunion.  A once-close partnership that produced one of the world’s great advances in science and safety was irretrievably shattered.  

This Day in Philadelphia History (Ben Franklin Mourned by City, Not Congress)

April 21, 1790—Approximately 20,000 people—half of Philadelphia’s population—turned out to pay last respects to Benjamin Franklin, who came to the city as a runaway 17-year-old indentured servant, going to become an international symbol of the Enlightenment and, in the words of biographer Walter Isaacson, “the first American.” A deist, Franklin privately doubted the divinity of Christ. But he not only never publicly disparaged any religious faith, but whenever the city’s churches launched a fundraising drive, he always contributed—even to Roman Catholic and Jewish houses of worship, when those religions were still barely tolerated. Not surprisingly, then, representatives of the city’s major religions not only paid tribute to Franklin at his passing but led the procession to Christ Church, the Anglican (later Episcopal) Church he attended whenever he was in town—and whose steeple he had financed with three lotteries he organized. Though the mourning for the 84-year-old patriot was intense and widespread, it was not universal. Philadelphia honored a printer, publisher, best-selling author, postmaster, entrepreneur, philanthropist, educator, scientist, inventor, musician, politician, and diplomat who left his thumbprint on the City of Brotherly Love, and even beyond. The Surprising Group of Franklin-phobes But anyone with that amount of energy is bound to cross someone who interferes with all this ceaseless striving, or even calls it into question. One such person with decidedly mixed feelings for “Dr. Franklin” was his illegitimate son, William Franklin, exiled in England and disowned by his father for loyalist sympathies as royal governor of New Jersey at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War favored by Benjamin. Five years after their last, strained meeting, Franklin couldn’t resist dissing his son in his last will and testament: “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavored to deprive me of.” Somewhat more surprising to today’s Americans, the Congress of the new republic that Franklin helped bring into being did not honor him. According to Gordon S. Wood’s The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, a resolution introduced by James Madison in the House of Representatives, calling for a month of national mourning for his aged colleague at the Constitutional Convention, sailed through the House. But when the same measure was introduced in the Senate, it was denounced immediately by Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut. Richard Henry Lee (yes, of the famed Virginia dynasty) had tangled with Franklin in the Continental Congress. Lee’s New England ally, John Adams—who, as Vice-President, presided over the Senate—was even more resentful of Franklin, having not only disagreed with his style of diplomacy in winning the French to the American side in the war and then negotiating the peace with Britain, but also feeling jealous of him and George Washington for the credit they received as the ones crucially responsible for the success of the revolution. Remember, again, that the resolution was now in the U.S. Senate. It’s been said that Willie Mays’ glove is where triples went to die. The Senate is where House measures go to die. And that’s what happened this time, too. The City as Franklin’s Social Science Laboratory No matter. If his son and many colleagues had issues with Franklin, that feeling is not shared today, as I discovered repeatedly on a visit to Philadelphia four years ago. A Boston native, Franklin remained an unapologetic city dweller all his days (including in London and Paris, where he served in crucial lobbying and diplomatic posts for nearly 30 years). While Washington and Jefferson were country aristocrats, Franklin delighted in Philadelphia, refusing to leave it even during its sweltering (and disease-inducing) summers. The issues that Franklin confronted early in his career—safety, health, poverty and education—resulted from his city’s expansion. His solutions--among them fire insurance, inoculation campaigns, and the University of Pennsylvania--represented a pioneering attempt at urban planning— a fresh approach to making the city more livable. If, as many historians maintain, Franklin was America’s first great scientist, then Philadelphia was his social science laboratory. Three centuries of fame and moral injunctions (“early to bed and early to rise…”) turned Franklin for a long time into a figure scorned either for platitude-spinning or for ceaseless womanizing. My tour of Philadelphia’s proudly preserved cobblestone streets revealed a Franklin more vital and complex than either Sunday-school teachers or revisionists acknowledge. Although his tolerance and wit continue to endear him to Americans, his drive and tangled family relationships also remind us of his frailties—a person closer to all of us. The Only Home Franklin Owned The best starting point for Franklin’s Philadelphia is Market Street—called, when he first came here, High Street. Conveniently located near Independence Hall, this section of the city is also where he worked and lived. Delicatessens, Italian restaurants, and service businesses have taken the place filled in the eighteenth century by tailors, saddle-makers, joiners, wig-makers, innkeepers and printers. But Market Street still beckons to newcomers just as it did on the morning of Franklin’s arrival, when he walked up this hothouse commercial district, with one loaf of bread tucked under one arm, a second loaf crammed into a jacket pocket, and a third stuffed in his mouth. Future wife Deborah Read burst out laughing at the sight. Today, on the same street, Franklin Court, run as part of Independence National Historic Park, commemorates the drive that made him rich and famous. Yet it also underscores the fragility of even his dreams for his posterity, for in a city that has gone to enormous lengths to preserve its past, his home was razed only twenty-two years after his death. In fact, the only building associated with Franklin that remains standing today is at 36 Craven Street in London, in the country he rebelled against. When Franklin Court was excavated in the 1950s, it was an alleyway running from Chestnut to Market Streets known as Orianna Street. With no building contract or architectural plan surviving and little physical evidence, the architectural team on the project decided they did not want to make something that was inaccurate or misleading. Instead, they preserved what they could and erected a structure that was frankly conjectural. Behind the alley, a “Ghost Structure” sweeps over Franklin Court. Architect Robert Venturi designed painted steel frames that suggest Franklin’s house and print shop, with quotations set into the pavement. Many items in the reimagining of his home would have been familiar to Franklin: flower beds, gravel and brick pathways, benches, fences, garden walls, and a mulberry tree mentioned in his correspondence. Of 13 houses Franklin lived in, Franklin Court was the only one he ever owned. Building began in 1765, supervised by Deborah, since Franklin was serving in London as an agent for several colonies. It embodied his typically practical maxim, “If you are going to build a house, build it modern.” Franklin, Uncharacteristically, at Rest Nearly a decade as Philadelphia’s colonial agent in London, then nearly another as a diplomat abroad, took Franklin away from the city he loved. During that time, a lonely Deborah died. Following a wearying, two-year battle with pleurisy and gout, Benjamin joined her in death sixteen years later and was laid to rest on Fifth and Arch Streets, in the graveyard of Christ Church. In addition to his own grave and those of his daughter and son-in-law, Franklin’s plot also contains the remains of Deborah and their son Francis, whose death from smallpox at the age of four devastated his father—and, predictably, launched him on a crusade for inoculation against the disease. More than 4,000 people are buried in the graveyard. During my visit, I spotted numerous flags across the soggy ground, indicating the final resting places of generals, admirals, politicians, and signers of the Declaration of Independence. Only 1,400 of the graves bear inscriptions. Many of the sandstone grave markers have disintegrated as a result of weather and pollution damage. The lettering in Franklin’s original tombstone has been retouched at least twice, much like his image has been continually revisited by generations of historians. I chuckled at all the pennies dropped on his tombstone, in homage to perhaps his best-remembered aphorism, “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Like his resting place, Franklin’s impact on his city and country is in no danger of fading from Americans’ memories.

This Day in Film History (Grace Kelly, Pride of Philly, NYC and Irish America, Born)

November 12, 1929—Even before becoming Her Most Serene Highness, Princess of Monaco, Grace Kelly—born on this date in Philadelphia—gave the appearance to her less attentive fans, with that stunning blonde hair and white gloves, of being born to an American aristocracy. Others—particularly Philadelphians and Irish-Catholics—knew that the heritage of the proper lady could be traced, not that far back, to far less comfortable circumstances in County Mayo, Ireland.

I hadn’t been aware that today would have been Princess Grace’s 80th birthday until I received an e-mail from my college friend Steve Irolla—Rabelaisian blogger, cunning cruciverbalist, film fan, galloping gourmand, tour guide extraordinaire, king of the world, master of the universe, and maybe one or two other things I’ve forgotten because of encroaching age. (You can read about my earlier adventures with my friend here.)

Steve reminded me that, though she is indelibly associated with Philadelphia, Hollywood and Monaco, the woman who became a byword for poise and glamour in films like Rear Window and High Society was resided for a while with New York, where she lived—in the Barbizon Hotel for Women—while she was modeling and taking her first tentative steps into acting. And we in the New York area can claim a distinction that none of the other aforementioned cities can: she stayed here during the pivotal period of her life, when she was trying to escape her testosterone-heavy family legacy.

Now, it’s true that Kelly was born to a life of privilege, but just remember: royals (or what passes for them here in the states) don’t always have it easy, even with all those estates, horseback-riding lessons, etc. The princess was speaking only the truth when she told future biographer Donald Spoto during a 1975 interview: "The idea of my life as a fairy tale is itself a fairy tale."

It was Kelly’s bad luck that her father, John B. (Jack) Kelly Sr.—the world-class sculler who wreaked vengeance on the British for banning him from the Henley-on-Thames Rowing Regatta by beating the champion of the event at the 1920 Olympics—treated her in much the same manner as Prince Philip of Great Britain acted toward Prince Charles as a young man: i.e., unfeelingly. Handsome, muscular, a millionaire contractor, Jack dominated his household, where there was no real place for an unathletic female. (Son Jack Jr. went on to win the Henley Regatta from which his father had been banned.) Jack and her mother, a former model, frowned upon her wish to become an actress.

Fortunately, Grace looked slightly afield to find a mentor to help her satisfy her aesthetic instincts: her uncle George Kelly, who first took Broadway by storm (the Pulitzer Prize-winning Craig’s Wife) before heading out to Hollywood. The bohemian, unmarried (widely speculated to be homosexual) George could not have been more like his brash brother, and it was in one of his early plays, a satire of the 1920s “little theater movement,” The Torch-Bearers, that Grace made her professional debut.

In the second half of the 20th century, Grace (was there ever a more appropriate first name)? shared pride of place with Jacqueline Kennedy as an American Catholic woman who symbolized elegance and allure at the intersection of the arts and politics. Posthumous gossipy revelations (all those alleged affairs by their husbands, and maybe even their own) have done noticeably little to decrease the affection that so many Americans feel for them. Perhaps that’s because they embody, far more truly than Marilyn Monroe, the Bernie Taupin lyric from Elton John’s hit “Candle in the Wind”: “You had the grace to hold yourself while those around you crawled.”

The lives of both women, it might be said, were divided in half by a single event that fixed their images with the public until their deaths: Grace’s marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco, and Jacqueline’s stoicism as a widow at the funeral of her assassinated husband.

Both women would have been wildly out of place in our current confessional era. Perhaps they did so out of the desire to protect themselves and their families, but, by staying within their zone of privacy, they retained their aura of mystery and fascination well after their deaths.

The lives of the two women did intersect memorably in one brief, funny incident. It was related by Jacqueline’s mother, Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss, in an oral history now posted on the Web site of the JFK Library in Massachusetts.

Just as she was about to tell the story, Mrs. Auchincloss—perhaps wondering how appropriate it was to relate this tale less than a year after the death of the President--wondered “whether this should be on the tape,” then plunged ahead anyway:

After Senator Kennedy had an operation in 1953, Jacqueline would visit him at the end of the day in the hospital. At one point, Kelly told Jacqueline that she’d never met Jack, whereupon the latter hatched a prank: She persuaded the actress to don a nurse’s cap and uniform, visit JFK's room, and pretend to be the night nurse.

The heavily medicated senator—who had been complaining about his aged nurses—awoke to behold a far different sight this time. “I don’t know what Jack was doing,” Mrs. Auchincloss recalled, “but he must have been rather electrified when she announced that she was the new night nurse.”

The future randy President must have thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

This Day in Theater History (Philly Stage Opens Despite Quaker Opponents)

June 25, 1759—The first playhouse to be built in Philadelphia, the Society Hill Theatre, opened on the southeast corner of Vernon and South Streets, just beyond the city limits of the time, all the better to avoid the ire of Quakers who had sought every means to contain what they perceived as a moral pestilence.

In October 2005, while attending a delightful performance of the musical Finian’s Rainbow at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre, I marveled at all the memorabilia downstairs in the bar, called, appropriately enough, Barrymore’s Café. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the City of Brotherly Love was the first important theater center in the American colonies.

Surprisingly, though, the tolerance for which the city was becoming famous was not very much in evidence at all in the half century it took to get any kind of enduring theater built at all there.

Now, you’d expect that kind of hostility from the Puritans, whose idea of fun was to hang witches in Salem, drive out heretics they didn’t like, and, because Prozac hadn’t been invented yet, spend countless hours confiding their deepest fears to their diaries instead of psychiatrists or bartenders.

Indeed, as I noted in a prior post, Samuel Adams represented a particularly virulent form of this killjoy during the American Revolution and shortly afterward, even seeking to deny theater as a much-needed psychological release to the men fighting for independence against Great Britain.

But the Society of Friends represented another matter entirely. As late as 1785, at a yearly meeting, the Friends were being warned to “avoid the attendance of vain sports, and places of amusement which divert the mind from serious reflection, and incline it to wantonness and vanity.”

Before the Society Hill Theatre went up, then, the dramatic muse had a distinctly checkered history with the Quakers:

* From 1700 to 1713, on three different occasions, the Provincial Assembly, at the behest of the Quakers, passed laws banning “stage plays, masks and revels,” only to be forced to repeal them.
* James Logan, mayor of the city, complained in a 1723 letter that the “sober people” of the town wanted him to ban itinerant players from passing through—a real political problem, as Governor William Keith loved such performances.
* In 1749, the same year that the first actors’ performance was held in the city—Joseph Addison’s tragedy Cato—the Common Council urged magistrates on toward “sending for the actors and binding them to their good behavior.”

I don’t understand, I hear you saying. What’s the big deal with a little fun?

Well, to some extent, the reputation that theaters had developed in Europe as dens of sin and decadence carried over here. A good girl didn’t go to these establishments. But Pennsylvania’s Common Council listed other reasons, too, for the prohibition, noting “the encouraging of idleness and drawing great sums of money from weak and inconsiderate people.”

That was the state of affairs when David Douglass took it upon himself to build, at last, a playhouse in this great colonial urban center.

If you want to know the truth, Douglass was hardly the Olivier of his time, let alone his own troupe (which, within four years, would be known as the American Company). That honor belonged to his stepson, Lewis Hallam Jr., who became the earliest known American actor to tackle Hamlet. (He’s the guy in the image accompanying this post.)

Nor was Douglass a great box office draw. That distinction belonged to his wife, young Hallam’s mother, who was still enough of a looker to play decidedly younger women (and all this before cosmetic surgery).

But other words come to mind besides “stars” when it came to Douglass, words with their own peculiar magic that came in handy when dealing with difficult people: “tactful,” “elegant,” and “gentleman.” Two government officials found these qualities particularly endearing:

* Governor Denny, who allowed Douglass to proceed, with the stipulation that the soon-to-be dubbed "American Company" stage a benefit for the Pennsylvania Hospital (which they were happy to do); and
* Judge Allen, who, after ruling in favor of Douglass, remarked that he’d sometimes learned more about morality from plays than from sermons.

Douglass became the colossus of American theater in the two decades before the Revolutionary War, keeping the dramatic arts alive despite the periodic need to hitch up and move elsewhere because of the disapproval of bluenoses. At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, he left for Jamaica, where he became a magistrate on the island. After the war’s outbreak he was forced to flee to Jamaica, where he died in 1786.

This Day in Business History (Nicholas Biddle, Prototype of the Reviled Central Banker, Dies)

February 27, 1844—Nicholas Biddle, who, as head of the Second Bank of the United States, was once the most important financial official in the antebellum republic, died in disgrace at age 58, his fortune lost and saved from jail by a technicality.

I touched briefly on the Second Bank in my post on Henry Clay’s censure resolution against Andrew Jackson, which had been prompted by the President’s war against that financial institution. But Biddle’s story deserves further exploration.

The go-go years of Wall Street that have so recently and painfully ended didn’t begin with the Reagan Revolution, nor even with the bull market that ended with the Great Depression.

If you want a prototype of the wunderkinds who long ruled The Street before they fell to earth, look no further than to this scion of a famous Philadelphia family, who for a decade bestrode America’s business and political landscape before running into a figure with a will that exceeded his own—Jackson.

Nowadays, Biddle is far less well-known than the mastermind behind the First Bank of the United States, Alexander Hamilton. I don’t think that is because of the precedents set by Hamilton, his part in founding the republic, his epic clash with Thomas Jefferson, or even his tragic duel with Aaron Burr.

More important, Hamilton left behind institutions and a philosophy that have endured. As Gordon S. Wood, the colonial historian, noted in Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, the republic we live in today—one with a powerful military, backed by high finance—is preeminently the one envisioned by Hamilton. 

On the other hand, Biddle was so utterly crushed, both by Jackson and his own folly, that, for all his manifest gifts, he left no historical footprint like Washington’s great Secretary of the Treasury.

To be sure, the two men possessed an enormous amount in common. That propelled both men to the top, where they encountered a host of enemies.

But it’s the difference between them—integrity—that has made the difference in how they are remembered. In history as in life, character counts.

Through much of his career, Biddle matched Hamilton in precocity, intellect, ambition, literary flair—and, finally, political recklessness. Consider the following similarities:

* Promise at a young age—Hamilton came to the attention of elders through his work as a sharp-eyed shipping clerk in the West Indies; Biddle enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania at age 10, then, when that school balked at graduating him quickly, he moved on to the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), where he spoke as valedictorian of the class of 1801, at age 15.

* Son-in-laws of wealthy men—Hamilton married a daughter of wealthy upstate aristocrat and Revolutionary War General Philip Schuyler; Biddle, who, coming from a prominent old Philadelphia Quaker family, did not need the social connections as much as the up-from-nowhere Hamilton, still managed to do well by wedding the daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia merchant named John Craig.

* Personal magnetism—Neither man was particularly tall but struck all who met them with their conviviality and good looks. Hamilton had such an eye for the ladies as a dashing young officer that Martha Washington called her tomcat “Alexander Hamilton”; Biddle made his own vivid impression with his chestnut hair, flashing eyes and fair complexion.

* Writing talent—Though he died before his 50th birthday, Hamilton wrote so much that his collected papers number 27 volumes. Biddle’s public life began with a well-received history of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and he served as an editor of the literary journal Portfolio.

* Protégé of a President—At least partly through their writing skill, both men came to the attention of influential mentors. Hamilton served on the staff of General George Washington in the American Revolution, then kept his chief’s loyalty when his plans as Secretary of the Treasury came under attack by Thomas Jefferson. James Monroe, who as American envoy to Great Britain became impressed by Biddle’s skill as his secretary, saw in him someone who could keep a steady hand on the Second Bank of the United States, nominating him as a director. (Having destroyed Hamilton’s bank, the Democratic-Republicans rued their folly when they had no major financial institution with which to fund the War of 1812.)

* Legal backgrounds—Hamilton and Biddle were lawyers before they became masters of finance—and, in certain ways, what they learned about the importance of contracts stood them in good stead as they built their mighty financial institutions.

As head of the Second Bank, Biddle presided over a revival of American commerce after the War of 1812. By issuing uniform currency, it ensured stability. By issuing interregional loans, it helped expand the republic to the limits of the frontier.

Had John Quincy Adams won reelection in 1828, all would have been well for Biddle and the imposing Greek Revival building on Philadelphia’s Walnut Street from which he directed the nation’s financial activities. 

Adams and Secretary of State Henry Clay both believed in the “American System” of protective tariffs and federally sponsored internal improvements, which called for the kind of strong central financial direction that Biddle’s bank could have provided.

But Jackson won that hotly contested race, and Biddle’s refusal to take seriously well-substantiated charges that several bank branches had shown favoritism toward Adams supporters put him on the radar screen of a new President already disposed to view bankers with suspicion. (Involvement with a Philadelphia speculator in 1795 nearly ruined Jackson.) 

It didn’t help that Biddle kept "on retainer"—i.e., bribed—such major politicians as Senator Daniel Webster.

Here is another way in which Biddle resembled Alexander Hamilton: an astonishing capacity for political miscalculation. Hamilton’s hotheaded denunciation of President John Adams for pursuing a peace overture from France opened the way toward victory by the Democratic-Republicans, and his own increasing political marginalization before his death. 

Likewise, Biddle’s decision to seek early renewal of the Second Bank’s charter (Jackson would never reject the charter during an election year, he guessed wrongly) spelled doom for him and the bank.

We need not go into the long, circuitous fight over "The Bank War" (which, if you want more detail, is recounted in this excellent episode of the NPR series "Planet Money.") 

What concerns us here is what it meant for Biddle. He thought he could prove the indispensability of the Bank by curtailing credit. All this did was provoke a downturn and prove Jackson’s point that the financial institution was dangerous.

By the end of 1834, Biddle’s credit-curtailment policy had proved so calamitous that he had to duck angry mobs in the city where he and his family had once been hailed.

After Jackson crushed the Second Bank, Biddle attempted to kept it going as a commercial institution, the U.S. Bank of Pennsylvania. But his old financial wizardry failed him, when—in a forerunner of our recent financial disaster—he authorized a series of risky loans.

One Biddle scheme—using bank funds to corner the market on cotton—led to utter catastrophe, as he and other directors were indicted for fraud and theft. He got off with the help of his lawyers, but investors lost faith in the bank, and Biddle's reputation was ruined. 

He spent his last years on Andalusia, the estate his father-in-law had built. In the acid words of poet-editor William Cullen Bryant, Biddle lived out his life “in elegant retirement, which, if justice had taken place, would have been spent in the penitentiary.”

It’s a short, perilous path from power brokering to white-collar indictment—one repeated years later by another purported Pennsylvania financial wizard, Andrew Mellon. 

Charges were also dismissed against Mellon, posthumously (though his recent biographer David Cannadine has argued convincingly that the real offense of the longtime Republican Secretary of the Treasury was conflict of interest rather than tax fraud).

Biddle was right that the nation needed central financial direction. But his career demonstrated the charges of opponents such as Jackson that such an institution was also a breeding ground for corruption that endangered the republic. 

The eventual structure of the Federal Reserve—12 independent regional banks with a central board—sought to recover the strengths of the institution that Biddle created but with crucial checks on its authority.

And here, a final word on Biddle's crucial difference with Hamilton. 

Though his involvement with Maria Reynolds ignited America’s first political sex scandal, Hamilton never benefited financially from any of the financial schemes he proposed. (It’s instructive to compare his private legal practice with that of Burr. Once, working on the same case, Hamilton charged a client considerably less for the same work amount of work put in by Burr.) 

Honor was so central to the man dubbed “the bastard son of a Scotch pedlar” by John Adams that he risked his life for it.

In contrast, Biddle became so intoxicated by his power that he used his office to maintain his control at all costs—and he lost everything in the process, including his good name.