If you watched Phillies play the Red Sox last Thursday
night, you saw them celebrating the club that won the National League pennant
in 1915. When I say celebrating I mean
there was banter about the price of milk and eggs in 1915 and some jokes about
the nicknames of some of the players. Oh
and they wore different hats! Which was
all fine and good because it’s hard to connect with something that happened
decades before our grandparents were born.
Everyone working in the organization now has at most only heard stories of that club, so there is no real
emotional connection. For one reason or
another, the Phillies have an aversion to any of their history before 1950.
I find this to be a failing of the club. Baseball is a game that plays as well in the
present as it does in the remembrances of the fans; more than any other sport
baseball has currency in its heroes. The
Phillies have done a poor job cashing in on their past. They’ve allowed the narrative around the club
to be dictated to them. And, yes, much
of the narrative is true: the club hasn’t enjoyed nearly as much success as
they have failure. But that shouldn’t
matter. The Cubs haven’t played in a
World Series since 1908 but they are known as the Loveable Losers. The Giants had over fifty years between World
Series wins, but they are one of the most prestigious clubs in baseball
history. The Cubs and Giants utilize
their history in a way that the Phillies don’t and are better for it.
I’ve wanted to build on to 21st and Lehigh for some time now to make it a more than
a blog that does analysis and recaps of the current Phillies. I love baseball and I love history, and I
really love Philadelphia’s baseball history.
Starting tomorrow and lasting through the rest of the season I will
combine these loves by recapping the 1915 Phillies. I want build a body onto the club, give it
more substance than the skeleton of statistics and black-and-white photos do. This will be an examination of Philadelphia
as a city coming out of the Industrial Revolution, American getting ready to
make a grand entrance as an international power, and the world as it’s engaged
in World War I; all through the lens of Deadball Era baseball in Philadelphia. This era is full of colorful players,
managers, and owners that deserve to be remembered for the contributions to the
game and establishing Philadelphia as a major league baseball city. It is through these people that we will take
a look back to see what life was like 100 years ago.
To begin, we have to orient ourselves with 1915. Philadelphia was the second biggest city in
the United States and its population was expanding like it never had before,
from 1.293 million people in 1901 to 1.684 million people by 1915. It was a city that Europeans had heard was
one of the bastions of the American Dream and they began moving to Philadelphia
in record numbers. Like in most cities
in America, the economy was booming; banking, food products, printing and
publishing, and textiles saw production increases during this period, all areas
that promised better and higher paying jobs. Though it was only the fourth biggest entry
port for immigrants, the overall amount of foreign-born people living in
Philadelphia jumped from 23% to 25% between 1901 and 1910. The city’s population of African Americans
doubled between 1900 and 1920, as well, including Alain LeRoy Locke, a Central
High graduate and the first black man to win a Rhodes Scholarship.
This influx of all of these “different” people wasn’t much
appreciated by the Philadelphians that had lived in the city for
generations. The nativism and racism of
the inhabitants meant that, as immigrants settled in ethnic neighborhoods in
the central and eastern portions of the city, the (mostly) white families that
had lived there began moving to the north and west. This was the first trickle of the white flight
that would come in the 1920s. Meanwhile,
the amount of cars in the city increased from less than 500 in 1905 to over
100,000 by 1918. The changes resulted in
the expansion of the infrastructure into new areas of the city. The first seven miles Roosevelt Boulevard
(then called the Northeast Boulevard) was constructed in 1914 to quench the
demand of people in the north to gain easy access to the center of
Philadelphia. The first subway was the
Market Street Subway, completed in 1907, began the process of moving west and
the citification of the western suburbs’ farms.
This was also the era of steel and concrete skyscrapers
dotting the skyline. New York and
Chicago had been building the mammoth structures for decades, but
Philadelphians had always thought that the amount of land surrounding the city
made them exceptional; in Philadelphia, the city could expand out, whereas New
York and Chicago were forced to build up.
As it turned out, the prices of land in the center of the city and the
fact that the recently begun infrastructure projects were only beginning to
provide access from the suburbs meant building up became advantageous in the
first decade of the twentieth century.
Philadelphia was just starting out in the pursuit as most other major
cities were decades into it.
But Philadelphia was in fact different than New York and
Chicago when it came to its neighborhoods.
It was more than just pride that bonded the Philadelphian to his
neighborhood; it was the fact that he or she was in a self-sustaining
ecosystem. Because of this
Philadelphia’s economy was much more segmented than the rest of America, each
neighborhood had many small businesses with factories and shops that
specialized in different goods and services, meaning there was little
conglomeration before 1910. It wasn’t
until this time that manufacturing began moving out of the city and
white-collar business moved in.
Even though all of these changes were taking place,
Philadelphia was dropping further and further behind the rest of the nation’s
big cities because of a unique feeling of superiority and defiance that made
the reluctant to evolve with the rest of the nation. Philadelphia had fallen into conservatism
that made change difficult. The city had
produced almost no artists or writers of note in the twentieth century because
there was no nurturing to be had for those types of pursuits. Philadelphia did have claim to plenty of people
that became famous in the arts, but only after they had left and established
themselves in another city. George
Biddle, a social realist artist born in Philadelphia in 1885 said,
“Philadelphia has its own brand of integrity.
It believes in itself; although there is nothing much any longer worth
believing in. It respects its own
standards, although these standards are inconceivably shallow and antedate in
great measure the birth of our nation.”
In fact, the only real area of society that Philadelphia was leading the
nation was in political corruption. McClure’s Magazine published a study of
corruption in the major cities of the United States in 1903, of which they
wrote of Philadelphia, “Other American cities, no matter how bad their own
condition may be, all point to Philadelphia as the worse – ‘the worst-governed
city in the county.’” From 1858 until
1951 there were only two mayors that were not part of the Republican political
machine. During that stretch of almost
100 years, jobs were given as rewards for bought votes, ballot boxes were
stuffed with fake voters, and bribes meant that the highest payer got the job
with little recourse for bad work, all while the public works suffered. And Philadelphians knew their politicians
were corrupt, but they also believed that a little corruption was to be
expected. They were like the frog in the
pot that doesn’t feel the water boiling around him until it’s too late.
Tradition was very strong in Philadelphia in the 1900s, even
if it was to the citizens’ detriment.
They liked things as they had always been and weren’t willing to hear
out a new idea. This was the beginning
of the decline of Philadelphia. It was
no longer a large port city, it was no longer a city of innovation, and it was
not longer a city of art. It was a city
stuck in its ways. The only exception to
this rule might be with baseball. As we
will see tomorrow, Philadelphians had enjoyed the game since before it was
organized. The city accepted many teams
during the nineteenth century, even those that were fly by night organizations
that popped up and were gone in a few years, as long as they were winning. The 1915 Phillies exemplifies this perfectly
because, as the major leagues as we now know them were established around 1901,
it was the Athletics that were the darlings of Philadelphia. But when the A’s took a nosedive in 1915 and
the Phillies prevailed, the city switched its allegiance to the National League
club. We will discuss this strange phenomenon
and much more as the season moves along.
Tomorrow, though, I will give a brief history of baseball in
Philadelphia as well as accounts from Opening Day 1915.
All information about Philadelphia is from Philadelphia: A 300 Year History, edited by Russell Frank Weigley, W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.
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