Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [926]
Restrictions on subject matter hastened an ossification of genteel culture. In a collective averting of eyes from indelicate matters, those who dealt with everyday city life or wrote in the vernacular were dismissed as vulgarians. When the Anglo-Saxon literati did deign to focus on immigrant working people, it saw them through picturesque or sentimental lenses.
This policing of the cultural landscape, by producers and consumers alike, was not exactly what Arnold had had in mind. For all his tendencies toward elitist snobbery, he had challenged an array of comfortable middle class convictions. But in the hands of the metropolitan gentility, Culture was transformed from critique to possession, ownership of which served as a credential of class standing.
“HEY, WHISKERS!”
On February 14, 1892, at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, the Rev. Charles Parkhurst gave a most unusual Sunday sermon. The tall, slender, bewhiskered minister launched a vitriolic attack on Mayor Grant and his Tammany cohorts. They were, Parkhurst thundered, nothing more than a pack of “polluted harpies that, under the pretense of governing this city, are feeding day and night on its quivering vitals. They are a lying, perjured, rum-soaked and libidinous lot.” The mayor, Parkhurst continued, together with District Attorney De Lancy Nicoll and the entire police department, were pillars of organized crime, linked in an “official and administrative criminality that is filthifying our entire municipal life, making New York a very hotbed of knavery, debauchery and bestiality.” Frustrated by the purity crusade’s setbacks—Parkhurst was a vigorous supporter of Comstock’s SSV—he declared that apparently “every effort to make men respectable, honest, temperate, and sexually clean is a direct blow between the eyes of the Mayor and his whole gang of drunken and lecherous subordinates.”
Mayor Grant challenged Parkhurst to prove his charges. DA Nicoll hauled him before a grand jury and demanded to see his evidence. Parkhurst was forced to admit he had none, apart from newspaper clippings of journalistic exposes. The jury then formally denied his charges of police complicity and rebuked him for character assassination. Most of the press denounced Parkhurst as a vulgarian, and Pulitzer’s World cautioned him about “the bearing of false witness.”
The humiliated minister now set out to assemble evidence that would stand up in court. He would descend into the city’s lower depths so he could himself serve as a firsthand witness to New York’s degradation. In Parkhurst’s person, gentility would go toeto-toe with vice; culture would meet anarchy head on.
Parkhurst, of course, was treading a well-beaten path. Dickens, Brace, and a host of sunshine-and-shadow journalists had long been prowling New York’s nether regions. There was even precedent for nocturnal meanderings by men of the cloth. Parkhurst’s fellow Presbyterian, Brooklyn’s Rev. Talmage, had been touring the nighttime metropolis ever since he had read Charles Loring Brace’s Dangerous Classes and decided that “I, as a minister of religion, felt I had a divine commission to explore the iniquities of ourcities.” Talmage had policemen pilot him around brothels and saloons. He then recounted his findings in vivid (and racy) talks that drew as many as five thousand to the vast Brooklyn Tabernacle. These sensational sermons were then reprinted in newspapers and collected in books like The Night Sides of City Life (1878) and The Masque Torn Off (1880).
Parkhurst was no mere sensationalist, and he set about his task methodically. Now president of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, he turned to his righteous and wealthy membership for funds and legal advice. Then,