Politics
In 1917, Greenfield was elected to a seat on the Philadelphia Common Council and served until 1920. Originally a Republican, he switched parties with the advent of the New Deal and remained a strong Democratic supporter until his death. He enjoyed a close relationship with many Presidents from Herbert Hoover to Lyndon Johnson. Greenfield served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1928 and to the Democratic National Conventions from 1948-1964. He was also a presidential elector in 1956 and 1960. Through his political connections he received appointments to various committees and commissions. These included appointment by Philadelphia Mayor Richardson Dilworth in 1956 as Chairman of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission. In order to accept the position, Greenfield had to retire from his real estate business, stepping down on January 1, 1956 after fifty years as head of the Greenfield Co. (which then became Albert M. Greenfield & Co., Inc.). He became a strong advocate of urban renewal. Although on the commission for only a little over a year, his work laid the foundation for the development of Penn Center, Society Hill, the Independence Square area surrounding Independence Hall, and Veterans Stadium. Also because of his political activism, in 1948 Philadelphia hosted both the Republican and the Democratic party conventions.
Read more about this topic: Albert M. Greenfield
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“I played by the rules of politics as I found them.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)