Honoring The Wrong Citizen

John Wanamaker (1838-1922) was and, for many. still is a household name in Philadelphia. He made his millions in retail marketing, and played a large part in developing the "department store" into the what we know it as today. With his money he became an extremely important figure in Philadelphia's political life. This statue on the East side of City Hall was one of the stops I made in my Anarchist Historical Walking Tour this afternoon.

In 1887 he fired 12 union activists who were discovered among his staff by store detectives, and there were no union contracts in his empire until after his death. That was when he was part of the Republican Party machine which, in Pennsylvania, was run by US Senator Matthew Quay. After Quay played a key role in electing President Benjamin Harrison in 1888, Wanamaker's share of the spoils was to become US Postmaster General. He then fired thousands of postal workers to replace them with his favored flock, causing a general chaos in the mails. Then he decreed that all the letter carriers in the country had to buy new uniforms, which must be bought from one firm only, which happened to be owned by a friend of his in Baltimore. Postage stamps are tiny pictures, and those who print them should really know what they're doing. Wanamaker's cronies did not, and the national press had a field day criticizing faces that looked like thumb prints.

Leo Tolstoy's novel The Kreutzer Sonata was published in English during Wanamaker's term as the boss of all mailmen. The publisher, Benjamin R. Tucker, was one of the very brightest and best anarchists in the United States. Wanamaker's store ordered copies, but Tucker declined to give it his advance-copy discount, so all of a sudden, Tolstoy's work was obscene and thus banned from the mails. The ridicule that "Pious John" suffered in newspapers all over the country did not occur in Philadelphia because no editor would dare cross him in those years. If you want to know how the mails were censored then, meet my friend Ida Craddock.

If you worked at Wnamaker's, you would be expected on Sunday morning at Bethany Presbiterian Church, if you lived anywhere near it. If his boys did not see you there, you might be fired on Monday morning.

John had two sons, Rodman and Thomas, and both became millionaires themselves as major executives in the family business. Rodman was the genius who made the stores the grand and beautiful spectacles that they were, and thomas was more behind the scenes in finances and management. Thomas was also a Socialist, and that's why I can't find a photograph of him in any of Wanamaker's biographies (nor anywhere). He was the black sheep.

Thomas B. Wanamaker bought a newspaper called the North American in 1899. He turned that very tired rag into one of the Nation's leading papers by hiring his father's former political aide as the editor-in-chief, who in turn brought on Henry John Nelson (later the city's leading free speech lawyer and attorney for anarchist leaders in local cases) as the Labor columnist, and Socialist Caroline Pemberton (of an old and distiguished family) for a daily Socialist perspective, and Julian Hawthorne (Nathaniel's son) as a major contributor. Thomas also pissed off his dad by launching a Sunday edition (it's very impious).

The reason I'm telling you all this is because Thomas Wanamaker, being independently wealthy and not attached to the political machine, was able to cover local anarchist stories without the interference of the Church or the State. His hobby was excellent journalism.

That's all I can tell you tonight, but it boggles my mind, how much I've learned because one daily newspaper had integrity during the years where I'm researching events.

During WW1, John Wanamaker proeposed, as a solution to the world's woes, that the US simply buy Belgium.