Philadelphia: Holy Experiment (review)

BOOK REVIEWS93 Mystic,'* by former President Sharpless. This essay in itself is of great charm and value and is new to most American readers. We are told that it was used in a book published in 1909 in London by Headley Brothers, in "The Religion of Life Series," Selections from the Works of William Penn, very few copies of which apparently came to America. The maxims avoid most successfully the tedium of much of what Penn wrote. They also constitute a most satisfying résumé of some of the choicest thoughts that Penn gave the world, thoughts which still remain abreast of the times. We are indebted once again to Dr. Comfort for this new evidence of his ripe scholarship. Francis R. Taylor Cheltenham, Pennsylvania Philadelphia: Holy Experiment, by Struthers Burt. Garden City, New York, Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc., 1945. 396 pp. $3.75. PROBABLY no one except the antiquarian now reads garrulous old Watson's Annals of Philadelphia or Scharf and Westcott's monumental (I had almost said mausolean) History of Philadelphia. One is therefore grateful to Struthers Burt for using his gifts as a novelist to tell the life^story of Penn's "green countrie towne." He modestly protests that he has not written a history but rather "a sort of civic biography," the implication apparently being that in a biography one does not need to be so careful about the facts. "Unfortunately the moment one touches upon facts," he writes disarmingly, ". . . the wolves gather. They are welcome to any bone they can find, so long as they don't bring it back to my doorstep. They will probably find a lot." (p. 14.) As a matter of fact, your reviewer can find no historical bones of any size to pick with Mr. Burt, although he would not be true to his vulpine instincts if he neglected to point out a few trivial errors such as that the Dunkers are not the Brethren in Christ (p. 61), and that David Lloyd was never Governor (p. 286). If there are any deficiencies in this delightfully informal book, they lie not primarily in the historian's field of factual accuracy, but in the novelist's field of unity and plot structure. The author betrays rather too much of the antiquarian's concern with remote periods and fails to do justice to the more recent past; he devotes three of his four hundred pages to colonial Philadelphia and only a scant hundred to the century and a half that witnessed the emergence and growth of the modern city, though he does manage to insinuate a certain amount of incidental information about modern Philadelphia into his earlier chapters. The other major criticism is that he frequently digresses from his main theme and drags ih incidents only remotely connected with the development of Philadelphia—the Yankee-Pennamite wars, for example, or Penn's difficulties with his steward. Vol. 34, Autumn 1945 94 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION In assessing the contribution of Friends to the growth of Philadelphia, he overlooks no occasion to criticize their peace testimony. Indeed on page 55 he ascribes "the supineness of Philadelphia politics" to their nonresistant philosophy, although on page 113 he rather inconsistently admits that Quakers are really pretty combative folk. On the credit side he mentions the tolerance, the good sense and charity, the concern for education, and the cooking of the Quakers. And he offers a backhanded compliment whose implications Friends will do well to ponder when he says that they are "invariably outstanding and noble, once something has happened." „· t·, , », t, . Frederick B. Tolles Big Flats, New York In Downcast Germany, 1919-1933, by Joan Mary Fry. London, James Clarke and Company, Ltd., [1944]. 146 pp. 3s. 6d. THIS is a well-told record of the visits which a brilliant and spiritually sensitive Quaker woman made inside Germany during the years between the first world war and the advent of Hitler's rule. It should be read along with Elizabeth Fox Howard's Across Barriers which appeared a year ago in order to get the full span of English Quaker concern on Germany between these two wars. Joan Fry's insight into the...