Sam Katz films the Rizzo years

The most important political story of 20th-Century Philadelphia has been told and retold many times. In the spring of 1951, after more than 80 years of mostly corrupt and contented one-party municipal government, a coalition of idealistic Young Turks and enlightened business leaders led by Joseph Clark and Richardson Dilworth successfully crusaded for a "Home Rule Charter" that replaced political patronage with a strong civil service system and reorganized the city's useless agencies so that they could actually function constructively; and that fall, the same coalition voted Philadelphia's long-entrenched Republican machine out of office in favor of Clark as mayor and Dilworth as district attorney.

But an equally inspiring movement— a bookend to the 1951 saga, if you will— has barely been acknowledged. That was the coalition of seemingly powerless Philadelphians who, beginning in the mid-1970s, squelched the megalomaniacal dreams of Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia's demagogic mayor from 1972 through 1979.

In another city— Chicago, say, or Boston or even New York (now yearning forlornly for a successor to Michael Bloomberg)— a man of Rizzo's charisma and ambition might have dominated City Hall for life. That he didn't— that he left office after just two terms, despite his repeated efforts to return— was largely the work of an odd alliance of liberals, blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals and, yes, even Anglo-Saxon Protestants who shared little in common other than the contempt in which Rizzo held them and their mutual if unspoken belief that Philadelphia was an urban experiment worth fighting for.

These despised minorities constituted the nucleus of the movement that in 1978 prevented Rizzo from revising the City Charter to enable him to seek a third consecutive term and subsequently defeated him when he ran for mayor again and again and again through the 1980s until his death in mid-campaign in 1991.

Demonstrations and police abuses

But this is not the story Sam Katz chooses to tell in The Fight: 1965-1978, the fourth installment of Philadelphia: The Great Experiment, Katz's ambitious multi-part documentary film history project. Instead we are offered a predictable 1970s mélange: film footage of civil rights demonstrations and police abuses, preening Rizzo pronouncements, accusations and counter-accusations, talking heads and unremarkable observations (e.g., "Frank Rizzo was a big guy" who "reminded me of my father").

It's almost as if we're back in the '70s again, fighting the same old fights— which I suppose is a useful exercise for anyone who has forgotten what a negative, combative and downright nasty place Philadelphia was during the Rizzo years. But the passage of time ought to provide some perspective— some mellowing in which erstwhile combatants can put down their dukes and search together for answers to the question: What was that all about?

The Fight astutely notes that the decline of Philadelphia's manufacturing base after World War II vastly expanded the city's poverty-stricken underclass, which stoked black anger and white fear, which in turn led white Philadelphians to embrace a tough-talking cop like Rizzo as the Great White Hope who would keep blacks under control.

What changed in the '90s?

But what's lacking in The Fight is a sense of context. How did other cities cope with the decline of manufacturing? Were Philadelphia's racial tensions more violent than those elsewhere? (Probably not, in part because Rizzo's bombastic image and rhetoric, much like that of the Wicked Witch of the West, really did intimidate people, at least until they wised up to his act.)

An incisive interviewer might also have inquired, for example, how it happened that Philadelphia's seemingly insoluble financial crises of the '70s suddenly evaporated in the '90s; or how, also in the '90s, Philadelphia's habitually negative residents suddenly started feeling good about themselves and their city. The 1990s team of Mayor Ed Rendell and his City Council president, John Street, surely deserve some of the credit for that transformation. But an important factor, I would submit, was the removal, by death, of Rizzo's genuinely overwhelming presence.

On Rizzo's watch, Philadelphia lost more than 100,000 jobs and nearly 250,000 population— not, to be sure, through any fault of his but because of broader economic factors beyond his control. The fact remains that this master of the illusion of control was helpless to stem the city's decline.

Many of those who fled the city for the suburbs during the '70s were Rizzo's own vociferous and worshipful supporters; today the Rizzo constituency barely exists as a political force. By contrast, the anti-Rizzo coalition has more or less persisted to this day. Thus another great irony: By uniting his enemies, Rizzo performed a greater service to his rivals than he ever did for his supporters.

Katz's conflict

But such retrospective judgments seem beyond the capability of The Fight, for three separate journalistic/historical reasons.

First, it's difficult if not impossible to write objective history about a period whose participants are still very much alive and lobbying for their respective narratives before they depart this earthly vale.

Second, film by its very nature favors dramatic images of violent confrontation and overheated rhetoric— the very sort of exciting conflict and posturing that caused so many Philadelphians (and impressionable journalists, too) to go belly-up for Rizzo in the first place. In such a medium, sober reflection and analysis tends to suffer.

Third, Sam Katz himself is a player in this story, albeit a minor one. He ran for mayor against Rizzo in the 1991 Republican primary, and subsequently ran for mayor twice more. That doesn't disqualify him from making a film about the Rizzo years and city politics— after all. Churchill wrote a well-regarded history of World War II— but it does cloud the credibility of the endeavor. Katz's pointed criticisms of Rizzo back in 1991, however valid they may have been then, sound like warmed-over campaign rhetoric (or, worse, sour grapes) if repeated today.

Whereas losing mayoral candidates usually slink off to New York, Washington, Longport or Arizona, Katz has responded to political defeat by re-inventing himself as a local historian. That's a reflection on his commitment to Philadelphia but also a cautionary tale. Historians must be careful when choosing their subjects, especially if they are the subject.

The project's next installment, Katz says, will deal with Philadelphia's settlement by the Swedes and the Dutch in the 1640s. Sounds like safer ground to me.




(Full disclosure: I was one of some two-dozen local historians whom Katz assembled for day-long brainstorming sessions five years ago, when he first conceived Philadelphia: The Great Experiment. I was also an outspoken critic of Rizzo back in the day, to the extent that he filed an $11 million libel suit against my paper, the Welcomat. That suit was subsequently dismissed.)♦


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