Abstract
Planners and planning academics, like members of any profession, see the world through the particular lenses of their education and professional experiences. Yet if our planners’ view is focused by our training and work, it remains an expansive one. We strive to be collaborative and comprehensive in our partnerships, savvy in our thinking, and historically grounded in key social and economic changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all the while being attuned to the political, cultural, and demographic changes of the present. Because our subject of practice and study is the human settlement in its many forms, we tend to be jacks of all trades, catholic in our interests and curiosities, always ready to add new tools to our analytical and professional toolboxes.
Dominic Vitiello, in writing Engineering Philadelphia: The Sellers Family and the Industrial Metropolis, has skillfully tapped into planners’ wide-ranging interests. In telling the story of three centuries of the entrepreneurial and civically engaged Sellers family of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he reflects on the defining breadth and diversity of the planner’s perspective, but approaches his subjects with details, insights, and a style connecting the dots, complementing the broad and sophisticated view. The book focuses on regional economic development. However, it is also a planning history of Philadelphia, a profile of many generations of a family of “millers, mechanics, manufacturers, engineers, and a corporate titan or two” (ix) who played important roles in the physical, economic, and social changes that have shaped one of the most historically and economically important cities of the United States. It is a chronicle of the mechanics and methods of regional economic development, of industrial growth and decline, and of American urbanization from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries.
Vitiello clearly defines the focus and boundaries of his book in the introduction: “This is a metropolitan study,” he writes, “a frame of analysis that captures two interrelated scales and spheres of activity: the individual urban region and the connections and interactions between regions” (x). He does this by documenting multiple generations of the Sellers family who developed local, then regional, national, and international businesses and reputations. (Precisely how many generations the book covers is unclear; one minor lacuna of the book is that a family tree—which would have been helpful in keeping the multiple Nathans, Colemans, and Samuels straight—is not provided.) Building on the professional and business skills of a line of mechanical engineers, Sellers men established company after company, some that failed, others that succeeded on a local scale, but several that became major national corporations of their times. Later generations of the family came to hold dominant positions in industry and in the city of Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley region. Dominant, that is, until the turn-of-the-twentieth-century rise of corporate capitalism led to their companies’ absorption into conglomerates headquartered in New York City.
Engineering Philadelphia “is an urban and planning history, concerned with the social and spatial dimensions of economic development at least as much as the business strategies and technologies that most historians of industrialization have examined” (xii). Vitiello does not ignore those “business strategies and technologies”; his recounting of the technologies pioneered by Nathan, Coleman, William, and other family members, of deals that went big and others that went awry, and of their many investments (including some ethically dubious) are all fascinating. But even in paying attention to the details of Sellers’ contributions to the first and second waves of industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he uses these stories to illustrate the impacts their efforts had on the city and the region.
Their accomplishments can be attributed in large part to their skills as mechanics, engineers, scientists, manufacturers, and businessmen. Vitiello explains that their successes also owe an important debt to large and overlapping religious, social, and institutional networks of which they were influential members. He describes these webs of connections in terms of the mediating role that the Sellers and their associates played in establishing and leading institutions that developed “agendas for urban development and reform and thereby became the intellectual foundations of early city and regional planning” (x).
By actively pursuing their professional interests and ambitions within larger networks, they built their personal fortunes and shaped institutions that would influence physical and economic changes in the Philadelphia metropolitan region. Promoting industrial, technological, and business innovation, some of these institutions ran their course and no longer exist: the Apprentice’s Library of Philadelphia, for example, originally established to aid millers, craftsmen, and mechanics learn their trades. Others, such as the Franklin Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, remain influential today, though in some cases their missions have significantly evolved.
Though Vitiello emphasizes the public lives of the Sellers family, he does not ignore personal aspects. Family anecdotes are included where they illustrate events and world views that are relevant to their professional and business lives. Of great importance were the family’s Quaker beliefs and values, although not always adhered to as strictly as others in the Religious Society of Friends would have had them do. During the revolutionary war, Nathan and John were labeled “Fighting Quakers” and nearly expelled from the Society for the goods and service they provided to American troops. Nor did his Quaker faith stop Charles from using slave labor in the decades before the Civil War, nor his mother Sophy from rationalizing his choice as a benevolent one: these slaves were not punished with whippings, she wrote, but only by being “deprived of their coffee” (66). (The story of American industrialization and its links to slavery is told in more detail in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Baptist 2014). With particular regard to Philadelphia, Slavery in Philadelphia: A History of Resistance, Denial and Wealth (Seitz 2014) links northern urban economic development of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the slave economy of the southern states.)
The book focuses on Philadelphia—the city and the metropolitan region—where Sellers ancestors first settled in the late seventeenth century. But the family roamed widely, sometimes driven by circumstance, sometimes lured by opportunity. The financial panic of 1837 and the economic depression that followed it led to the bankruptcy of Sellers & Sons, a firm that produced some of the most sophisticated machinery of the early nineteenth century (including carding combs and steam-powered papermaking machines), and the relocation of Escol and Charles to Cincinnati. The family made investments in southern states, upstate New York (where Coleman was the lead engineer for the pioneering Niagara Falls power project), and elsewhere.
Sellers companies built rolling stock for railroads, bridges (including the steel superstructure of the Brooklyn Bridge), roads, and water and sanitary sewer systems. These efforts drew them into the processes of planning, zoning, and designing cities and towns. William was influential as a member of the Fairmount Park Commission and its work to protect the city’s water supply by “‘scientifically’ managing the Schuylkill River watershed” (166). Other family members helped design and ensure mass transit access to recreational areas and develop the bucolic suburb of Ridley Park in nearby Delaware County, using “a broad complement of spatial and institutional strategies” (181) that would become mainstays of land use planning. The family’s network of civic and planning connections extended to early innovators and intellectuals associated with the planning profession, including Frederick Winslow Taylor, who was hired to “rationalize” labor productivity at Midvale Steel in the 1880s, and English utopian socialist Robert Owen, whom they helped bring to Philadelphia for a series of lectures. Eventually, as corporate modes of capitalism undermined Philadelphia’s industrial foundations in the early twentieth century and as the family sold its companies to larger national corporations, Horace Sellers helped redefine Philadelphia by celebrating its revolutionary past and historical significance, setting the stage for regional economic changes that would come later.
Some readers will finish the book feeling their subfield of city and regional planning has not been thoroughly covered; regional economic development specialists will start with a greater familiarity with the foundations of the family’s story than transportation planners, housing experts, community development specialists, or urban designers do. But planners in each of these areas will find examples, connections, and references that draw them in professionally and illuminate the issues and histories that link them to their planning colleagues of all specialties. In delving into the lives of the Sellers family, we come away with a rich understanding of the specifics of industrial development in Philadelphia. But we also put the book down with a deeper appreciation for the broad economic and institutional forces that have made and then transformed the modern American city.