Philadelphia Story

Philadelphia is famed for dead heroes, delicate food and municipal mismanagement. Last week it got a new dead hero and a new delicacy. The hero: Samuel von Pufendorf. The delicacy: Bologna. The municipal mismanagement was still right there.

For 57 years a Republican machine has ruled and ruined Philadelphia. The police force has been undermanned, street lights failed, water out of taps has been so noisome that citizens took their drinking water from springs (TIME, Jan. 8, 1940). Latest chapter in the Philadelphia story went back to New Year's Day, 1940 when, amid the jingling of Philadelphia's Mummers' Parade, Robert Eneas Lamberton was sworn in as the city's new Mayor. Mr. Lamberton, a Republican but a nice one (gardening in Germantown, cards at the crusted Union League Club), did what he could. He replaced worn-out motorized equipment, enlarged the police force, got WPA to promise to fix the lights. Last summer he was getting around to the water system when he suddenly died.

There was no question of his successor: Bernard Samuel, short, swart, slick ward politician, who had long ago got himself elected to the Philadelphia City Council. As president of the Council he automatically succeeded to the Mayor's office.

Samuel comfortably settled down to the rest of Mr. Lamberton's four-year term. But the watchful Democrats, their senses sharpened by hunger, saw their chance and leaped in. The City Charter specifically said: a mayoralty vacancy must be filled at the next election.

The Democrats demanded that Philadelphia vote for a mayor at the elections next month. The argument finally went to the State Supreme Court (all Republican).

Last week the justices came out of their huddle. There were no nominees for the office, they triumphantly declared, and no legal way to name any. That a city of 1,014,128 registered voters could hold a write-in election and "select a Mayor by such a plurality or majority as will fairly express the public will is a manifest absurdity." When the application of a law is manifestly absurd, the law should be invalidated. The Court cited many a legal authority, for that principle. Among them: Samuel von Pufendorf.

Baron Samuel von Pufendorf, a German lawyer who died in 1694, had once made a pointed citation from the laws of Bologna that the rule "whoever drew blood in the streets should be punished with the utmost severity" should not extend to the surgeon "who opened the veins of a person that fell down in the street in a fit."

The Court ruled that Philadelphia could have no mayoralty election until Nov. 4, 1943. Until then, Mr. Samuel was in.

Democrats declared themselves "amazed and appalled." But on second thought they began to think they might not be so badly off. If they had been able to elect a mayor, the solidly Republican City Council would have hamstrung him, blamed him for everything. Now Mr. Samuel could stew in his own juice.

There was always plenty of juice. A badly needed $42,000,000 sewage-disposal project had had to be shelved because no one could figure out how to finance it. Local piers had been insultingly called fire traps by a member of the British Purchasing Commission. Philadelphians had become such indifferent citizens that only 200 of them had volunteered for jobs as air-raid wardens, fire watchers, etc. A languid District Defense Council had met once. Council members, after listening to the fears of wealthy Main Liners that their property would be "overwhelmed" during air raids by a "large panic population" from city districts inhabited by "persons of foreign birth," had adjourned sine die. Water out of Philadephia taps still stank.

Democrats calculated that, if they kept their heads down until 1943, they might yet break in. They figured that, no matter how Mr. Samuel sliced it, his administration would be bologna -- and not the Bologna to which Baron von Pufendorf and the Supreme Court referred.

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