A Tale Of Two Cities

I almost passed on reading this op-ed piece in the newspaper of record in the Big Apple. I am glad I took the time. Stacy Schiff is a good writer. She almost won a Pulitzer for her biobraphy of the author of The Little Prince: Saint-Exupéry. It was her first book and everyone told her that it was a fool's errand to choose such a subject for a biography. Schiff's essay, however, reflects her most recent subject, Benjamin Franklin. That old rascal is the perfect symbol for today's Super Bowl. Franklin fled Boston at age 17 for Philadelphia and became a world celebrity. Schiff has convinced me. I will pull for the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl XXIX. As the greatest running back to wear a Dallas Cowboys uniform, Duane Thomas, said (when asked how it felt to play in the ultimate NFL game): "If it's the ultimate game, why do they play it every year?" If this is (fair & balanced) diversion, so be it.

[x NYtimes]
Four Centuries and a Cloud of Dust
By Stacy Schiff


Copyright © 2005 Douglas Fraser 

It has always been just under 300 miles from Boston to Philadelphia. But long before 100 yards of Florida turf divided them, they were universes apart.

From its inception Boston was the Puritan redoubt, theocratic and autocratic, narrower in its thinking, the hierarchical land of the ministerial Mathers. Men were sacrificed in Boston to their dissenting opinions, as Harvard's first president discovered. He had the temerity to challenge the institution of baptism, after which he lost his job.

Philadelphia was the Quaker colony, the seat of tolerance and equality, heterogeneous in the extreme, closer to the democratic ideal. Money went further in that colony than did authority. In the words of one 18th-century immigrant, "Pennsylvania is heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans and hell for officials and preachers." Even from a distance the regional differences stood out in high relief. To the European mind, New England was a benighted backwater in which good Quakers were persecuted. Philadelphia was a utopia on earth.

No one better grasped that divide than - or crossed it to such stunning effect as - Benjamin Franklin. Always generous, ever the diplomat, he managed to be born in both places. To Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Franklin remained "a Bostonian who dwelt awhile in Philadelphia." From New England, where he was born originally and in the time-honored way, Franklin took a work ethic, a reverence for the written word, a religious equation between virtue and industry, and a weakness for that preacher's perennial, the well-honed adage. In Boston he also found it easy to make himself "a little obnoxious" to the authorities. He had seen his brother jailed for his public statements; already Franklin had begun to ask too many questions, and to be "pointed at by good people as an infidel or atheist." Fearing prosecution, off he flew, in a sort of dress rehearsal for America's dash to freedom, to the city of brotherly love. That personal rebellion Franklin accomplished in a most un-Bostonian way. Not only did he secure his freedom by telling a lie, but - could he have any more effectively thumbed his nose at the puritan state? - the tale involved his having got a local girl pregnant.

At 17 he was reborn as a Philadelphian. Franklin's entry into that city - he retroactively calculated the date to have been Oct. 6, 1723 - warrants one of the stained glass windows of American history. Franklin may just as well have been riding a donkey, Dale Carnegie, Horatio Alger and Huck Finn laying palms before him. His was also very much a flight from one world, one culture, to another. The Second Street baker was puzzled when his young customer ordered a biscuit, an entity unheard of in Philadelphia, where both the baked goods and the currency were different. With less difficulty the teenage runaway stumbled into a Quaker meeting, where he fell fast asleep, gloriously at home in the cradle of liberty. And in the ecumenical air of Philadelphia he thrived. Decades later he would himself streamline mail service between those two realms, previously separated by a matter of weeks.

It was in large part thanks to Franklin that Philadelphia further distinguished itself from the wooden settlement on Massachusetts Bay. For all its intellectual and spiritual rigor, Boston was already a familiar town; there was more wealth in Philadelphia but more luxury in Boston. (The only Philadelphia building that impressed foreigners was the prison.) Boston was a New World oddity for its Old World design; it amounted to a tangle of irregular, muddy, open-guttered streets. Mark Twain thrilled to that labyrinth, which kept a man in delicious suspense as to what lay around the next corner. He proposed as well that the twisted streets served a civic purpose, "for I do not know what else to attribute Boston's patient affability to if it be not the schooling her citizens get in teaching lost strangers how to find themselves."

Well-lighted, well-paved Philadelphia offered up no hidden delights. It was laid out on an open grid. From most accounts its contribution to 18th-century civilization appears to have been its awe-inspiring sidewalks, "so well built that you can walk on them as comfortably as you would in your own bedroom." Philadelphia was clean, it was orderly, it was rational - too much so for some tastes. In 1831 Tocqueville's traveling companion balked at its geometric precision: "It is of a regularity that one is tempted to find too perfect." As for the city's nomenclature, it was nothing less than an insult to the human spirit. Who would name their streets with numbers? "Don't you find that only a people whose imagination is frozen could invent such a system?" groused Tocqueville. Clearly Philadelphia culture consisted solely of arithmetic.

In Boston by contrast there was always a certain disconnect between straight-spined propriety, the upright embrace of knowledge, and a propensity toward anarchy, of which Boston traffic survives as the pre-eminent legacy. Along with the city's religious culture went an impulse toward the wanton and the destructive, toward public-spirited eruptions. The Puritan city was at once more straightforward and more subversive. In 1773 the East India Company dispatched to the colonies a large shipment of tea, from which Parliament had refused to remove a duty tax. Philadelphia (and New York) turned away the ships. Boston did not. Thereafter its God-fearing citizens pitched 342 chests of tea leaves into the harbor.

No one did more to put Boston on the map than John Adams, as rigid, uncompromising and eloquent as Franklin was fluid, conciliatory and taciturn. If the faux Quaker proceeded with a simple strategy - "Never contradict anybody" - the Bostonian's lifeblood was dispute. After a blow to his ego, Adams confessed to Franklin: "My talent, if I have one, lies in making war." The two men served together on committee after committee. They shared a New Brunswick bed and a Paris address; they collaborated on the Declaration of Independence and on the treaty that recognized America as a sovereign nation seven years later. Together they represented their country abroad. Otherwise they had nothing in common. In 1776 Franklin led the committee that wrote the Pennsylvania Constitution. Several years later Adams penned that of Massachusetts. As the historian Gordon Wood has pointed out, the two documents diverge on nearly every point.

It was Franklin's laissez-faire approach that most riled Adams, and it is Philadelphia's sagging socks that most set it apart from over-achieving, buttoned-up Boston. If Boston demonstrates bounding ambition, Philadelphia presents itself as the easygoing younger sibling. Either the familial expectations were different or the family adapted. As the best-selling Pennsylvanian Owen Wister saw it, success is a birthright in Boston. It surprises in Philadelphia.

In E. Digby Baltzell's formulation, Boston owes its pre-eminence largely to its individualistic, undemocratic spirit. The ruling elite in that city may have been intolerant but it was also responsible. In Philadelphia it was tolerant and irresponsible. So Baltzell explained the disproportionate number of Massachusetts natives among the founding fathers - as well as Philadelphia's lamentable showing in the "Dictionary of American Biography." That city was inoculated with an "antileadership vaccine," the legacy of Quaker egalitarianism and anti-intellectualism. Quakers tended not even to go to college, a tradition Franklin - a Bostonian again in Baltzell's book - accidentally upheld.

Baltzell could have pointed out that Philadelphians can be proud while Bostonians tend toward the chauvinistic. It is a little bit the secret of their success. "Philadelphia with all its trade, and wealth, and regularity is not Boston," asserted John Adams. "The morals of our people are much better; their manners are more polite and agreeable - they are purer English. Our language is better; our persons are handsomer; our spirit is greater; our laws are wiser; our religion is superior." That same eminently moral and polite people had the previous winter thrown a Tea Party.

One particularly irritating thing about John Adams is that he was so often right. In his will Franklin bequeathed equal sums to his native cities, to be placed in long-term trusts. Philadelphia followed his instructions to the letter. Hot-headed, cold-blooded Boston pushed the envelope, putting the premium on maximum profit. Two centuries later Philadelphia's fund totaled $2.5 million. Boston's was worth more than twice as much.


Stacy Schiff 

Stacy Schiff was educated at Phillips Academy and Williams College. She was a Senior Editor at Simon & Schuster until l990. She left Simon & Schuster to write Saint-Exupéry: A Biography (Knopf, l994) which was a finalist for the l995 Pulitzer Prize and won numerous prizes abroad. Schiff's second book, Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage, was published by Random House in April, l999. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. Schiff is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Schiff is the author of the forthcoming A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America.

Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company