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PARKHURST AND THE SIN TOUR

The battle started with a poorly researched sermon.

The Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst, adorned with an abundant goatee and steel-rimmed, thick-lensed glasses, just shy of his fiftieth birthday, stood on February 14, 1892, before about 800 well-dressed parishioners in Madison Square Presbyterian Church, at 24th Street off the park. The understated building-a long and narrow slab of drab brownstone with a classic steeple-evoked earnestness, in stark contrast to the exuberant yellow-and-white Madison Square Garden tower nearby, topped by nude spinning Diana. In the pews sat the city's elite; scrubbed boys and girls fidgeted but their parents certainly did not, not that morning.

Parkhurst sent no advance notice of the subject of his sermon nor did he distribute the text to the press during the prior week, but afterward almost every newspaper requested it.

Parkhurst didn't thunder from the pulpit. He spoke evenly and favored erudite words, befitting an Amherst graduate (class of 1866), one who had studied abroad at Leipzig and once penned an essay on similarities between Latin and Sanskrit verbs. He sometimes showed a sly dry wit.

On that Sunday winter morning, his calmly delivered words stunned his audience. He called the Tammany men ruling New York, especially the mayor, the district attorney, and the police captains, "a lying, perjured, rum-soaked and libidinous lot." He accused them of licensing crime, of polluting the city for profit. He said he would "not be surprised to know that every building in this town in which gambling or prostitution or the illicit sale of liquor is carried on has immunity secured to it by a scale of police taxation" as "systematized" as the local real estate taxes. He asserted "your average police captain is not going to disturb a criminal if the criminal has means."

Parkhurst was born on a farm outside Framingham, Massachusetts; he revered his rural roots. He had never seen vice until he moved to the big city. He taught school till age thirty-three. For the past dozen years at Madison Square Presbyterian he had been praised for geniality and charitable works but was little known outside his congregation.

That would change overnight.

The minister, his quiet cadence building, wrapped his sermon in a biblical theme, charging that gambling places "flourish on all these streets almost as thick as roses in Sharon," that day or night, "our best and most promising young men" waste hours in those "nefarious dens." He said he had firsthand experience that the city government "shows no genius in ferreting out crime, prosecutes only when it has to, and has a mind so keenly judicial that almost no amount of evidence that can be heaped up is accepted as sufficient to warrant indictment."

He explained that, as the president of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, he had recently met with the district attorney and confronted him about McGlory's-a notorious den of prostitutes and thieves that thrived for years. The D.A. had replied that he had no idea that such "vile institutions" existed. "Innocence like that," added Dr. Parkhurst, "in so wicked a town ought not to be allowed to go abroad after dark."

Parkhurst promised his rapt congregation that he was not speaking as a Democrat or a Republican but as a Christian. He complained that the word protest was no longer driving "Protestants." He called for action.

"Every effort that is made to improve character in this city, every effort to make men...