First called Bandstand, the program premiered October 6, 1952, hosted by Philadelphia radio DJ Bob Horn (1916-66). It was shot live from Studio B at Forty-Sixth and and Market Streets, where the two-and-a-half-hour show was broadcast regionally on WFIL-TV Channel 6. Via this network, which advertised itself as “WFIL-adelphia,” the show reached almost six million viewers in the Delaware Valley, the nation’s third-largest market at the time.  Pennants from local high schools lined the walls of American Bandstand’s production studio, emphasizing to viewers and advertisers the show’s local orientation.

Dick Clark (1929-2012) replaced Horn as host in 1956, just before the show was renamed American Bandstand, shortened to ninety minutes, and expanded to a national ABC audience on August 5, 1957. The show then aired at 3 p.m., Monday through Friday, corresponding with the typical school day’s end. American Bandstand was an immediate success, with an estimated audience of twenty million viewers.

From its earliest days, the show featured young people dancing to a rock-and-roll soundtrack or other popular genres of the day.  This included dances the Bop, the Twist, the Jitterbug, and the Stroll. The show also incorporated appearances by acts like Paul Anka, Frankie Avalon, and Connie Francis, who would lip-sync performances. Being featured on the show all but guaranteed a spike in popularity; even before it moved to a national platform American Bandstand offered a remarkably large audience base for musicians, often generating national popular demand for a new group or single.  Another component of the show was its Rate-a-Record segment—where people evaluated a record on a scale of 35 to 98—which originated the saying, “It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.” For this era’s music industry, American Bandstand was arguably the most significant television venue in the country.

Local Teens as National Celebrities

Throughout its Philadelphia years, the show was so popular that it transformed average local-area teens into national celebrities. On each broadcast day the line of teens hoping to appear on the show snaked around the block; some were granted entry and others denied. In order to help establish a clean-cut image for the show, guys were required to wear ties with suit jackets or sweaters, while girls dressed in “good taste,” for example a high-cut blouse with a dress or skirt. Clark felt such conventions helped boost the perception of rock-and-roll, which in the 1950s was a controversial genre often disliked by older generations.

Several teens belonged to a select group of taste-making gatekeepers who helped monitor dress code and admission. Clark and producer Tony Mammorella (1924-1977) dubbed this group “The Committee,” led from 1954 to 1956 by future DJ Jerry Blavat (1940-2023). Such white Philadelphia-area teens (many from South Philadelphia or near the show’s production site in West Philadelphia), among others, regularly appeared on American Bandstand.  Many subsequently became celebrities (albeit temporarily), appearing in other media, receiving fan mail, and starting fashion trends. Many of the show’s female dancers wore Peter Pan collars—a feature of their Catholic school uniforms—and at one point this even sparked a nationwide trend imitating the look.

Racial Influences

Arguably, American Bandstand both contributed to racial integration and supported racial segregation. For instance, the show’s producers allegedly practiced discriminatory policies that excluded or limited appearances by African American teen dancers, presumably to appease advertisers. In the early years of American Bandstand, African Americans were rarely seen on television. However, musicians such as Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Sam Cooke all made national appearances on American Bandstand during the late 1950s. Conceivably, this helped promote racial equality and intercultural understanding.

Over the decades, American Bandstand’s location, air days, duration, and content changed. The program moved production in 1964 from Philadelphia to Hollywood, months after it began airing once per week.  In its later years the show was challenged by the diversifying tastes of fragmented audiences.  As music styles evolved, American Bandstand incorporated more emerging genres. Throughout its run the show featured various types of popular music, such as rock-and-roll, R&B, Motown, British rock, psychedelic rock, disco, new wave, and more.

Despite changes over the years, the show continued to embody and represent evolutions in American music, fashion, dance, and other sociocultural norms.  Still, American Bandstand’s Philadelphia years are recalled with particularly impassioned nostalgia. Emphasizing this sentiment, Philadelphian John Oates (of musical duo Hall & Oates) said, “The show had such an impact on the music business, it set the tone and the pace for teenage style and attitude and everything else across America.”

Jordan McClain is Assistant Teaching Professor of Communication at Drexel University. Amanda McClain is Assistant Professor of Communications at Holy Family University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The first two-wheeler in Pennsylvania was crafted by a blacksmith in Germantown from the parts of a threshing machine in 1819, at the request of artist and antiquarian Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827). Technically a French-invented “velocipede,” the machine lacked a chain-drive transmission and brakes among other accoutrements. Peale, then nearly eighty years old, encouraged his sons and daughters to ride the 55-pound iron juggernaut and noted how they were able to travel—downhill, at least—“with a swiftness that dazzles the sight.” Not everyone was as enthusiastic. The same year that Peale acquired his velocipede, Philadelphia issued the first citation for riding on the city’s sidewalks, a spoke-stopping $3 fine. Even the museum proprietor soon lost interest in the heavy, ungainly two-wheeler.

This changed, however, with Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition. Among the varied exhibits was the English-designed “ordinary,” a machine with dissimilar wheel diameters that perched the rider several feet off ground. Spectators gathered to see this mechanical oddity in action, deftly demonstrated by Philadelphian John Keen. This was the high-wheel’s first public unveiling in the United States. As “ordinaries” became more widely available by the end of the decade, well-to-do riders gathered to socialize and formed local clubs, including the Philadelphia Bicycle Club (founded in 1879), the city’s first. The club promoted “the proper use of the bicycle and similar machines [as] a benefit to good health” and fellowship among cycling enthusiasts. Members shared advice on navigating gravel, dirt, or cobblestone roads that were also thronged with horses, carriages, and pedestrians. Members donned dandyish livery consisting of navy-blue flannel shirts trimmed in linen, brown corduroy breeches, and navy-blue knee stockings— – which served to invite even more ridicule by the press and public. Undaunted, similar associations formed in neighborhoods and towns across the region, from Ardmore’s Cycle and Field Club to the Wissahickon Wheelmen.

Safety Issues

While the “ordinary” provided a much more controlled and enjoyable ride than its velocipede forebears, the machine remained extraordinarily unsafe due to the high center of gravity required of its riders. “Taking a header” by vaulting headfirst over the handlebars was a common accident befalling non-helmeted high-wheel operators.

It was not until the early years of the 1890s that, following innovations such as chain-drive transmissions, pneumatic tires, and reduced height, the Philadelphia area shifted into its first bike boom. Like the “ordinary,” these “safety” bicycles were publicly unveiled in the United States for the first time in Philadelphia, in 1891. With a marked decrease in the chances of cracking one’s cranium, a much shallower learning curve for operation, and a smaller price tag, these “safeties” provided a variety of riders— professionals, laborers, men, women— with a democratic means of travel, recreation, and sport.

Although many of the earliest cycling clubs were founded by and for men, the “wheel” of the 1890s became an engine of emancipation for women. “The new means of propulsion has found especial favor with the advanced and progressive femininity of the present age,” wrote Philadelphia historian Julius Friedrich Sachse (1842-1919) in 1896. “No class of persons has taken more readily to the wheel than the new or strong-minded woman.”

In the 1890s, custom confined many women to corsets, long gowns, and other voluminous garments, modes of dress wholly unsuitable for riding. For “New Woman” cyclists, this was far more than a sartorial or safety issue: this was a matter of sovereignty. If women could not determine something as personal as their own clothes, how could they demand public rights, such as getting the vote? Clad in divided skirts, knickerbockers, and bloomers, these “belles of the boulevard” stirred a national controversy. “Thoughtful people … believe that the bicycle will accomplish more for women’s sensible dress than all the reform movements that have ever been waged,” observed an 1895 issue of Demorest’s Family Magazine.

New manufacturing methods, many of which foreshadowed the assembly-line production techniques of the twentieth century, brought the price of bicycles within reach of millions of Americans. Demand sparked the rise (and fall) of several dozen bicycle manufacturers in the greater Philadelphia area alone, including Philadelphia’s Sweeting Cycle Company, Reading’s Packer Cycle Co., and the Haverford Cycle Company. Even the department store magnate John Wanamaker (1838-1922) joined the craze, with his 1897 Falcon model a particular hit. Like any new industry boom, a handful of upstarts flourished while many floundered. Founded in 1892, Philadelphia’s Common Sense Bicycle Manufacturing Company proved to be anything but, as the company folded the following year.

Mapping Routes

For a sense of the popularity of riding, consider that, beginning in 1896, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a series of bicycle routes, complete with a hand-drawn map, a narrative describing road conditions and landmarks of cultural or historical significance riders would encounter, and a coupon offering discounts on hotels and restaurants along the way. Many routes were confined to Philadelphia— such as “Philadelphia, Darby and Chester, A Pleasant 15-Mile Spin”—while others— “Harrisburg to Lewistown, En Route to Pittsburg”— crisscrossed the central and western regions of the state.

From the 1890s through the 1920s, a golden age of bicycle racing captivated millions of Americans, while men, women, and children used their two-wheelers for leisurely jaunts and exercise. Local printers and cartographers, cashing in on the craze, produced guides advising cyclists on the best way to navigate the region’s roughed and rumbled streets. In tandem with electric streetcars, the bicycle also upended business practices from mail delivery to police work. By 1894, only Chicago and New York had more bicycle-bound uniformed patrolmen than Philadelphia. So popular was the machine that, the following year, more than fifty thousand buggy and carriage horses were no longer needed in the City of Brotherly— and Bicycle— Love.

While the “safety” bicycle lived up to its name in many ways, the region’s dilapidated road network posed great challenges to cyclists, whether they were racing or commuting. To smooth out the city’s rutted roads, the Associated Cycling Clubs of Philadelphia (ACCP) published two pamphlets, “Improvement of City Streets” and “Highway Improvement,” in support of bicycle-friendly infrastructure projects, including macadamized surfaces. Petitions in favor of constructing bicycle paths in Fairmount were put to park commissioners as early as 1897. That same year, ACCP president William Tucker (1845-1930) petitioned Philadelphia’s Department of Public Safety to consider a “more careful and systematic use of water upon the highways” to reduce roads’ wheel-choking mud.

During the 1920s, public interest in cycling waned as automobiles— rendered affordable through many of the same manufacturing methods previously applied to bicycle production— emerged as the vehicle of choice for excitement, speed, and convenience. Gasoline rationing during the Second World War sparked a brief renaissance in bicycle-riding, but nothing approximating the near-hysteria of earlier decades. In the post-war period, the bicycle became primarily associated with children’s recreation, popularly conceived of as a vehicular prelude to owning an automobile.

During the environmental activism of the 1970s— marked by an increased concern over pollution produced by gas-guzzling four-wheelers— cyclists formed the Philadelphia Bicycle Coalition (PBC). In an effort to make the city more bicycle-friendly, the PBC campaigned for funding of bicycle infrastructure, sponsored city-wide rides, and produced publications such as 1974’s Commuters’ Bike Map for Philadelphia. The organization scored its first major victory in 1973, working with the Delaware River Port Authority to open the Benjamin Franklin bridge walkways to pedestrians and bicyclists, overturning a prohibition that had been in effect since 1950.

The Push for Bike Lanes

By the 1990s, municipalities began to designate bike lanes on city streets. In 1993, the PBC and Mayor Ed Rendell (b. 1944) planned for a 300-mile network of bike lanes and bicycle-friendly streets. Although the plan was never formally adopted, Philadelphia’s first bike lanes were installed two years later on a half-mile stretch of Delaware Avenue. Also in the 1990s, one of the PBC’s successful programs became a separate non-profit organization, Neighborhood Bike Works, and the citywide Philly Bike Ride began in 2009 and continued annually. Also in 2009, as the use of bicycles for commuting continued to grow in popularity, the PBC— renamed the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia in 2002— worked to install buffered bike lanes on the major east-west arteries of Spruce and Pine Streets. Bicycle paths along Fairmount Avenue and along the Schuylkill Banks followed in 2013 and 2014. Central New Jersey unveiled buffered bike lanes in Cherry Hill in 2013, while Delaware–which the League of American Bicyclists named the third most bicycle-friendly state in the country in 2015–began construction of bike lanes along West and Washington Streets stretching from north Wilmington to the Riverfront in 2017.

In the region around Philadelphia, a consortium of organizations and municipalities created a trail network along the Schuylkill River from former carriage pathways, canal towpaths, and railroad corridors. Alternately called the Philadelphia to Valley Forge Bikeway and the Valley Forge Bikeway, the trail’s first stretch opened in 1979, spanning from Whitemarsh to downtown Philadelphia, following the right-of-way rail trails of the former Schuylkill Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Further extensions of the trail during the 1980s included a 4.3-mile section in Montgomery County and the completed connection between Philadelphia to Valley Forge National Historic Park. Beginning in 2012, the renamed Schuylkill River Trail became integrated into the Circuit Trail project, part of the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission’s plan to create a single network of 750 miles of trails across nine counties in southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. By 2016, more than 60 miles of the Schuylkill River Trail had been completed, with a planned goal of 130 miles connecting Philadelphia to Pottsville, linking the region’s urban, suburban and rural communities.

In 2009, the Northern Delaware Greenway Trail was completed, linking Wilmington, Alapocas Run, and Bellevue state parks between the Delaware and Brandywine Rivers. The trail network, part of the larger East Coast Greenway project, spanned more than forty miles between Wilmington and the Maryland border. Upon completion, the East Coast Greenway was slated to run from Maine to Florida.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, several cities in the Philadelphia region adopted bike-share programs to promote fuel-conscious travelling. Philadelphia’s Indego, launched in 2015, generated a larger ridership in its first year than similar programs in Boston, Washington D.C., and Denver. By 2016, Camden County and Collingswood instituted bike-share programs. In a 2016 survey conducted by Bicycling, the world’s leading cycling magazine, Philadelphia ranked as the fifteenth-most bike-friendly city in the United States, the culmination of a trend stretching back to the early enthusiasm of Charles Willson Peale and his children for the velocipede in the nineteenth century. The city’s Naked Bike Ride, first staged in 2010, again displayed the machine’s power of liberation. One of the largest such outings in the country, the event promoted positive body image and bicycle advocacy with participants in considerably less rigid attire than their elaborately festooned counterparts in the region’s first cycling clubs.

Vincent Fraley is communications manager for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and writes the Philadelphia Inquirer’s weekly history column, Memory Stream. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Like public schools, charters were tuition free and (theoretically) open to all students. However, they were exempted from most government regulations and had to compete with traditional public schools and other charters for students. Theories of choice and competition were central to the charter school movement. Many proponents argued that the public school “monopoly” was bad for students and that charter schools, by infusing market dynamics into the educational domain, promoted more innovative and responsive schools.

In 1991 Minnesota was the first state in the country to pass a law authorizing charters. New Jersey and Delaware passed charter school bills in 1995, and Pennsylvania followed suit in 1997. As in other areas, charter schools in the region were generally a response to urban school failure and were uncommon in suburban and rural areas. Indeed, over half of all the state’s charters were in Philadelphia as the school year began in the fall of 2016, while only five were in the suburban school districts in the four Pennsylvania counties surrounding it. Similar patterns appeared in Chester and Camden.

Charter schools immediately generated controversy, with proponents claiming that they provided important options to students trapped in failing schools and critics maintaining they took resources and students away from public school districts and increased race and class segregation. Republican lawmakers (especially at the state level) championed charter schools, viewing them as a way to counter the power of teachers unions, but even some Democrats also supported them.  For example, Pennsylvania State Representative Dwight Evans (b. 1954) saw charter schools as a way to increase school choice for his African American constituents in Philadelphia.

Charter Schools in Philadelphia

The first charter schools in Philadelphia opened in 1997. The number of charters rose from a handful at first to eighty-four by the fall of 2016, serving approximately 30 percent of the students in Philadelphia. Philadelphia had one of the highest proportions of students in charters in the country, behind only New Orleans, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and Cleveland. Theoretically, charter schools were accountable to the authorizing district, which had the right to close the schools if they did not live up to the terms of their charters. However, Pennsylvania’s charter school law included limited mechanisms for oversight and accountability, and only a handful of charters were closed due to poor student performance or financial mismanagement.

Charter schools in Philadelphia varied widely in mission and program. Some focused on particular cultural heritages, others on workforce development or at-risk populations; still others aimed to provide highly academic, college preparatory experiences. Charters also played a central role in School District of Philadelphia Superintendent Arlene Ackerman’s  (1947-2013) reform effort, launched in 2010. Called the “Renaissance Schools Initiative,” the strategy aimed at quickly improving outcomes in some of the city’s lowest-performing schools. As a part of this initiative, seven traditional public schools in the city with especially poor outcomes were turned over to charter providers (with more to come in the following years). Selected providers included Mastery Charter, which ran a network of “no excuses” schools with high expectations for low-income students.

Like charters across the country, some Philadelphia charters produced better student achievement outcomes than traditional public schools, some produced the same, and some produced worse. Such high levels of variation made it difficult to draw absolute conclusions about relative student performance, but, in general, charter schools in the district did not outperform their traditional counterparts. Despite their mixed results, charter schools were popular; parents appreciated having the freedom to choose, and charters were often seen as safer. Scandals involving mismanagement and even fraud did little to discredit them.

Charter Schools and the Funding Crisis

Funding for charter schools in Pennsylvania came from the students’ original districts, with the amount determined by a state formula that distinguished between regular education and special education students. This formula was especially problematic for the School District of Philadelphia given its already low per-pupil spending, inadequate financial support from the state, and large numbers of English Language Learners and special education students who needed additional services. For each student, the district was required to send approximately 70 percent of that year’s per-pupil cost from the district to the receiving charter; each special education student in a charter cost the district significantly more (nearly 180 percent of the per-pupil cost). This plan was designed to leave the sending district some money for fixed expenses, while directing the bulk of each student’s funding to the school he or she would attend. The result, however, was a significant drain on the district’s budget, especially because charter schools served fewer English Language Learners and high-needs special education students, which left district-run schools responsible for educating a costlier population. A state subsidy intended to help districts offset some of the costs of charter schools was eliminated in 2011, further exacerbating the district’s funding problems.

By 2012, the shift of students and funds to charters forced the district to close dozens of schools, generally those with declining student populations located in high-poverty areas. Some parents and politicians blamed charters for these austerity measures. Critics also argued that the district moved many students from closing schools to those with worse achievement records and that its decision to shutter schools discounted local traditions, undermined social bonds, and left certain neighborhoods bereft of functional institutions.

Other Regional Charter Schools

The School District of Philadelphia was not the only school district in southeastern Pennsylvania affected by the rise of charters. Half of the students in the Chester-Upland School District attended them. Most were enrolled in Chester Community Charter School (CCCS), the largest in the state. CCCS was a for-profit school that attracted attention not only for the close ties between its founder, Gladwyne attorney Vahan H. Gureghian (b. 1955), and major Republican figures in the state but also for questionable financial dealings, including extravagant charges for special education.

In addition, Pennsylvania law allowed for cyber charters (schools in which most or all of the instruction occurred online), which were authorized at the state level and served thirty-five thousand students in 2015. Although cyber charters were not subject to oversight by school districts and students could attend any cyber charter in the state, cyber charters received the same per-pupil funding from the student’s home district as regular charters. Cyber charters were controversial because they operated with minimal oversight and produced generally poor outcomes.

One of the first charters in New Jersey, LEAP Academy, opened in Camden City in 1997. Operated in partnership with Rutgers University-Camden, LEAP originally served students in K-6th grades and later expanded into a K-12 school. Other charter schools followed in New Jersey, mainly in impoverished cities like Camden, where performance was low. By 2012, there were twelve such schools in Camden, the second-largest number for any city in the state. They served about 3,700 students; Camden’s public schools, on the other hand, enrolled 13,000.

With Camden school performance continuing to lag, the New Jersey legislature—prompted by State Senator Donald Norcross (b. 1958) and with the influential backing of his brother, South Jersey power broker George Norcross (b. 1957)—passed Renaissance school legislation, loosely modeled on the program by the same name adopted in Philadelphia in 2010. Providing both incentives to private investors, such as higher per-pupil subsidies than standard charters received, and greater flexibility in contracting for services, the program also aimed at strengthening neighborhoods by requiring that students live in local catchment areas designated by the school district.

Both traditional charters and Renaissance schools found strong supporters among community advocates. Academic outcomes, however, were mixed. A 2007 report by the Institute on Education Law and Policy at Rutgers University, the first of its kind, determined that on fourth-grade standardized tests for language and math, New Jersey’s charter schools performed worse on average than other public schools in the same district, although it also found that over time schools that survived review tended to show better results. In 2012 the Center for Research in Education Outcomes at Stanford University provided more encouraging statistics in both reading and mathematics for 2006 to 2011. Although critics expressed concern at the effect Renaissance schools in particular might have in draining students from traditional public schools, with the three Renaissance operators authorized to educate over nine thousand youth, the political weight behind the movement was strong and accelerating.

Like New Jersey, Delaware passed its charter school law in 1995. By 2016 there were twenty-two charter schools operating in New Castle County, only thirteen of which were in Wilmington. Buchanan v. Evans (1975), which combined parts of Wilmington with nearby suburbs to consolidate schools in New Castle County, may account for the existence of so many charter schools in the Wilmington suburbs.

Beginning in the 1990s, charter schools helped reshape education in many parts of the Philadelphia metropolitan area. As the number of charters increased, it became more and more common for students to spend at least some of their school years in a charter.  Although they were largely intended to improve opportunities and outcomes for students who had been poorly served by traditional public schools, research on charter school outcomes was mixed. Nevertheless, charters continued to be politically popular and to attract large numbers of families seeking options they felt were safer and more personalized than district-run schools. Over the course of several decades, the rise of charter schools meant that in most urban areas of the Philadelphia region “school choice” had moved from slogan to reality.

Maia Cucchiara is an Associate Professor of Urban Education at Temple University. She is the author of Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities: Who Wins and Who Loses When Schools Become Urban Amenities (University of Chicago Press, 2013). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Young people have worked as long as families’ expenses have exceeded adults’ incomes. In the Philadelphia region’s preindustrial, industrial, and postindustrial eras, children sought work for the needed earnings it brought them and employers sought children for the lower pay they commanded. But the nature of youthful occupations changed along with the economy, and so too did attitudes about the employment of minors. Over the course of three centuries, local policymakers and the public alternately condemned children’s work as a consequence of poverty and a mechanism of exploitation, and encouraged it as a means of alleviating poverty and inspiring virtue.

In eighteenth-century Philadelphia, the children of working families sold twigs for fuel, tended cattle, cleaned chimneys, hauled dairy products from the countryside, and apprenticed themselves to craftsmen. State coercion, as well as economic necessity, drove poor children to work in an era when most authorities saw youthful employment as a means of combating dependency and vice. Under the system of “pauper apprenticeship,” local magistrates could require destitute families to “bind out” children to households that would provide for their maintenance and sometimes education in exchange for their labor. Meanwhile, enslaved children—about a third of the colonial city’s total enslaved population was under the age of twelve —were forced to work in occupations ranging from domestic service to craft trades.

When Philadelphia emerged as a leading industrial city in the mid-nineteenth century, children made up a significant minority of its labor force. Entire families wove cloth with simple handlooms and performed other outwork in the cottage industries that coexisted with the new factories into the 1850s. And when adults went to work for wages in the mills, they brought their children with them. An investigation conducted by the Pennsylvania Senate in 1837 found that about one-fifth of the state’s cotton workers were children under the age of twelve.

It was the mass entrance of children into factories that inspired the early movement to regulate what was first labeled “child labor.” Protestant revivalist millhands in Manayunk petitioned Pennsylvania lawmakers for a minimum age of employment of 12 and a ten-hour day for all workers. After a protracted legislative debate, the law that finally emerged banned children under twelve from working in cotton, woolen, silk, and flax mills, but permitted children over fourteen and adults to work longer than fourteen hours through “special contracts.”

Beyond Factory Work

Nineteenth-century Philadelphians defined child labor as full-time, wage-earning, and specifically industrial employment for minors under the age of twelve or fourteen. Yet children also continued to work outside of factories and even outside of the formal economy after industrialization. The incomes that children earned from peddling and other “street trades” provided a crucial source of support when injury, illness, or a bout of cyclical unemployment resulted in the loss of adults’ wages.

The industrial focus of reformers persisted as child labor reform became a full-fledged movement in the early twentieth century. “That the industrial pursuits of to-day are, with all their efficiency and prosperity, attended by certain deplorable conditions, most of us recognize,” wrote the editors of one pamphlet distributed at a 1906 Philadelphia exhibition on contemporary social problems. Of the conditions that concerned the exhibition’s organizations—crowded tenements and the communicable diseases that spread within them, the low wages and long hours that characterized “sweated” work—none provoked as much moral outrage as “that great and spreading menace,” “child labor.” The exhibition’s organizers and participants included the Eastern Pennsylvania Child Labor Committee (an affiliate of the National Child Labor Committee), the Consumers’ League of Philadelphia, and the White-Williams Foundation, three of the leading groups devoted to the issue.

Child labor—typically defined in the Progressive Era as waged employment for minors under sixteen—was a concern of Progressives nationwide, but local reformers had particular cause for alarm. In 1900, Pennsylvania counted more children under the age of sixteen employed than any other state with the exception of Alabama. As the pace of mechanization, urbanization, and immigration accelerated, employers sought “little people” for “little pay” in nearly all of the major industries of Philadelphia and its environs: from the “cracker-off boys” who broke the cooling glass from the end of the blowpipe in glass factories, to the “breaker boys” who separated impurities from anthracite coal by hand, to the “bender-up girls” who folded the edges of pre-scored cardboard in paper box factories. As late as 1924, the city’s famous textile mills employed more than half of all children who worked in manufacturing establishments, according to one study based on more than three thousand employment certificates.

Like other turn-of-the century Progressive Era reform movements, the women-led campaign against child labor directed maternalistic concern for the plight of the vulnerable toward the end of state regulation of industry. Organizations such as the National Consumers League and its local affiliates leveraged women’s control over household budgets, urging shoppers to boycott companies known for the employment of children and other abuses.

Resistance to Reform

Seeking to protect children from the hazards of industrial labor, Progressive Era reformers encountered opposition not only from employers but also from working-class parents who relied on children’s incomes. Young people themselves often associated labor with autonomy and pride rather than danger. Those attitudes shifted gradually over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in concert with the rise of compulsory schooling and new forms of recreation, the automation of many unskilled youthful jobs, and the increasing physical risks of employment in the industrial workplace. By the time the NCLC celebrated its tenth anniversary in 1914, the District of Columbia and thirty-seven states, including Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, had passed laws establishing a minimum age of employment.

Pennsylvania’s law, passed in 1909, prohibited employing children under sixteen in mines, children under fourteen in other manufacturing and commercial settings, and boys under twelve from selling goods in public places (girls were prohibited from peddling in 1901). Although a 1915 revision to the law extended a minimum employment age of fourteen to all establishments, agriculture and domestic service were still exempted. The law’s varying standards reflected the long-standing focus of reformers on the abuse of child labor in mills and mines. After all, these were establishments that employed children in particularly dangerous conditions: two in every ten accidents to working children in Pennsylvania occurred in anthracite and bituminous coal mines, where children operated heavy machinery in underground shafts.

But laws enforced by factory inspectors did little to regulate labor performed outside of the workplace.  Employers of “errand boys”—the most common occupation for the Black male children whom manufacturing employers typically discriminated against— easily escaped state supervision. And despite the 1922 extension of the state’s child labor laws to industrial home work, common among eastern and southern European immigrant families, one 1926 study found that half of all home-working households in Philadelphia and surrounding counties still included an illegally employed child.

Likewise, reformers found that the law had little effect on the “street trades.” Scott Nearing (1883-1983), an economist and secretary of the Pennsylvania Child Labor Committee, attributed what he saw as an epidemic of moral vice among working-class boys working late nights in unwholesome places to “newsboy-ism.” Even as newspaper sellers became critical to the operations of rapidly consolidating commercial newspapers, publishers claimed that their young charges were not their employees at all but rather “little merchants” engaged in entrepreneurial endeavors of their own.

Outside the City Limits

Reformers became even more alarmed when they turned their attention to child labor outside of the city limits. In 1923, Janet McKay (1881-1959), a field worker for the Public Education and Child Labor Association of Pennsylvania, investigated the seasonal migration of Philadelphia families, mostly Italian, to New Jersey truck farms and cranberry bogs. Boys and girls as young as twelve scooped berries by hand from the bogs, carried sacks of fruit to the roadside for sale, and drained ditches. Employers in rural canneries also relied on the transiency of their workers to evade compulsory education that did not apply to interstate migrants. Cannery investigators in 1926 identified 250 underage children skinning tomatoes and husking corn during school hours in forty-one canneries, but estimated that the true number was higher. Many “little figures” simply fled into the woods when the state officials arrived.

By the 1920s, Philadelphia reformers were increasingly convinced that even the strictest state legislation was not only inadequately enforced but flawed in its design. After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned two federal laws that would have regulated child labor on a nationwide basis, they launched a campaign for a constitutional amendment. Passed by Congress in 1924, the Child Labor Amendment would have given the federal government the power to regulate and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years of age, in any industry—reflecting the movement’s adoption of a far more expensive definition of child labor than ever before.

But as the proposed twentieth amendment moved to the states for ratification, its opponents launched a campaign for its defeat. In Pennsylvania, newly formed groups such as the Republican Women of Pennsylvania and the State Council of Pennsylvania Order of Independent Americans had industry ties but mobilized grassroots support. A coalition of manufacturers, rural farmers and working-class urban Catholics—who feared that the amendment would license government interference with religious education—characterized the federal regulation of child labor as an undue and “socialistic” encroachment on the traditional autonomy of the family and household.

Pennsylvania and New Jersey both effectively rejected the amendment in the initial push in 1925, and then joined twelve other states that finally voted to ratify it in 1934 amid Depression-era pressures to reduce labor-market competition. But by then, national policymakers had turned their energy toward passing child labor reforms as part of New Deal recovery efforts. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA, 1938) exempted children involved in agriculture, service, communication, transportation, and the street trades—some four-fifths of all working youth, the very same majority also exempted by Pennsylvania’s and other state laws.

With War, a Shift in Attitude

While the Child Labor Amendment languished in state legislatures, the nation’s entrance into World War II dramatically increased the demand for young workers. Employers across industries faced a tight labor market, and state legislatures acceded to their pressure to relax regulations to meet the demands of wartime production. Pennsylvania passed laws increasing the maximum hours and lowering the minimum age requirements for minors who worked “directly or indirectly in furtherance of the war effort,” while New Jersey’s 1942 Student Service Act allowed school officials to relax attendance requirements for youth working as agricultural laborers. Over the course of the war years, the number of Pennsylvania children who annually left school for work increased from 19,143 to 118,655.

The exigencies of wartime production enabled employers and sympathetic policymakers to recast child labor as a patriotic necessity. Farmers in southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey recruited teenaged day haulers transported on trucks between public schools in Trenton and work sites in its rural environs. Through its Victory Farm Volunteers program, the federal government recruited high school students for farm employment marketed as a wholesome and healthful experience for poor urban youth who otherwise lacked opportunities for outdoor recreation.

Laws and standards changed to meet the wartime emergency had a lasting effect, even in industries that never had much to do with defense. A year after the war ended, Philadelphia’s bowling alleys still routinely employed “pin boys” under the age of fourteen, often in violation of state labor laws. Agriculture remained the greatest offender through the postwar years. In 1961, an undercover journalist found children under ten carrying 100-pound potato sacks on a farm in Hastings, New Jersey. A 1949 amendment to the FLSA prohibiting agricultural employers from employing children during school hours didn’t interfere with their labor, performed between 3 p.m. and midnight.

New Focus in the 1950s

Though the Consumers League of New Jersey and other reform organizations continued to advocate for regulating migrant agriculture, the campaign against child labor shifted its focus in the 1950s. In 1959, the NCLC changed the name on its letterhead to the National Committee on Employment of Youth (NCEY).

The organization defined its new focus as the promotion of opportunities for vocational education, job training, and part-time and summer employment for poor urban youth. As an exemplary model, the organization cited the Philadelphia School-Work Program, which allowed high school students to work for part or attend job-training sessions for part of the school day. Similarly, the Philadelphia Youth Conservation Corps encouraged boys to leave school early for temporary work assignments clearing brush, removing parasitic vines, and chopping dead trees in the Fairmount Park.

Progressive Era reformers fighting for a Child Labor Amendment had sought to increase the ages and expand the list of occupations that fell under the category of “child labor.” Their postwar counterparts now redefined teenagers’ part-time work as “youth employment.”

The Twenty-First Century

In July 2022, the New Jersey General Assembly voted to pass a bill increasing the number of hours that minors in the state can work and eliminating a requirement for children to obtain a separate work permit for each job they seek. The state legislators who proposed the bill pitched it as an emergency remedy to the service industry’s post-COVID pandemic labor shortage. Days before the vote, U.S. Labor Department investigation had found that the Manasquan-based business Jersey Mike’s Subs employed 14- and 15-year-olds beyond permitted hours. “With all the real problems threatening the future of this country’s survival, they’re going after a sub shop that employs teenagers,” lamented one local radio host.

The nature of minors’ employment changed over the years since twelve-year-olds accompanied their parents to the mill. But just as importantly, so did understanding of who counts as a child and what counts as labor. Those categories expanded and contracted across contexts of industry, service, and agriculture; during times of peace, war and pandemic; in the summer and after school. The kids are still at work.

Maia Silber is a PhD candidate in American history at Princeton University.  (Author information current at time of publication.)

The nineteenth century experienced a significant increase in urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. The population of Philadelphia tripled between the years 1790 and 1830, and this growth coincided with epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, and typhoid fever, which contributed to an abundance of children who were either orphaned or abandoned. As a result of such upheaval or parental neglect, children often roamed the streets, worked as apprentices through indenture, or faced confinement to almshouses, jails, or insane asylums. The combination of crime and abandoned street children presented serious issues that social welfare advocates such as Hinckley, who had previously served as secretary at the Pennsylvania Homeopathic Hospital for Children, could not ignore. In 1883, she successfully pushed for legislation that prohibited the institutionalization of children in asylums designated primarily for adults. In 1884, the Children’s Aid Society reported that it had cared for 681 children annually, a number that grew steadily over the next fifty years.

The Philadelphia-based organization served children throughout the state until 1889, when the Children’s Aid Society of Western Pennsylvania was organized. Since the Children’s Aid Society could not accommodate all children in the region who were in need of homes and services, volunteer committees created local county branches to respond to this need. Although initially created to address an overflow from the central office, county offices became essential to operations by the 1890s. Before the creation of a centralized bureau in 1921, these local agencies reported between half and two-thirds of the cases to the central office, many of whom were children who had been contracted as indentured workers. By the mid-1930s the Children’s Aid Society reported that it provided care and services for 3,030 children annually from both Philadelphia and its neighboring counties.

The Children’s Aid Society was a pioneer in the professionalization of the field of social work during a period when foundations were established to tackle the root causes of poverty. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the field of social work evolved to include more scientific-based understandings of poverty and child development. In response to these developments, in 1908 the Children’s Aid Society began offering career training to its employees, which eventually grew into the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work (later the School of Social Policy and Practice). The society itself also became more professional, with several prominent figures serving in managerial capacities. Edwin D. Solenberger (1876–1964), a social service administrator, served as general secretary from 1907 until 1943. John Prentice Murphy (1881–1936), a pioneer in the literature on the models of intervention and outcome assessment, joined the society in 1908. In the 1920s, Dr. Jessie Taft (1882–1960), an expert in the burgeoning field of mental hygiene, became the director of the Child Study Department, which provided mental examinations to incoming children. These advancements contributed to the agency’s mission by providing holistic care and support to children and their families.

Over the years, several local child welfare agencies merged with the Children’s Aid Society. The Union Temporary Home (1856), an institution that was created specifically for poor white children, officially closed in 1887 due to financial constraints. The Philadelphia Home for Infants (1873), created for children under the age of three, also began struggling financially in the early twentieth century and eventually merged with the Children’s Bureau in 1942. The Children’s Bureau (1907) functioned as a shelter and centralized information bureau to funnel information to the more than sixty agencies that received needy children. During World War II, both the Children’s Bureau and the Children’s Aid Society helped place juvenile refugees from Europe into homes in the Philadelphia area. They merged into one organization in 1944.

From the 1950s through the late 1970s, child welfare services were typically self-contained units that focused on in-home evaluations. From the 1970s onward, local government agencies began operating under federal legislation. Similar in its mission to the Children’s Aid Society, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 aimed to serve children in their own homes, prevent external placement, and facilitate the reunification of families. Despite such reform, the late 1980s and 1990s experienced increases in child neglect and foster placements. In Philadelphia, agencies such as the Philadelphia Task Force for Children at Risk, the Support and Community Outreach Program, and PhillyKids Connection addressed these concerns.

Dedicated to improving and protecting the lives of children, the Children’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania was a pioneer in child welfare and advocacy. In 2008, it merged with the Philadelphia Society for Services to Children and formed Turning Points for Children, an organization dedicated to reducing child abuse and improving the lives of over nine thousand children and their caregivers. Like its predecessor, Turning Points for Children focused on providing holistic family-center programs in the interest of building community relations in the region.

Holly Caldwell received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Delaware, where she wrote her dissertation on the medicalization of deafness and deaf education reform at Mexico’s Escuela Nacional de Sordomudos (National School for Deaf-Mutes). She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at Chestnut Hill College and has also taught at Susquehanna University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

When commercial television began, national networks typically did not begin their weekday broadcasts until after seven o’clock at night. Local stations had to fill the rest of the air time during each weekday.  Children’s shows became a popular choice for economic reasons. The local children’s programs kept their production costs very low: the sets were minimal; there were no writers (most shows were ad-libbed); and the star (the host) performed live.

From Radio to TV

Most of the shows followed the same formula. The role of host was similar to the role of a disc jockey on the radio. Indeed, several of the popular children’s show hosts in the Philadelphia area were originally radio personalities. The host introduced cartoons or film shorts (such as Popeye, Little Rascals, and The Three Stooges), which program directors purchased in bundles from the controlling motion picture studios or from brokers such as King Features Syndicate. Hosts filled the time between the segments with singing, improvised “dialogue” with the child-viewer at home, and story-telling often accompanied with drawings by the host done in real time. The host also served as the spokesperson for the show’s sponsors. Inexpensive to produce and popular with the child-viewer, these shows became attractive vehicles for local businesses eager to tap into the new advertising medium of television.

Hosts such as Sally Starr (Popeye Theater) and Bill “Wee Willie” Webber (Breakfast Time), whose personalities transcended the shows’ limited production values, attracted the children who tuned in daily.  Many program directors felt that since there was so much time to fill, they could afford to give any reasonably good idea a chance. This atmosphere fostered creativity and encouraged experimentation. Children’s entertainers had the opportunity to land their own shows if they could craft a unique concept. In addition to Starr and Webber, some of the most popular hosts—based on both the longevity of the shows and market share of viewing audiences—were Jane Norman (Pixanne), Gene London, “Uncle” Pete Boyle, Traynor Ora Halftown (Chief Halftown), and W. Carter Merbreier (Captain Noah).

By the early 1970s, the heyday of children’s programming in Philadelphia had ended. New Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations prohibited the hosts from performing commercials for the sponsor’s products, thus making them less attractive to local businesses. The rise of educational programming, UHF stations, and the introduction of the Saturday-morning cartoon block resulted in increased competition for the locally produced shows on the network affiliates. Thus increased government scrutiny and regulation in conjunction with major industry changes reduced the financial viability of these shows and helped to bring about their demise in stations across the country.

Host Bill Webber

By decade’s end, most of the local hosted children’s shows were gone. Some hosts, like Bill Webber, made a successful transition to UHF. From the mid-1960s through to the end of the 1970s, Webber hosted cartoon shows for local stations Channel 17 (WPHL) and Channel 48 (WKBS). Captain Noah and His Magical Ark (which began in the late 1960s) sailed its final voyage in 1994. Chief Halftown’s weekend show continued on the air until 1999, although the format had changed from a cartoon show to a children’s talent showcase.

Even though the hosts of the shows were no longer on television they continued to personal appearances and draw crowds of former child-viewer fans at local parades and amusement parks throughout the area. Bill Webber, Ora Halftown, and “Uncle” Pete Boyle are now deceased. Many of the remaining hosts have reinvented themselves and have had second careers. Jane Norman has had a highly successful career as an author and currently tours and records as an interpreter of the Great American Songbook and jazz standards. Sally Starr was a radio show host (WVLT Vineland, N.J.) until her retirement in 2011. Gene London became a historian and curator of movie costumes. His collection has been featured in museums nationally and internationally. Although now retired, W. Carter Merbreier continues to write for children and is active in professional organizations such as the Broadcast Pioneers. (The set of Captain Noah is on permanent display at the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia.)

Though their reign over the “Golden Age of Television” was brief, children’s television show hosts in the Delaware Valley left an indelible mark on the children of the era who were comforted by the hosts’ warmth and charm. Television stations produced inexpensive yet high-quality programming, and Baby Boomer children in the Philadelphia region reaped the benefits.

Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic is a reference librarian at the Paul Robeson Library of Rutgers – The State University of New Jersey. Brandi Scardilli graduated from Rutgers University–Camden with an M.A. in history. (Author information current at time of publication.)

 Throughout the eighteenth and into the late nineteenth century, theatrical entertainment was generally not segmented by age. Rather than “children’s productions” or “adult productions” theater producers assumed attendance by a general audience that included children with their parents or working youths who could afford the price of admission. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an evening’s dramatic entertainment often included pantomimes (pantos), usually based on fairy or folk tales with strong comic elements. The pantomime Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper by Michael Kelly (1762-1826), first performed in 1804 at London’s Theatre Royal, debuted at the Chestnut Street Theater in 1806 to great success. In addition to legitimate stage productions such as those at the Walnut and Chestnut Street Theaters, Philadelphia’s children and youths attended the first American circus, founded in 1793 at Twelfth and Market Streets by the Scottish circus impresario John Bill Ricketts (1769–1800). Later generations of children and working youth attended vaudeville and minstrel shows at venues such as the Arch Street Opera House (founded in 1870 and later renamed the Trocadero Theater) and spectacles including Philadelphia’s Cyclorama (1888-90), which presented spectacular –360– degree paintings such as The Battle of Gettysburg and Jerusalem on the Day of the Crucifixion in a circular-shaped building at Broad and Cherry Streets. 

While children remained part of a general audience for amusements the city offered, in the late nineteenth century child-specific theater arose in response to the emerging concept of a “protected childhood.” This era of a rising middle class, urbanization, and shifting cultural values produced specialized child-related material culture such as furnishings, clothing, literature, and entertainment. Theaters advertised offerings specifically for children or matinees adapted and advertised as “suitable for ladies and children.” For example, in  1891 the Grand Opera House (Broad Street and Montgomery Avenue) produced Gulliver’s Travels with the Lilliputians played by the “Royal Midgets.” In 1893 the Walnut Street Theater offered a matinee performance of “Terry’s Funny Pantomime,” and in 1895 a “specially adapted” matinee vaudeville performance took place at Mathews and Bulger’s Company at The Auditorium (Eighth and Walnut Streets).  

Encouraging Creativity

Educational theater emerged during the Progressive Era (c. 1890-1920) of social and political reform as teachers, social workers, and other child advocates viewed live theater as a venue for introducing language skills, encouraging creativity, and teaching positive values to the growing number of immigrant children in America’s cities. The City of Philadelphia created play spaces for children and youth as well as opportunities for adult-led leisure activities such as sports, arts, and crafts. By the early 1930s, Philadelphia’s fifteen  recreation centers offered a robust dramatic program for children and youth with a reported 1,100 participants. While the Recreation Department’s productions featured child actors participating in a volunteer activity, the Junior League of America also brought theater to Philadelphia’s children in the form of professionally produced plays with adult actors and the goal of promoting literacy and academic achievement. The Children’s Theater, sponsored by the Junior League of Philadelphia beginning in 1927, continued to serve school children in the twenty-first century. The Women’s International League and the Philadelphia Art Alliance also sponsored professional productions such as those by the Clara Tree Major players for area children at theaters across Philadelphia from the 1920s into the 1950s. 

By the latter part of the twentieth century Philadelphia’s children’s theater community became increasingly interactive and participatory, create a new role for child audiences. In the late 1960s the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts sponsored several successful children’s theater initiatives, including the Society Hill Playhouse’s Philadelphia Youth Theater (1970–83); Society Hill’s Street Theater (1968–70), in which young adult and adult actors traveled to Philadelphia neighborhoods with live productions; and the Free Children’s Theater of the Germantown Theater Guild, which offered free children’s programming throughout the 1970s. 

The Children’s Repertory Theater, founded by Dr. Hans Walter Wenkaert (1909–80) and active during the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrated collaboration between adults and children.  Featuring a company of child actors who performed for a child audience, the company originally was located at 1617 Locust Street home of the Philadelphia Musical Academy. Wenkaert, who immigrated to the United States from Germany before World War II, brought to his work the European tradition of regarding children’s theater as a venue for encouraging agency, identity, and creativity. The company produced shows based on fairy tales and children’s literature such as Puss in Boots and Peter Pan.   

Child Empowerment

The political climate of the 1960s and 1970s shaped educational theater with progressive themes of child empowerment, tolerance, and acceptance. The Philadelphia Youth Theater under the direction of Susan Turlish (b. 1946) produced versions of A Clockwork Orange and Animal Farm. Laurie Wagman (b. 1932) founded American Theater Arts for Youth in 1971 with the goal of educating and entertaining children through theater arts, particularly children who may not have had access to live theater previously. Performances, based on children’s classics and historical figures, featured high production values and Equity actors. They included Black Journey, an original musical that surveyed three hundred 300 years of African American history. Based in Philadelphia, this organization garnered a national reputation for bringing live theater productions to children for over forty years.

As the baby boom of children born 1946-60 produced an expanded youth audience, children’s shows became a staple of the summer tent music venues such as the Valley Forge Music Fair (active 1954–96), the Camden County Music Fair (active 1956-69 and 1972-73), the Lambertville Music Circus (1949–69), and the Playhouse in the Park in Fairmount Park (1952–79). Performance spaces that hosted children’s shows also included the Electric Factory Children’s Theater at 2201 Arch Street, the Karenga Cultural Arts House at 1711 N. Croskey Street, and the Society Hill Playhouse. University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts became home to the annual Philadelphia International Children’s Festival of performing arts in 1975. 

By the twenty-first century, children were encouraged to be not only participants but also writers and artists. The children’s theater community consisted of commercial and non-commercial ventures including professional productions (those employing Actor’s Equity members), non–professional community groups, and educational theater companies.  Children’s series and acting programs continued in Philadelphia at the Walnut Street Theater, the Arden Theater, and the MacGuffin Theater and Film Company (Twentieth and Sansom Streets); People’s Light in Malvern; and the Hedgerow Theater in Media. Philadelphia Young Playwrights (1219 Vine Street) worked with elementary and high school-aged children and to encourage creative writing skills and an interest in the lively arts through its classes and, beginning in 1987, an annual Playwriting Festival. 

As the concept of “child audience” evolved in popular culture from the early the nineteenth century to the present, so did productions in children’s theater. In addition to attending adult-created and produced plays, children and youth in Philadelphia gained a hand in writing and directing their own content. By engaging the next generation of thespians, Philadelphia’s theater community continued a centuries-long history of live stage productions for child audiences.      

Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic  is a Librarian Emerita of the Rutgers Universities Libraries and an adjunct professor of English at Atlantic Cape Community College. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Before Pennsylvania state legislators passed the Reorganization Act of 1905 and Martin G. Brumbaugh (1862-1930) became Philadelphia’s school superintendent in 1906, corrupt budgetary and hiring practices plagued the School District of Philadelphia. Under Brumbaugh’s guidance, the board of education replaced its ward-based governance system with one that gave the superintendent the power to systematize and standardize the public schools. As superintendent, Brumbaugh obtained public funds to build additional primary and secondary schools, reform academic programs in the high schools, and raise teacher salaries. These policies increased access to educational institutions for Philadelphia youth, particularly those living in West Philadelphia, Frankford, and Germantown—beyond the city’s core—and alleviated overcrowding and part-time attendance patterns in the city’s primary schools. At the same time, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia expanded its school system to attract families who wanted their children to attend Catholic schools.  These policies increased racial segregation in the city’s schools as white ethnics—primarily Italians and Irish—enrolled their children in parochial schools. African American families never enjoyed the same educational opportunities. For decades, the School District of Philadelphia maintained specific policies and informal practices that segregated Black and white youth and discriminated against Black teachers.  African American leaders and concerned residents challenged these racist practices by forming grassroots organizations, such as the Educational Equality League, and mounting fundraising campaigns through the city’s Black newspaper, the Philadelphia Tribune.

The Great Depression brought new challenges to Philadelphia and suburban communities. As men and women lost their jobs and homes, the tax revenues for education plummeted. The School District of Philadelphia had faced fiscal difficulties before, but the Great Depression brought unprecedented challenges. To reduce costs, the board of education eliminated positions, cut salaries, and slashed programs.

During the 1930s, the region’s schools, like others in the nation, witnessed a dramatic increase in student enrollment. The Great Depression decimated the nation’s labor market, forcing thousands of working-class youth to enroll in school. As economic conditions worsened, some of Philadelphia’s upper class families had to transfer their children to the local public schools because they could no longer afford the tuition charged by private schools. As a result, students poured into public schools in the city and surrounding communities, creating overcrowded classrooms and underfunded schools. Both educational opportunity and inequality increased simultaneously.

World War II boost

World War II brought Philadelphia’s economy back to life—at least temporarily. The School District of Philadelphia created accelerated secondary school programs so that students could earn their diplomas before enlisting in the nation’s armed services or securing employment in a variety of wartime industries. As families moved to the region to find work and as youth returned to the labor market, student enrollment decreased at the secondary level even as it increased in elementary schools. The School District of Philadelphia did not have the budget or the resources to build new schools during the war, and thus primary school children, particularly African Americans, found that racial segregation in the region’s housing market barred them from the best schooling options.

When the war ended, Black leaders such as Floyd L. Logan (1901-78) and Cecil B. Moore (1915-79) urged local governments to provide Black children with greater access to educational opportunities by desegregating the region’s public schools. In the postwar period, boroughs and townships on the edge of Philadelphia and Camden expanded as GIs returned from duty and used their benefits to purchase suburban homes for their young families. Communities such as Levittown, Pennsylvania, were transformed from rural outposts to planned neighborhoods.  These suburban communities provided young families with many advantages—sprawling landscapes, new schools, and modern shopping centers. But real estate agents and local homeowners routinely refused to sell homes to Black buyers and thus created suburban communities that were reserved almost exclusively for white upper- and middle-class residents.

As this suburban expansion and white flight from the city occurred, urban public schools systems like Philadelphia’s lost the tax revenues that white families had contributed. They also witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of Black youth in the public schools. This combination, coupled with the Philadelphia City Council’s failure to raise the revenues the schools actually needed, created an untenable situation. The school district could not hire enough teachers or build enough new schools. When they did find the land and money to build new schools, these new institutions often reinforced inequality by creating distinct schools for Black children in North Philadelphia and white children in predominately middle-class white communities such as Mount Airy and Overbrook. The school district’s policies and practices often left African American children in schools that were much more crowded than those attended by their white counterparts. School choice played a role, as well, as white Catholic families sent their children to parochial schools rather than their local public schools.

Desegregation Pressures

The pressure to desegregate mounted after the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which stipulated that separate but equal educational institutions were unconstitutional. Civil rights activists in Philadelphia and suburbs like Abington, Pennsylvania, and Mount Holly, New Jersey, called for the desegregation of public schools. But those in charge of those schools routinely replied that the conditions were beyond their control. In 1959, Philadelphia’s Board of Public Education passed a resolution stating that the school district did not discriminate against anyone on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. Civil rights leaders pressed the board to do more, and in the mid-1960s, the school district finally admitted that Philadelphia’s public schools were indeed segregated. It commissioned several studies, such as the Report of the Special Committee on Nondiscrimination (sometimes referred to as the “Lewis Report” for the committee’s chairman, board Vice President Ada H. Lewis) whose findings the district’s leaders largely ignored. In 1967, Philadelphia youth staged a demonstration to urge the district to adopt Black history and a more Afrocentric curriculum. When Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo ordered his officers to use brutal force to quash this peaceful demonstration, it became more apparent than ever that equal educational opportunity was not a reality in Philadelphia.

In 1983, a commission convened by President Ronald Reagan issued A Nation at Risk, a report that emphasized the failures of the American educational system and ushered in a wave of local, state, and federal efforts to improve the nation’s schools. While it raised new concerns about the economic viability of American schoolchildren, the report did little to change the educational opportunities in the region despite the efforts of some civic leaders, concerned residents, and urban youth. Public schools in Philadelphia; Camden, New Jersey; and Wilmington, Delaware, still lagged behind their suburban counterparts with regard to per capita funding, academic achievement, and extracurricular activities. The racial segregation that had existed in the City of Brotherly Love since the beginning of the twentieth century had spread beyond Philadelphia. In 1997, Camden had a student population that was 57.7 percent Black and 38.1 percent Latino while most school systems in its adjoining suburbs were predominately white. The court-ordered reorganization of the public schools in Delaware’s New Castle County led to the creation in 1981 of four school districts that encompass Wilmington and its suburbs. The racial segregation in these school districts was not so blatant. For example, the Christina School District to the south was 33.4 percent Black and 4.2 percent Latino in 1997. The Red Clay School District to the north was 29.7 percent Black and 12.7 percent Latino.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, some of these urban school systems welcomed charter management organizations in the hopes that market-driven solutions could alleviate inequities that had existed for decades. Educational opportunity is clearly greater today than it was at the beginning of the twentieth century, but along with these changes, the level of educational inequality has also increased, creating gross economic, political, and social inequities between youth who have access to first-rate educational institutions and those who do not.

Erika M. Kitzmiller is a historian of race, social inequality, and education who served as an assistant clinical professor at Drexel University and is currently the Caperton Fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute.  She received her Ph.D. in History and Education and Master’s in Public Policy from the University of Pennsylvania and her B.A. from Wellesley College. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Interest in studying and perhaps channeling human heredity long predated eugenics. Philadelphia in particular, with its extensive network of academic, medical, scientific, and philanthropic institutions, helped develop some of the key early institutions that applied quasi-scientific theories of fitness to issues of social welfare. The Philadelphia Society for Organizing Charity (SOC), established in 1878, one of the first of about two hundred similar organizations nationwide, exemplified the new “scientific” approach to treating dependent persons based on their perceived moral and biological worthiness, or lack thereof. These charity organizers, many of whom eventually moved into eugenics, argued that the chronically poor, the insane, alcoholics, some criminals, the “feeble-minded,” and prostitutes represented a single, biologically distinct substratum of humanity that passed on its defects from generation to generation. Leaders claimed that by identifying such individuals and promoting cooperation between charities, they could prevent such persons from sustaining themselves by going from one charity to the next. This in turn would motivate those who could work to find gainful employment, end the need for taxpayer-funded relief, and cause the truly degenerate to wither and die, unable to pass on their defective taint.

Based on such logic, within a year of the SOC’s founding, Philadelphia eliminated all public funds given to support the poor outside of institutions. In doing so, the city was at the forefront of a nationwide trend in reducing or eliminating public relief.  Efforts to bring greater efficiency and scientific scrutiny to poor relief in the greater Philadelphia area echoed associated work to reform charitable and correctional institutions. Pennsylvania had long boasted of its leading role in providing humane institutional care, but by the 1880s institutions nationwide were besieged by critics who simultaneously argued that they were too great a drain on public funds, yet also provided inadequate and inhumane services based on outdated principles. The insane asylum in Philadelphia, for instance, was kept within the larger confines of the Blockley Almshouse on Thirty-Fourth Street. When a fire swept through on February 12, 1885, more than twenty inmates, locked into their rooms from the outside and many physically restrained, died.

“Race Suicide”

Complaints about wasteful spending on inhumane social welfare programs, coupled with alarm over “race suicide”—a theory that held lower-class, biologically suspect whites were out-reproducing the white upper class, which, along with immigration and births in African American families, would result in the swamping of the better heredity of the white professional class—gave rise to the nationwide eugenic agenda to identify, isolate, and even sterilize certain classes of dependent persons. This effort was in large part built on the work of Drs. Isaac Kerlin (1834–93) and Martin Barr (1860–1938) at the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children in Elwyn, in Delaware County, and Henry Goddard (1866–1957) at the Vineland Training School in New Jersey. Under their direction, these institutions became two of the most important centers for eugenic research and pro-sterilization arguments in America. Kerlin, the superintendent at Elwyn from 1864 to 1893, was one of the nation’s foremost experts on the education and institutional care of children with intellectual disability. In his 1892 presidential address to the Association of Medical Officers of American Institutions for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Persons—an organization he founded—he acknowledged an “asexualization” surgery performed at his institution, and he became one of if not the first to recommend the practice. Records are spotty, but historians generally believe that Kerlin’s  also were the first sterilizations performed in an American institution.

His protégé and subsequent superintendent at Elwyn, Martin Barr, led the Philadelphia area’s lobbying effort for a state law authorizing sterilizations. The 1901 “Bill for the Prevention of Idiocy” would have given legal sanction to the castrations he already was performing. It passed both houses before a “technicality” in language led Governor William Stone (1846–1920) to conclude it had not passed properly and return it to the legislature, where it died. A sterilization law passed in 1905 would have been the first in the nation had not Governor Samuel Pennypacker (1843–1916) vetoed it with a rousing statement in defense of the rights of institutionalized persons. Several more bills failed to get through the legislature in subsequent years. All the while, Barr continued sterilizing residents of the Pennsylvania Training School and pivoted from arguments about the procedure’s educational and therapeutic value to more extravagant claims that it might eliminate the supposed hereditary source of many cases of intellectual disability. From Kerlin’s first sterilization through 1931, the school oversaw about 270 sterilizations. It is unclear how many of those involved consent from the individuals or their guardians; notions that vulnerable people might have a right to informed consent before submitting to medical procedures did not become prominent in America medical ethics until the 1950s and 1960s. While the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of the legality of involuntary sterilization in the notorious Buck v. Bell case in 1927, Pennsylvania had passed no law ruling on its permissibility within the state. Indeed, at no point did Pennsylvania actually enact a law permitting sterilizations of persons in institutions, though thirty-three other states did. Still, superintendents at Elwyn persisted. The superintendent who succeeded Barr, Dr. E. Arthur Whitney (1895–1966), proposed such legislation at every legislative session from 1929 to 1951.

Though the Pennsylvania Training School led the effort to pair medical and scientific expertise with state authority to restrict reproductive rights, it had many allies. The administration at Eastern State Penitentiary similarly turned to eugenic arguments to explain the underlying causes of crime. Like the training school, Eastern State had been founded on the progressive premise that its charges could be reformed and improved, but according to a 1907 report of the inspectors, favored “restricting the liberty and power of degenerates to transmit their criminal propensities to unfortunate progeny” as the only solution.

The explosive growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of institutions for people with intellectual disabilities, including the facilities in Polk and Pennhurst, Pennsylvania, also expressed the eugenic aspiration of restricting the right to reproduce among the “unfit.” So too did efforts nationwide to require medical examinations determining couples’ fitness to marry or prohibiting marriage for persons with certain classifications of mental illness or intellectual disability, including New Jersey’s 1904 marriage law, and the judicial reform movement to allow for indeterminate sentencing of criminals. In such efforts, eugenic reformers in the greater Philadelphia area and nationwide resembled and often overlapped with the public health movement, which similarly used the threat of illness and promise of scientific cures—most notably, the discovery by Robert Koch (1843–1910) that tuberculosis was contagious—to argue for coercive measures to advance the nation’s health.

Henry Goddard

The eugenicists’ work culminated in Henry Goddard’s work for the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Boys and Girls. After completing his doctorate of psychology at Clark University in 1899, Goddard taught pedagogical courses for the West Chester State Normal School. He did so at a moment when Pennsylvania and New Jersey struggled to meet the challenge of educating children with intellectual disability in their rapidly expanding public school systems. His interest in this challenge resulted in an opportunity for him to serve as the first director for research at Vineland, a position he accepted in 1906. Vineland’s superintendent envisioned the new research department to function as a psychological laboratory for investigating good teaching practice in the field later known as special education. Goddard, however, soon came to share the pessimism of physicians like Barr, with whom he collaborated. His research produced two crucial works justifying sterilizations of persons with intellectual disability. First, Goddard’s assistant, Elizabeth Kite (1864–1954), a Philadelphian, translated the works on childhood intelligence of French psychologist Alfred Binet, (1857–1911), and from this Goddard created some of the first intelligence tests. He used these to classify the children at Vineland based on their intelligence and capacity to improve from education, and from there, such testing soon swept the nation.

Armed with these tests and a new scheme for classifying levels of intellectual disability, Goddard’s staff of field workers—mostly college-educated women whose work was supported by Philadelphia philanthropist Samuel Fels (1860–1950)—sought to identify families with long histories of intellectual disability and immoral living. Their work resulted in the 1912 publication of The Kallikak Family. In it, Goddard traced a legacy of criminality, sexual wantonness, feeble-mindedness, and poverty across six generations, arguing that their causes were hereditary, not environmental. It is a work whose lack of rigor and amount of outright fabrication were exceeded only by its enthusiastic reception in its time. The Kallikak Family became an international phenomenon and made Goddard one of the figures most closely associated with American eugenics. Vineland’s Committee on Provision for the Feeble-Minded functioned as a national campaign office and soon relocated to Philadelphia, where it produced public pro-eugenic exhibits that attracted one hundred thousand visitors. Goddard also brought his tests to Ellis Island, where the dismal—and very flawed—results quickly became fodder for anti-immigration activists. Ironically, New Jersey had passed a sterilization law the year before publication of The Kallikak Family and the state supreme court overturned it the year after, with no sterilizations having occurred. Delaware, by contrast, had legalized sterilizations in 1923, without granting a right to counsel for those to be sterilized, most done at the Delaware State Hospital at Farnhurst.

Delaware frequently led the nation in involuntary sterilizations per capita in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, but several trends brought about a slow unwinding of eugenic policies nationwide. Diminishing fears of “race suicide” and revulsion at Nazi Germany’s sterilization program, which had been modeled on the legislative proposals of American eugenicist Harry Laughlin (1880–1943), a better understanding of the interplay of heredity and environment, changing medical ethics standards for informed consent, and disability rights activism all helped curtail the eugenics movement.

Yet echoes of such attitudes endured. Perhaps most infamous among regional examples, a 1990 editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer became a source of nationwide controversy when it suggested offering incentives to mothers who received welfare if they used the long-term contraceptive Norplant. Though the paper insisted it did not mean to suggest eugenics and its concern for making birth control affordable and easily available to all women presaged more recent political debates, the editorial’s suggestion that birth control could solve generational poverty among the “underclass” reminded many critics of the simplified explanations and solutions for dependence characteristic of the eugenicists, as well as its racist baggage.

Brent Ruswick is an Assistant Professor of History at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. His historical research—including the monograph Almost Worthy: The Poor, Paupers, and the Science of Charity in America, 1877–1917 (2012)—concentrates on how professional communities defined and treated social deviancy in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He also publishes and teaches in social studies education. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Anderson, a New York Times best-selling author of the award-winning young adult novels Speak (1999) and Chains (2008), conceived the idea for Fever 1793 after reading a newspaper article about the yellow fever epidemic while her family was stuck in traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway, driving into Philadelphia. Anderson then lived in the city and worked as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Always interested in historical fiction, she began research in 1993 for Fever 1793 by examining primary sources at the Historical Society of Philadelphia and consulting historians at Independence National Historical Park and the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians.

Before completing and publishing Fever 1793 with Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers in 2000, Anderson published two children’s books, Ndito Run and Turkey Pox, both in 1996, and Speak, which became a National Book Award finalist adapted into a 2004 film starring Kristen Stewart (b. 1990). In 2001 Anderson published another children’s book, The Cheese on 3rd Street, also set in Philadelphia. In many of her novels, she writes from the perspective of teenagers and children, often the marginalized. With Fever 1793 and her other works of historical fiction, like the trilogy Seeds of America, Anderson developed a reputation for writing novels that address challenging topics and engage young readers.

Rumors of the Fever

In Fever 1793, Mattie Cook lives with her mother, grandfather, and a family cook named Eliza. She helps with her family’s coffeehouse, originally built by her now-deceased father. Toward the beginning of the novel, Mattie argues with her mother because she wants to be treated as an adult rather than a child. While facing this issue, Mattie and her family begin to hear rumors of the fever spreading throughout Philadelphia. At first the townspeople, including Mattie’s grandfather, are not alarmed and believe it will be like other fevers during previous summers. However, as the death toll begins to rise, Mattie and her family discover the overwhelming danger of the plague.

To avoid the sickness, Mattie leaves the city with her grandfather. They travel to the Pennsylvania countryside, only to be denied entrance because of their fever symptoms. Fighting off dangers and the fever itself, Mattie must persevere and make it back to Philadelphia to find her family. In the fight for her survival, she discovers how to care for others while also achieving the maturity she eagerly sought. Mattie’s character demonstrates the power of perseverance and determination in the face of sickness and sometimes death, and readers experience some of the dangers of illness in eighteenth-century America from a child’s perspective.

Throughout the novel, Anderson describes Philadelphia of the 1790s, when the city served as capital of the United States. She portrays the effects of the rampant fever in Philadelphia as well as important historical landmarks such as Christ Church and influential people like Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), who advocated bloodletting patients in an effort to cure them. She quotes archival accounts of the fever and writes about places like Bush Hill, an estate used as a hospital for those affected by the fever. In the novel, Mattie finds herself at the mansion, where she learns about the French doctors’ methods, which were more effective than some approaches of American doctors. Anderson also uses the character Eliza to recount the important acts of the Free African Society, founded by Richard Allen (1760-1831) and Absalom Jones (1746-1818). Readers see how this society assisted people affected by the fever by bringing resources, burying the dead, and caring for orphaned children.

Recommended by the publisher for grade levels 5-9 (ages 10-14), Fever 1793 has often been assigned in schools following widespread, favorable reviews that called attention to its potential uses in the classroom. Publisher’s Weekly emphasized the quality of its research, useful for students studying eighteenth-century America. A review for junior and senior high school librarians in the journal Book Report suggested teachers could pair the novel with a historical-fiction unit and identified it as essential for every school library. In The New York Times Book Review, Constance Decker Thompson wrote that Anderson tells a “gripping” story that “rages like the epidemic itself.”

Fever 1793 encourages readers to envision a significant time in Philadelphia’s history. The novel introduces students to research using primary sources and nonfiction texts, correlates with subjects such as history and science, and promotes discussion of contemporary issues related to health and medicine. Mattie’s character development and the historical context of the novel give readers a glimpse into eighteenth-century Philadelphia during a deadly time that most could otherwise never have imagined.

Megan Walter is completing her M.A. in English at Rutgers University-Camden. While in elementary school, she wrote her first-ever book report on Fever 1793 and the historic significance of the epidemic. After receiving her B.A. in English Education, she assigned the novel to her own students while teaching high school English at a public school near Richmond, Virginia. (Author information current at time of publication.)