Local politics of Philadelphia

After the Civil War Philadelphia's Democratic Party, which had once represented the city’s poor and working class, barely existed.

The Republicans had developed a strong local organization or political machine that became known as the Gas Ring because it controlled the city-owned Gas Company and its $2 million in annual contracts.

The head of the Philadelphia Republican machine, Boss James McManus, ruled the city's politics and its police force and used his position to make illegal profits until 1885. That year reformers secured a new city charter and ousted him.

Nevertheless, other Republican bosses followed, and by the 1890s the political machine controlled 10,000 city jobs. The bosses maintained notoriously fraudulent voting lists that counted horses and even the dead.

Philadelphia residents soon tired of the national attention focused on the city’s corrupt politics by investigative journalists like Lincoln Steffens and tried to initiate change.

In 1911 Philadelphia voters elected as their mayor Quaker Rudolph Blankenburg, who had been involved in municipal reform movements for decades. Reform climaxed in a new 1919 city charter that created a one-house city council of 21 paid members with four-year terms. The new charter also forced the mayor to submit an annual budget, forbade council members from holding other jobs, and brought most, but not all, city employees under the control of the civil service.

During the 1920s Philadelphia continued to elect Republican mayors. Although the Republican machine weakened in the 1930s when it failed to act quickly to aid the unemployed during the Great Depression, it was not toppled until 1950 when reformers of the postwar era convinced voters that there was flagrant corruption and financial mismanagement in city government.