My first hint that Philadelphia and Spruce Street and a Biddle needed a past to justify the esteem in which we held them, came from the spectacle of Mrs. Gillespie towering supreme above Philadelphians with far more familiar names than hers at every Centennial ball and in every Centennial Society, the central figure in the Centennial preparations and in the Centennial itself. I did not know her personally, but that made no difference. There was no blotting out her powerful presence, she pervaded the Centennial atmosphere. She remains in the foreground of my Centennial memories, a tall, gaunt woman, not especially gracious, apparently without a doubt of her right to her conspicuous position, ready to resent the effrontery of the sceptic who challenged it had there been a sceptic so daring, anything but popular, and yet her rule accepted unquestioningly for no better reason than because she was the descendant of Benjamin Franklin, and I could not help knowing that she was his descendant, for nobody could mention her without dragging in his name. It revolutionized my ideas of school and school books, no less than of Philadelphia. I had learned the story of Benjamin Franklin and the kite, just as I had learned the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, and of General Marion and the sweet potatoes, and other anecdotes of heroes invented to torment the young. And now here was Franklin turning out to be not merely the hero of an anecdote that bored every right-minded school-girl to death, but a person of such consequence that his descendant in the third or fourth generation had the right to lord it over Philadelphia. There was no getting away from that any more than there was from Mrs. Gillespie herself and, incidentally, it suggested a new reason for Biddles and Cadwalladers and Whartons and Morrises and Norrises and Logans and Philadelphia families with their names on the Assembly list. That they were the resplendent creatures Philadelphia thought them was not so elementary a fact as the shining of the sun in the heavens; they owed it to their ancestors just as Mrs. Gillespie owed her splendour to Franklin; and an ancestor immediately became the first necessity in Philadelphia.
THE DINING ROOM, STENTON
The man who is preoccupied with his ancestors has a terrible faculty of becoming a snob, and Philadelphians for a while concerned themselves with little else. They devoted every hour of leisure to the study of genealogy, they besieged the Historical Society in search of inconsiderate ancestors who had neglected to make conspicuous figures of themselves and so had to be hunted up, they left no stone unturned to prove their Colonial descent. It must have been this period that my Brother, Grant Robins, irritated with our forefathers for their mistake in settling in Virginia half a century before there was a Philadelphia to settle in and then making a half-way halt in Maryland, hurried down to the Eastern Shore to get together what material he could to keep us in countenance in the town of my Grandfather's adoption. It was soothing to find more than one Robins among the earliest settlers of Virginia and mixed up with Virginia affairs at an agreeably early date. But what wouldn't I have given to see our name in a little square on one of the early maps of the City of Philadelphia as I have since seen J.'s? And the interest in ancestors spread, and no Englishman could ever have been so eager to prove that he came over with the Conqueror as every American was to show that he dated back to William Penn, or the first Virginia Company, or the Dutch, or the Mayflower; no Order of Merit or Legion of Honour could have conferred more glory on an American than a Colonial Governor in the family; no aristocracy was more exclusive than the American founded on the new societies of Colonial Dames and Sons and Daughters of Pennsylvania and of every other State.
It was preposterous, I grant, in a country whose first article of faith is that all men are born equal, but Americans could have stood a more severe attack of snobbishness in those days, the prevailing attitude of Americans at home being not much less irreverent than that of the Innocents Abroad. In Philadelphia it was not so much irreverence as indifference. The habit of Philadelphians to depreciate their town and themselves, inordinate as, actually, was their pride in both, had not been thrown off. Why they ever got into the habit remains to me and to every Philadelphian a problem. Some think it was because the rest of the country depreciated them; some attribute it to Quaker influence, though how and why they cannot say; and some see in it the result of the Philadelphia exclusiveness that reduces the social life of Philadelphia to one small group in one small section of the town so that it is as small as village life, and has the village love of scandal, the village preoccupation with petty gossip, the little things at the front door blotting out the big things beyond. A more plausible reason is that Philadelphians were so innately sure of themselves—so sure that Philadelphia was the town and Philadelphians the aristocracy of the world—that they could afford to be indifferent. But whatever the cause, this indifference, this depreciation, was worse than a blunder, it was a loss in a town with a past so well worth looking into and being proud of and taking care of.
A few Philadelphians had interested themselves in their past, otherwise the Historical Society would not have existed, but they were distressingly few. I can honestly say that up to the time of the Centennial it had never entered into my mind that the past in Philadelphia had a value for every Philadelphian and that it was every Philadelphian's duty to help preserve any record that might survive of it—that the State House, the old churches, the old streets where I took my daily walks were a possession Philadelphia should do its best not to part with—and I was such a mere re-echo of Philadelphia ideas and prejudices that I know most Philadelphians were as ignorant and as heedless. But almost the first effort of the new Dames and Sons and Daughters was to protect the old architecture, the outward sign and symbol of age and the aristocracy of age, and they made so much noise in doing so that even I heard it, even I became conscious of a research as keen for a past, or a genealogy in the familiar streets and the familiar buildings as in the archives of Historical Societies.
If the Centennial had done no more for Philadelphia than to put Philadelphians to this work, it would have done enough. But it did do more. The pride of family, dismissed by many as pure snobbishness, awoke the sort of patriotism that Philadelphia, with all America, was most in need of if the real American was not to be swept away before the hordes of aliens beginning then to invade his country. In my opinion, the Colonial Dames, for all their follies, are doing far more to keep up the right American spirit than the flaunting of the stars and stripes in the alien's face and the lavishing upon him of the Government's paternal attention. The question is how long they can avoid the pitfall of exaggeration.
IV
If there was one thing in those days I knew less of than the past in Philadelphia, it was the present outside of it. Of my own country my knowledge was limited to an occasional trip to New York, an occasional visit to Richmond and Annapolis, an occasional summer month in Cape May and Atlantic City. Travelling is not for the poor. Rich Philadelphians travelled more, but from no keen desire to see their native land. The end of the journey was usually a social function in Washington or Baltimore, in New York or Boston, upon which their presence conferred distinction, though they would rather have dispensed with it than let it interfere with the always more important social functions at home. Or else the heat of summer drove them to those seashore and mountain resorts where they could count upon being with other Philadelphians, and the winter cold sent them in Lent to Florida, when it began to be possible to carry all Philadelphia there with them.
