Pennsylvania Politicians' Long History of Insignificance

The things that truly last when men and things have passed,

Rudyard Kipling, “Philadelphia”

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s being passed over as Kamala Harris’s running mate reflects the low esteem that the state’s political figures are held nationally. Since the nation’s founding, Pennsylvania, once the second-largest state in the union (and home to Philadelphia, then the second-largest city) has counted for little politically.

Over the years, the country’s political parties, from the Jeffersonians and Federalists to today’s Republicans and Democrats, made few attempts to enlist the city and state’s elites into the heart of national politics. Pennsylvania’s only president, James Buchanan, is regarded as among the worst. His inaction during the national crisis over slavery is often credited with helping bring about the Civil War. Since Buchanan, no Pennsylvanian has been a serious candidate for president or vice president of either major party.

Over the past century and a quarter, only one resident of the Keystone State achieved national significance: Boies Penrose, senator from 1896 to 1921, a 300-pound mammoth of a man whose appetite was legendary. A typical breakfast would consist of a dozen eggs, a half dozen rolls, and an inch-thick slab of ham washed down in a vat of coffee. His appetite for politics was equally huge. He effectively ran Pennsylvania politics along with Republican Party boss Matt Quay and was a major figure nationally for thirty years. He helped engineer the vice presidency for Theodore Roosevelt in 1900, mostly as a way to spite the Republican Party boss, Mark Hanna, whom he disliked. He also was one of the men responsible for Warren Harding’s winning the presidency in 1920. No other Pennsylvanian since could boast of similar influence.

A case could be made that David Lawrence, long-time Democratic mayor of Pittsburgh, governor of the state from 1959 to 1963, and a respected voice in the Democratic Party, helped Kennedy become president. But he was a minor figure compared with Penrose. Hugh Scott, a long-time Republican member of the House and the Senate, was one of the three Republican elders who told Richard Nixon that he had to resign the presidency. But like Lawrence, Scott was a behind-the-scenes operator with no national ambitions.

The question remains: Why has Pennsylvania counted so little nationally? Some historians have argued that Pennsylvania and Philadelphia suffered from an inferiority complex once the state lost influence to New York early in the nineteenth century. The nation’s banking center moved from Philadelphia to New York in the 1830s, when Andrew Jackson declared war against the Bank of the United States then housed in the city. Financial dominance has remained on Wall Street ever since.

The same holds true for Philadelphia’s legal position. The term “Philadelphia lawyer” was once a synonym for honesty and probity, and the University of Pennsylvania was once famous for the quality of its graduates. Now Yale and Harvard have long outstripped Penn. The last graduate from Penn’s law school to serve on the Supreme Court was Owen J. Roberts. Famous for casting the vote that may have saved the Court from President Roosevelt’s packing plan – “the switch in time that saved nine” – Roberts left the Court in 1950. Yale and Havard have dominated the Court since.  

Philadelphia also lost out to New York in sports. For thirty years early in the twentieth century, Philadelphia matched New York for dominance in the only sport that then mattered to the nation, baseball. Christened “White Elephants” by New York Giants manager John McGraw, Connie Mack’s Athletics won two more World Series than McGraw’s Giants. But the success of Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees, combined with the miserable performance of the two Philadelphia teams, the A’s and Phillies, further reinforced the state and city’s sense of inferiority.

Pennsylvania’s major contributions to the nation’s economic development, the coal mining industry and Pittsburgh’s steel mills and the railroads, gave the state a powerful economic position into the twentieth century, but they failed to translate to political power. The Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association carefully nurtured the state economically and politically but lacked any interest in national politics. The Pennsylvania Railroad lost power and influence as the New York Central and the Erie Canal gave the Empire State access to the economically expanding Middle West and Great Lakes region.

One of the most intriguing explanations for both the state and its largest city’s sense of inferiority was developed by historian R. Digby Baltzell of the University of Pennsylvania. Baltzell, an historian as well as sociologist – he coined the term WASP – in a series of books and articles, especially “Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia,” argued that Quaker influence, with its emphasis on equality and deference, was at the core of the state’s reluctance to push itself forward. Baltzell contrasted the Boston region’s record of statesmanship, from John and John Quincy Adams to the Kennedys, with the quiet deference of the great Philadelphia families, the Drexels, the Ingersolls, and the Biddles.

Considering Gov. Shapiro’s rejection for the vice presidency and the relative insignificance of the state’s two current senators, Robert Casey and John Fetterman – one a quiet party regular and the other a party renegade – I doubt if the state’s national political irrelevance will change soon.

John P. Rossi is Emeritus Professor of History at La Salle University.