A reader sent us the above photo of this recently-defaced statue of legendary Philadelphian tycoon Stephen Girard outside the Philadelphia Museum Of Art. And you may be wondering why, at this late stage in the game (Girard died in 1831), anyone would still have beef with the man. As it turns out, there’s a pretty good reason: Girard pretty much single-handedly created Philly’s brain drain, and insured a kind of second-tier city status that haunts us to this day. From Wikipedia:

Girard’s vision was a key factor in moving the financial center of the United States from Philadelphia to New York, and in moving the number of early government agencies from Philadelphia to Washington DC. He achieved this by not allowing them to return to Philadelphia following the Yellow Fever Epidemic. He saw these undertakings as “of a lower nature”. Girard sought to keep the new country’s financial business in New York, and the governing affairs in Washington. He sought to keep Philadelphia as “the village in between”. In the process, he laid the groundworks for what today would be called outsourcing. This approach has crystallized Philadelphia as the innovation machine that has fueled the US economy. In the late 1800s the foundations of the US consumer products and pharmaceutical industries were started in Philadelphia. Today’s global organizations such as Merck, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Keebler, Best Foods, Nabisco, Lipton, and Proctor and Gamble all have their origins as Philadelphia innovations. Once established these businesses were outsourced to areas that provided cheap labor, at the time New Jersey, Connecticut, and Ohio.

Oh, now we get it. Whatta dick. Or, as the case may be, “doucbag,” which, as our tipster theorizes, “is past tense, you know, for dead monopolists.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 2:25 pm.