Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
In Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell is a symbol of both America's ideals and its failings.
Aug 31, 2000 | The most visited tourist spot in Philadelphia is the Liberty Bell; No. 2 is the Franklin Mills Outlet Mall, which confirms my belief that our nation was founded on the freedom to shop.
In fact, Philadelphia got its start because of an invoice that was overdue. England's King Charles II owed 16,000 pounds to William Penn, but the king was a little short of cash, so he paid off the debt by giving Penn a huge tract of land in North America -- an area bigger than England.
Penn was an aristocrat, which the king liked, but he was also a Quaker, which the king didn't like. The Quakers were much too liberal for the king; they believed in freedom of religion, and thought that a government should represent the needs of all the people. Outrageous ideas!
Charles threw 10,000 Quakers into prison, Penn among them. So the opportunity to pay off a debt, and send Penn and the Quakers to a colony 3,000 miles away, seemed like a great idea. Penn could conduct his holy experiment so far away that the king would not be bothered.
Only one problem -- the ideas that came to Pennsylvania with the Quakers were the very ideas that formed the basis of the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War. Some days, you just can't win.
Philadelphia was the capital of Penn's colony; what the brothers loved most was freedom, particularly freedom from England. In 1750, as part of the 50th anniversary of Pennsylvania's Charter of Privileges, a bell was ordered from England. The inscription around the crown reads, "Proclaim liberty through all the land to all the inhabitants thereof."
They hung the Liberty Bell in the Statehouse, which is now known as Independence Hall. The first time they rang it, it cracked, so they recast it. They tried to ring it again, and it cracked again. The point seemed to be that anybody who trusted England to give the colonies a fair shake had to be cracked.
Eventually a group of people who felt that way ended up in Independence Hall. They were delegates to the Continental Congress and had come from each of the 13 original colonies. On July 4, 1776, they adopted the Declaration of Independence, which led to our fight for freedom and made Philadelphia the capital of the United States.
But there was life in Philadelphia before the Revolution. Chris Klemek is a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania working on his doctorate in history. Under the rubrick "Poor Richard's Walking Tours" he guides visitors through the history of the city. Slightly irreverent and thought-provoking, his tour is an interesting way to see Philadelphia.
Klemek pointed out that Penn was a radical guy, an aristocrat who converted to Quakerism and was constantly advancing revolutionary ideas. And as you walk through Philadelphia you can see the radical way that Penn laid out his town -- creating the first planned city in the modern world. In stark contrast to the London in which he was born and that he watched burn to the ground in 1666 because it was so dense and unplanned, Penn designed Philadelphia as a perfect open grid. He also decided that everyone who lived in his grid would be free to follow whatever religion attracted him in any way he saw fit -- a reaction against the persecution that Penn was subjected to as a Quaker in England. Philadelphia became the first truly diverse society in America.
By the eve of the Revolution Philadelphia was the largest city in the English-speaking world after London. And it was rich. There is no better illustration of the wealth that came to Philadelphia in this time than the Christ Church, built in the 1730s and '40s in grand high Georgian style. At the time of construction, it was the greatest building in North America. It is in extraordinary contrast to the austere, frugal Quaker meetinghouse, which embodied the ideals that Penn was trying to bring to his wholesome colony.
It was the very success of the colony that ultimately undermined many of Penn's ideals. The best example of this problem was slavery, which was at the heart of much of the wealth coming into Pennsylvania. As early as 1688, the Quakers were at the forefront of the anti-slavery movement and favored abolition.
By the middle of the 1700s, large segments of the population were dissatisfied with the colony's relationship to England and wanted out. The resulting movement was centered in Philadelphia; the plotting began in Carpenter's Hall, where radical ideas were discussed -- codified in Thomas Paine's "Common Sense," which said citizens could overthrow a government and challenge a millennial tradition of monarchy. They were plotting treason, planning to take on the most powerful army and navy in the world.
Just how radical was this revolution? It could easily be said that this was a conservative revolution that did not fundamentally restructure American society. These days the media is filled with stories dealing with the connection between money and politics as if it were something new, but few people realize that at the time of the revolution George Washington was the wealthiest man in America. Was he merely the 18th century equivalent of a Bill Gates leading a movement to have Seattle secede from the nation in response to a governmental antitrust case?
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