Philadelphia Municipal Election, 1951

The 1951 Philadelphia municipal election held on Tuesday November 6, was the first election under the city's new charter, which had been approved by the voters in April, and the first Democratic victory in the city in more than a half-century. The positions contested were those of mayor and district attorney, and all seventeen city council seats. There was also a referendum on whether to consolidate the city and county governments. Citywide, the Democrats took majorities of over 100,000 votes, breaking a 67-year Republican hold on city government. Joseph S. Clark Jr. and Richardson Dilworth, two of the main movers for the charter reform, were elected mayor and district attorney, respectively. Led by local party chairman James A. Finnegan, the Democrats also took fourteen of seventeen city council seats, and all of the citywide offices on the ballot. A referendum on city-county consolidation passed by a wide margin. The election marked the beginning of Democratic dominance of Philadelphia city politics, which continues today.

Background

In the 1940s, Philadelphia was the last major city in the United States to have nearly all of its political offices occupied by Republicans. Mayor Bernard Samuel and sheriff Austin Meehan led the Republican organization and were supported by many of the city's business interests. In 1947, city voters had elected Republicans to the mayor's office and to every seat on the city council. Over the next few years, cracks in the Republican wall began to emerge as independent voters and reform-minded Republicans began to join with Democrats in opposing what they saw as shortcomings of the Republican political machine. Some in the Democratic coalition objected to making common cause with the reformers, but Democratic City Committee chairman James A. Finnegan saw it as a chance to revitalize his moribund party, saying "good government is good politics."

In 1949, that coalition scored a victory in the election for "row offices" (minor citywide offices including treasurer, coroner, and controller), and the reformers used their new platforms to expose corruption in city government. A bipartisan commission of reformers proposed a new city charter in 1950. The new scheme would shift power away from city council to a strong mayor, something they believed would produce a system that would be more efficient and less susceptible to corruption. It also included provisions for civil service reform, requiring that city jobs be filled by merit selection rather than patronage. The higher-ranking executive branch positions in city government would almost all be filled by the mayor directly without council approval, which was intended to encourage the appointment of independent experts instead of distributing jobs as reward for political service. Voters approved the charter overwhelmingly in an April 1951 referendum, setting up a showdown in November for election to the revised city government.

Mayor

Samuel did not run for re-election as mayor, leaving an open seat to be contested by the Republican nominee, Daniel A. Poling, and the Democrat, Joseph S. Clark Jr. Clark was a lawyer and United States Army officer who had served in World War II. Raised in an upper-class Republican family, he switched his party affiliation to the Democrats in 1928. After several unsuccessful attempts at public office in Philadelphia, he served as a Deputy Attorney General of Pennsylvania. Clark was known as a reformer, having been elected city controller two years earlier in 1949 on a platform of cleaning up corruption in the city. Despite being slandered as a communist for his membership in the Americans for Democratic Action, a left-wing group, Clark was victorious.

In those two years, Clark probed graft and theft in the Samuel administration and reported his findings to the voters. Many of those accused of crimes were convicted, and several committed suicide. Clark continued his push for reform by urging adoption of the new city charter. He campaigned for mayor with the promise of a "clean sweep of City Hall". He won the support of party Democrats in part by announcing his intention to run whether they backed him or not. In the July primary election, he triumphed easily over former City Solicitor Joseph Sharfsin by an eight-to-one margin.

The Republican nominee, Poling, was a Baptist preacher with a national reputation for integrity who GOP leaders hoped would help deflect the corruption charges leveled against the machine. Poling had worked for various charitable organizations and managed the '' Christian Herald''. His son, Clark V. Poling, was one of the Four Chaplains lost aboard the SS ''Dorchester'' in World War II, and Poling served as pastor at the chapel erected in their memory. Poling was challenged in the primary by Walter P. Miller, a businessman who had the backing of independent Republicans. The ward leaders swung their support to Poling, who won by a six-to-one margin.

As in 1947 and 1949, Clark focused his campaign on the corruption of the Republican organization, calling it "the most corrupt political machine in the United States". Poling admitted that corruption existed, but pledged to root it out himself if elected. Philadelphia's two newspapers, the ''Inquirer'' and the ''Bulletin'', had traditionally endorsed Republicans, but in 1951 favored the Democrats. Poling's association with the Republican party bosses clinched the ''Inquirer''s endorsement for Clark; in an editorial, the editors said "the only way Philadelphia can get a change at City Hall is by throwing out the Republican ward-boss clique". Clark and his running mate, district attorney candidate Richardson Dilworth, bought radio time and made street-corner speeches. In one speech, Dilworth called the Republican leadership "political hogs and extremely avaricious gentlemen". In a broadcast, Clark called his non-politician opponent the ignorant tool of corrupt interests, saying "he can know nothing about the subject personally for he has not been in politics in Philadelphia long enough to find out." Poling campaigned vigorously with the full support of his party organization, but the effort fell short.

The general election was a landslide for Clark, who won by more than 120,000 votes. With 58% of the vote, the Democrats had gained nearly 215,000 votes over the last election, in which they had been defeated. The Democrats' greatest gains were in the so-called "independent wards", where middle-class voters were more likely to split their tickets in pursuit of good government, and in the majority-black wards in North and West Philadelphia, where Clark's promise of civil service reform gained the confidence of black voters, who had traditionally been left out of the patronage system. As the result became apparent, he told reporters that it was a "great victory for the thinking people of Philadelphia and it ends a long hard fight."

This was the first time since 1881 (70 years) that a Democrat won the mayoralty, and the first time since 1911 (40 years) that a Republican nominee lost the mayoralty. It ushered a period of Democratic control of the mayoralty which continues to this day.

District Attorney

Philadelphia elects a district attorney independently of the mayor, in a system that predates the charter change. Since 1957, district attorney elections have followed mayoral and city council elections by two years, but in 1951 both offices were up for election in the same year.

As in the mayor's race, the contest for district attorney pitted a Democratic reformer, Richardson Dilworth, against a representative of the Republican machine, Michael A. Foley. Dilworth, like Clark, was a former Republican who had been advocating reform for several years. He had run for mayor unsuccessfully in 1947, with Clark as his campaign manager. In 1949, he was elected City Treasurer. Democratic Party leaders had intended Dilworth to be their candidate for mayor again in 1951, but when Clark announced his candidacy, Dilworth agreed to run for district attorney instead. Foley, an attorney for the Insurance Company of North America, had organization backing in the primary but had no success against the Democratic wave in the general election. Dilworth was unopposed in the primary. In November, Dilworth won by almost as large a margin as Clark, taking just shy of 58% of the vote. He told reporters that the victory had a "sobering effect", adding: "the bigger the victory, the bigger the responsibility".

City Council

Under the new charter, Philadelphians elected a seventeen-member city council in 1951, with ten members representing districts of the city, and the remaining seven being elected at-large. By the rules of the limited voting system for the at-large seats, each political party could nominate five candidates and voters could only vote for five, with the result that the majority party could only take five of the seven seats, leaving two for the minority party. The Democrats' citywide triumph continued into the city council races, as they took nine of ten districts and five of seven at-large seats.

Constance Dallas, the first woman to win election to City Council, was elected in a close vote in the 8th district (covering Chestnut Hill, Germantown, and Roxborough) over incumbent councilman Robert S. Hamilton. In the 1st district, which took in South Philadelphia

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