In December 1967, DeFilippo printed within the Information American a groundbreaking two-part sequence on Baltimore’s then-powerful institution, revealing the interlocking directorates of town’s 5 main banks, the 2 prime legislation companies, The Baltimore Solar and town’s main firms:
Describe them by any identify — the Energy Elite, the Standing Seekers, the Group Males, the Institution — an inbred and unique clique of 133 businessmen and attorneys controls Baltimore, its authorities, its commerce, its tradition, instructional and social establishments.
In flip, this choose corps of interlocking and overlapping company brokers is dominated by a half-dozen males who emerge on the apex of town’s pyramidical energy construction.
Greater than a half-century later, DeFilippo regarded again on the destiny of Baltimore’s institution in a 2019 essay for Maryland Issues, “When Powerbrokers Dominated Baltimore.”
“Immediately, the captains of business and the establishments they headed are all gone,” DeFilippo wrote. “The banks, the legislation companies, the insurance coverage corporations and the most important industries both disappeared or had been subsumed by bigger, out-of-state logos, or, as lots of the outdated titans light out, the heirs determined to money in.”
The Baltimore Solar was bought to out-of-towners, DeFilippo famous, and “the 5 main banks — Mercantile, Equitable, First Nationwide, Union Belief and Maryland Nationwide — had been all devoured up by out-of-state behemoths. And town’s two largest legislation companies, Venable, Baetjer & Howard and Piper, Marbury, merged with even bigger nationwide legislation companies.”
The Baltimore institution, like its counterparts in different cities, was shot by way of with conflicts of curiosity, self-dealing and the train of energy by a bunch characterised by, in DeFilippo’s phrases, “a type of hand-me-down inbreeding.”
These unfavorable attributes had been counterbalanced, a minimum of partially, by the pluses:
The buildup of energy, in these days, introduced with it a sure company duty and civic obligation. The departure of company Baltimore, a method or one other, additionally led to the collapse of company giving and the help of charitable and cultural establishments as is evidenced by the monetary squeeze of the Baltimore Symphony….
It was normally the native banks that spearheaded civic fund-raising drives, not solely as a show of civic good will and company citizenship however as a result of it was good enterprise. And the trick was that they donated to one another’s pet initiatives, offering a gradual lifeline of monetary help to maintain cultural establishments alive.
On the similar time, DeFilippo identified,
There was a provincial aspect to the do-gooder impression. Native banks stunted business improvement within the metropolis by denying loans to outdoors pursuits that wished to find in Baltimore. Native cash was considered as important to establishing a connection to the group, however the native banks had been extra concerned with defending their fellow Baltimoreans (and purchasers) from outdoors competitors.
Baltimore’s inhabitants turned majority Black within the mid-Seventies, and African Individuals voters turned the dominant political drive within the Nineteen Eighties, culminating with the election of Kurt Schmoke, a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard Legislation College graduate, as mayor in 1987.
