Our Philadelphia

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

CITY HALL FROM THE SCHUYLKILL

I wondered at first why so many people had fled to the country, why so many signs "For Sale" or "For Rent" were to be seen about Spruce and Pine and Walnut Streets. Various reasons were given me:—with the Law Courts now in the centre of the town and the new Stock Exchange at Broad and Walnut, and stores everywhere, nobody could live in town; the noise of the trolleys is unbearable; the dirt of the city is unhealthy; soft coal has made Philadelphia grimier than London; the motor has destroyed distance;—excellent reasons, all of them. But it was not until I discovered the Russian
Jew that I understood the most important. It is
the Russian Jew who, with an army of aliens at his back—thousands upon thousands of Italians, Slavs, Lithuanians, a fresh emigration of negroes from the South, and statistics alone can say how many other varieties—is pushing and pushing Philadelphians out of the town—first up Spruce Street, nearer and nearer to the Schuylkill, then across the Schuylkill into the suburbs, eventually to be swept from the suburbs into the country, until who can say where there will be any room for them at all? With the Russian Jew's genius for adapting himself to American institutions, I could fancy him taking possession of, and adding indefinitely to, the little two-story houses that already stretch in well-nigh endless rows to the West and the North, Germantown and West Philadelphia built over beyond recognition. I remember when, one day in a trolley, I had gone for miles and miles between these rows—each little house with the same front yard, the same porch, the same awning, the same rocking-chairs—I had a horrible waking nightmare in which I saw them multiplying—as the alien himself multiplied beyond the most ardent dreams of Mr. Roosevelt,—and creeping out further and further, across the city limits, across the State, across the Middle West, across the prairies, across the Rockies, across the Sierras, until at last they joined East to West in one unbroken line—one great, unbroken, unlovely monument to the enterprise of the new American, and the philanthropy of the old: while only the Russian Jew at the door of the State House, like Macaulay's New Zealander under the shadow of St. Paul's, remained to muse and moralize on the havoc he had wrought.

CHESTNUT STREET BRIDGE

This may seem a trifle fantastic, but I should find it hard to give an idea of how impossibly fantastic the prevailing presence of the alien in Philadelphia appeared to me. To be sure, we had our aliens a quarter of a century ago. But they were mostly Irish, Germans, Swedes. The Italian at his fruit-stall was as yet rather the picturesque exception, and I can remember how, not very long before I left home, the whole town went to stare at the first importation of Russian Jews, dumped down under I have forgotten what shelter, as if they were curiosities or freaks from Barnum's. But now the aliens are mostly Latins, Slavs, Orientals who do not fit so unobtrusively into our American scheme of things, and who come from the lowest classes in their own countries, so ignorant and degraded most of them that, what with their increasing numbers and our new negro population from the South, there are people in Pennsylvania who are trying to introduce an educational test at the polls—America having learned the evil of universal suffrage just as England is coquetting with it.

IV

The rest of Philadelphia—the rest of America, for that matter—may be accustomed to this new emigration to my town as well as to all parts of the country. But I had not seen the latter-day alien coming in by every steamer, and gradually, almost imperceptibly, establishing himself. The advantage, or disadvantage, of staying away from home so long is that, on returning, one gets the net result of the change the days and the years bring with them. Those who stay at home are broken in to the change in its initial stages and can accept the result as a matter of course. I could not. To be honest, I did not like it. I did not like to find Philadelphia a foreign town.

I did not like to find Streets where the name on almost every store is Italian. I did not like to find the new types of negro, like savages straight from the heart of Africa some of them looked, who are disputing South Street and Lombard Street and that disgraceful bit of Locust Street with the decent, old-fashioned, self-respecting Philadelphia darkies. I did not like to find the people with foreign manners—for instance, to have my hand kissed for a tip in the hotel by a Lithuanian chambermaid, though I should add that in a month she had grown American enough to accept the same tip stoically with a bare "Thank You." I did not like to find the foreigner forcing his way not only into the Philadelphian's houses, the Philadelphian's schools, the Philadelphian's professions—professions that have been looked upon as the sacred right of certain Philadelphia families for almost a couple of centuries. I have heard all about his virtues, nobody need remind me of them; I know that he is carrying off everything at the University so that rich Jews begin to think they should in return make it a gift or bequest, as no rich Jew has yet, I believe. I know that the young Philadelphian must give up his sports and his gaieties if he can hope to compete with the young Russian Jew who never allows himself any recreation on the road to success—and perhaps this won't do the young Philadelphian any harm. I know that if the Russian Jew keeps on studying law, the Philadelphia lawyer will be before long as extinct as the dodo—a probability that if it wakes up the Philadelphia lawyer may have its uses. All this, and much besides, I know—also, incidentally, I might add the fact that the Russian Jew, who is not unintelligent, has mastered in a very short time the possibilities of arson and bankruptcy as investments. But if there were no other side to his virtues—and of course there is that other side too—I should not like to think of the new Philadelphian that is to come out of this incredible mixture of Russian Jews and countless other aliens as little like us in character and tradition.