19102 Review: Richardson Dilworth: Last of the Bare-Knuckled Aristocrats

Richardson Dilworth: Last of the Bare-Knuckled Aristocrats, by Peter Binzen with Jonathan Binzen
(Camino Books, 2014, 214 pp.)

Peter Binzen sets a familiar scene to start his retelling of Richardson Dilworth’s epic tale: decades of one-party rule has left Philadelphia’s politics “corrupt and contented,” schools are crumbling, jobs are scarce, racial tensions are high and the baseball team sucks.

Then, as now, native Philadelphians seem to suffer from “a deep instinct for self-disparagement” — things have always sucked, they’ll always suck, so why bother? Dilworth arrived as a distrusted outsider, too privileged for the oppressed, too progressive for the powerful, and willfully ignorant of the “that’s just how it is” mentality. “Dilworth…shunned the cautious ‘Philadelphia style,’ which was once described as ‘drowning without making waves,’” Binzen writes. “He made waves.”

Stylistically, the former Bulletin and Inquirer reporter writes like the old newspaperman he is: succinctly, with an eye for telling details and an ear for a juicy quote, and never substituting his own words if someone said it better. “Penrose…never married and ‘never kept a mistress.” Binzen writes, quoting the old Republican Party boss’s own biographer. “’When he wanted a woman, he rented one — a professional. He scorned amateurism in everything.’”

Richardson Dilworth isn’t a musty history that transports the reader to a bygone era — it’s a collection of aphoristic anecdotes for today’s would-be reformers. Dilworth, like the man himself, is inspirational and instructional, emotional and intellectual. Above all, it’s an excellent read about an exceptional time in Philadelphia, a time just like our own.