Cities: Just Like the Old Days

For 67 uninterrupted years, a powerful G.O.P. machine ruled Philadelphia—and stole it blind. Then, in 1951, a group of young, liberal Democratic reformers threw the Republican rascals out of office. During the next years, the last 5½ of them under Mayor Richardson Dilworth, the reformers, with their programs for slum clearance, improved park and recreation facilities, and road construction, made Philadelphia a model of municipal progress. But as of last week able, aggressive Dick Dilworth was fighting for his political life as his aging reform administration was swamped by scandal.

Blueblooded Watchdog. Strangely, the man who exposed the scandals was a fellow Democrat, a onetime protege of Dilworth’s and an official in his administration. Like the mayor, City Controller Alexander Hemphill, 40, is a well-heeled blueblood with an Ivy League background (University of Pennsylvania ’43). The father of seven, he is the godfather of a Dilworth grandchild, and a fancier of Utrillo and Rouault prints. He also takes his watchdog job as city controller seriously —so seriously that when he decided to run for election in 1957, Dilworth tried to persuade him to withdraw. Says Hemphill: “I just told him to go to hell.”

Hemphill’s investigations of the city government’s spending and ethical practices at first seemed to be digging up only small potatoes: a Dilworth appointee was discovered holding two jobs; municipal employees were seen at a race track when they were supposed to be at work; city truck drivers were caught selling city paint; a private citizen’s driveway was paved at public expense. But Hemphill was a serious annoyance to Dilworth. “The crooks we can cope with,” cried Dilworth. “But it is these pious phonies we can’t handle.”

But the scandals multiplied and grew bigger. Last winter Hemphill’s auditors discovered that an automobile dealer had set up an elaborate shell game with a possible profit of $40,000 by selling new cars to the city, then buying back used cars at cut-rate prices after they had been conveniently “re-evaluated.” Dilworth fired the officials involved in the deal, but he was still unimpressed by Hemphill’s investigations. “It strikes me as a lot of penny-ante stuff,” he said in April—and left town on a round-the-world trip. While Dilworth was gone, Hemphill kept digging. He struck pay dirt.

Payola & Whisky. Eli G. Travis, a free-spending contractor, admitted that he had lavished a small fortune on friendly city officials who helped him to get contracts and did not inspect his work too closely. On one big job—$1,000,000 worth of repairs for an elevated transit line—city officials claim that he successfully swindled the public out of $800,000. In his various deals with city officials, said Travis, he had “paid out at least $75,000 in payola.” Travis testified that the chief of the Division of Architecture and Engineering and a former secretary had received $25,000. Another civil servant was rewarded with a gift of $4,000.

The city treasurer and two other officials accepted Christmas bottles of whisky, gaily gift-wrapped in $100 bills.

Last month, Mayor Dilworth hurried back to Philadelphia, ruthlessly fired every accused employee, no matter how lightly tainted. Three clerks were discharged for accepting $25 to $50 Christmas gifts. Last week, when Travis announced that he had given Public Property Commissioner William Gennetti a $50 golf bag, Gennetti denied the charge. Dilworth agreed that Gennetti was probably innocent, but accepted his resignation just the same and replaced him with a man who vowed to work without salary.

After Hemphill made his first big exposures, it seemed that nearly everybody in Philadelphia wanted to get into the act. The local press gleefully joined the chase, rocked the city with new revelations of corruption. The Republican Alliance, a G.O.P. reform group, hired three professional investigators to uncover more scandals. In court last week, Dilworth argued tearfully that there was no need for a grand jury investigation. The municipal government, he pleaded, could clean up its own messes. “We were lax,” he admitted privately. “We got so wrapped up in pushing our programs that we just assumed our civil service was fine.” But in the welter of scandal that surrounded him, there was reason to wonder whether Dilworth could survive politically. As a reformer at the head of a sullied reform administration, he may have to stifle his ambition to become Governor of Pennsylvania next year and settle for private life in Philadelphia’s swank Society Hill.