No More Consenting to Corruption in Philadelphia

This week in North Philly Notes, Brett Mandel, author of Philadelphia, Corrupt and Consenting, offers ideas about how to overcome the perils of public corruption.

Philadelphia is weeks away from an election that will help set a new direction for local government. Change is badly needed, given the unsatisfying state of the city. Candidates for mayor and for other offices are talking a lot about poverty, gun violence, and lack of economic opportunity. They should also be talking about public corruption, which underlies so many of Philadelphia’s problems. Today, corruption is consented to—through action and inaction by so many in our hyper-connected town—and it costs so much to run a city so poorly. To move Philadelphia into a better future, we must change a culture of corruption and implement key anticorruption reforms so we can best address the city’s challenges.

What is public corruption? It is when officials put their own private gain before the public good, abuse their public authority to advance private agendas, and pervert the work of public entities by excluding the public from official decision-making processes in order to favor private interests. Corruption increases the price of government services and reduces resources that could be used to address our many challenges. Corruption also imposes further costs in denying opportunity for those who deserve It, trampling on the values of fairness and equity, and threatening the health and safety of residents. 

Philadelphia, Corrupt and Consenting details the city’s history of corruption and show how it threatens our future. The book recounts the story of the city’s most important corruption investigation so far this century. It discusses the roots, effects, and reasons for corruption’s persistence, places our current issues into perspective, and offers recommendations to make positive change. Every candidate for office should read the book, review its recommendations, and tell voters what they will do to stop consenting to the corruption that holds Philadelphia back.

To make change for the better, we must understand certain things.

• We need to learn to recognize corruption when we see it. We are on the lookout for overt shakedowns or passing envelopes of cash to bribe seekers, but Philadelphia corruption generally consists of officials doing favors for friends and subverting the work of government to benefit special interests
• Arguing about whether corruption in Philadelphia is worse or better than it previously was is counterproductive; asserting that today’s corruption is different from that of the past does not reduce its cost or blunt its other damaging effects today
• Norms, laws, and accepted standards change; what was once an everyday practice can become stigmatized, even demonized, so we cannot count on the legal system to solve these problems
• We cannot leave the fight against corruption up to a few reform actors or a single reform moment; each of us needs to want our city to function systematically and properly for everyone more than we want to know someone who can get something done for us — and we cannot stop the fight after any small victory is won

We need a mayor and other elected officials who will confront our culture of corruption and embrace an anticorruption honor code for themselves and those they hire—to not only not engage in corruption acts, but to report instances of corruption they see. Ultimately, it is not enough to change rules or laws and we must all stop enabling corruptors with our silent consent. The defining characteristic of Philadelphia corruption is its collegiality. We are all so closely connected to each other, which makes us reluctant to call out bad behavior by anyone who is “one of us.” 

If we cannot stand against those who engage in corrupt activities because too many ties bind us together, then we need to organize a different “us” to oppose corruption. An anticorruption movement or slate of candidates, or even a formal local anticorruption political party could build a movement so we can split from those who do wrong by the city—and those who try to play both sides. If we refuse to consent to more corruption, we can create the thriving city that Philadelphians deserve.

Brett Mandel is a writer, consultant, and former city official active in reform politics in Philadelphia.

Reforming Philadelphia

This week in North Philly Notes, Richardson Dilworth, author of Reforming Philadelphia, 1682-2022, writes about what the history of reform might tell us about contemporary city elections.

On May 16 of 2023, Philadelphians will vote for mayor in the Democratic and Republican primaries, and the general assumption in this overwhelmingly Democratic city is that whoever wins the Democratic primary will also be elected mayor in the general election on November 7. The nine declared Democratic candidates represent a relatively broad ideological mix, from the relatively conservative candidacies of Rebecca Rhynhart and Allan Domb, to the more liberal candidacy of Helen Gym. But given that the current mayor Jim Kenney has reached his two-term limit, we are guaranteed to have a new mayor who will most likely set a distinct policy direction for our city government.

In my book, Reforming Philadelphia, 1682-2022, I wanted to provide a short but comprehensive and deep context for understanding political events such as the 2023 mayoral election, by placing it in the long history of what I call “reform cycles.” “Reform” is a broad mantel that has been claimed by innumerable politicians for a variety of reasons. Among historians it is most typically associated with the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20^th Century. For my purposes, I took the historian’s definition of reform but generalized it into criteria that might be found in any historical period. My criteria were that a reform cycle is defined by:

• A new idea regarding the city and its purpose in the world.
• Actors who attempt to take control of city government and reform it in the image of this new idea.
• Actors conceived of as thwarting reform – sometimes known as “the machine.”
• Elections in which reformers gain some control over city government.
• The implementation of ideas that transform the city to some degree.
• Public recognition, typically provided through the press, that reform occurred.

Using these criteria, I identified the following five reform cycles:

• The 1840s to the city-county consolidation of 1854
• The 1870s to the adoption of a new city charter in 1887
• Mayor John Weaver’s revolt against the machine in 1905, to the adoption of a new charter in 1919
• The Democratic sweep of elected offices in 1951, to the mayoralty of James Tate in 1962
• The mayoralty of Ed Rendell, from 1992 to 2000.

My definition of reform cycles raises at least two important questions. First, it appears that race is a notably muted feature in my reform cycles. And second, what about the contemporary period? What can all of this tell us about the 2023 mayoral election?

With respect to race, I argue that the emergence of a substantial Black political class  — a product of the dramatic change in the city’s racial composition after World War II – fell largely into existing machine-reform categories, which was itself a result of the fact that the reform-oriented White political establishment moved relatively quickly to incorporate Black politicians, certainly to a greater extent than in many other cities (such as Chicago for instance). Thus, race-based political organizations such as the Black Political Forum or the Northwest Alliance functioned largely as earlier white reform organizations. And Wilson Goode was arguably a reformer when he was elected as the city’s first Black mayor in 1983. Yet crucially, Goode’s election fails my criteria for defining a reform cycle because it was not recognized as such, for at least two reasons: (1) Goode’s mayoralty was more often defined in the media in terms of race rather than reform, and (2) Goode’s reform status was often overshadowed by larger policy blunders, such as the MOVE bombing and the city’s near-bankruptcy.

With respect to what my conception of reform cycles can tell us about the 2023 election, this is the subject of the third and final chapter of my book, in which I argue that there are currently two overlapping reform cycles, not unlike the reform cycle of the 1870s and 1880s, which was quickly followed by the reform cycle of the 1900s and 1910s. In the 21^st Century, we can identify a reform cycle that was driven by the economic resurgence in and around Center City, resulting in the election of Michael Nutter in 2007 and extending at least to the surprise election of Rhynhart as controller in 2017. The issues that defined this reform cycle were campaign finance reform, increased government responsiveness and accountability, planning reform, and environmental sustainability. The second reform cycle is defined in policy terms by social and racial equity and justice and was most visible politically in the elections of Larry Krasner as district attorney in 2017, and of Helen Gym and Kendra Brooks to at-large council seats, in 2015 and 2019, respectively.

Thus, the 2023 mayoral campaigns will fall along a policy and political continuum defined by these two overlapping reform cycles – what journalist Larry Platt has also called a battle between “progressives vs. reformers.” The actual election dynamics will be shaped by at least two long-term trends that have fundamentally altered the city’s electoral politics: Declining voter turnout, which provides greater leverage to smaller groups; and a diminished local media, which makes it harder for campaigns to communicate to a mass audience. The sad result is that our local political universe is more fragmented than in the past. And with so many candidates running in the Democratic primary – so many of which are of high quality – whoever the winner is will undoubtedly be the choice of a minority of voters, making it more difficult for the new mayor to claim a mandate and set an aggressive policy agenda.