Charles Henry Parkhurst

• Charles Henry Parkhurst
• Born: April 17, 1842
• Died: September 8, 1933

Presbyterian clergyman and antivice crusader, was born on his parents’ farm in Framingham, Massachusetts, the second son of Charles F. W. Parkhurst, a New England farmer and schoolteacher whose ancestors had emigrated to New England in the 1630s, and Mary (Goodale) Parkhurst. He had two sisters and two brothers; the eldest brother, Wellington, was editor of The Clinton Courant of Clinton, Massachusetts, and a member of the state legislature.

Charles Parkhurst was educated at home until the age of eleven. From eleven to sixteen he attended the Clinton Grammar School. His father then placed him as a clerk in a grocery store, a job he found distasteful. At eighteen he entered Lancaster Academy to prepare for college, and he was admitted to Amherst in 1862. (He escaped service in the Union Army because of his nearsightedness.) Graduating with honors in 1866, he became principal of Amherst High School, a post he held for three years.

Attracted by German rationalism, Parkhurst went to Europe to study philosophy and theology at Halle, but was obliged to return to the United States prematurely when a serious illness occurred in his family. He accepted a professorship of Greek and Latin at the Williston Seminary in Easthampton, Massachusetts, and in November 1870, married Ellen Bodman of Williamsburg, Massachusetts, his former student at Amherst. In 1872 the couple returned to Germany, where Parkhurst studied at Halle, Leipzig, and Bonn for two years. He was ordained by the South Berkshire Association of Congregational Ministers in 1874. He had a scholarly temperament, but wanted the experience of ministering to a parish, so in 1874 he accepted the pastorate of the First Congregational Church in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Six years later Parkhurst accepted a call to become minister of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church in New York City. Quickly developing an interest in municipal politics and corruption, he began to preach sermons against the police graft that encouraged vice in his new city. Howard Crosby, president of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, an association of clergy, lawyers, and merchants who wanted to improve the image of the city, recruited him as a member and director. On Crosby’s death in 1891, Parkhurst became president of the society.

Shortly afterward Parkhurst delivered an impassioned sermon condemning the Tammany Hall Democratic organization as “the damnable pack of administrative bloodhounds that are fattening themselves on the ethical flesh and blood of our citizenship.” In the congregation that Sunday morning was a reporter, W. E. Carson, who published the minister’s charges. Called before a grand jury to prove that his allegations were more than hearsay, Parkhurst was unable to produce any substantial evidence. Local politicians thought that this procedure would silence him, but Parkhurst was determined to sustain his attack.

Parkhurst recruited a freelance detective, Charles W. Gardner, a burly young man with a handlebar mustache, to guide him through the vice district for six dollars a night plus expenses. Gardner, who wrote a dime novel about their adventures entitled The Doctor and the Devil, dressed the sober and studious Parkhurst in a pair of “seedy black-and-white checked trousers ‘loud enough to make a noise in the next block,’ “ took him into a Lower East Side saloon, and introduced him as his uncle from South Carolina who wanted to buy a stolen watch. On three subsequent nights the two visited a variety of brothels and derelicts’ lodging houses and went to Chinatown to watch a game of fan-tan and an opium-smoking ritual. They hired four additional detectives, who visited 254 saloons that were open on Sunday.

After these investigations, Parkhurst and Gardner swore out affidavits concerning their discoveries, and Parkhurst preached a second sermon, waving his documentary evidence before the congregation. Predictably, Parkhurst’s actions were severely criticized. One fellow clergyman remarked, “If he wanted to see five nude women, he might have had the good sense not to flaunt the matter before the public.”

A second grand jury brought indictments against several individuals based on Parkhurst’s evidence. Parkhurst insisted that he was not so much interested in closing down brothels as he was in prosecuting the police officers who protected them in return for kickbacks. The superintendent of the police force resigned, and every precinct captain in the city except one was transferred to another post (though Parkhurst complained that an official who was corrupt in one precinct would be just as corrupt in another).

The fallout from the crusading minister’s investigations was relatively minor, however, until the Republican party captured the state legislature in November 1893 and appointed State Senator Clarence E. Lexow to investigate corruption in New York City. Over the howls of Tammany Hall, which correctly protested that the Republicans were simply engaged in a political vendetta, the Lexow committee investigation of 1894 ruined another generation of Tammany politicians, finally sending boss Richard Croker to Europe in disgrace and bringing about a structural reorganization of the New York City police department.

John W. Goff, counsel for the Lexow committee, called a succession of witnesses who testified that the police had shaken them down brutally, in one case taking the children of a recent immigrant who had refused to pay protection money and placing them in an orphanage. There was not a dry eye in the hearing room when the three children, dressed in black orphanage uniforms, were returned to their distraught mother. Prostitutes were followed on the witness stand by steamship-corporation officials and pushcart peddlers who swore that they, too, had been the victims of extortion. The investigation generated so much favorable publicity that the Republican candidate in the 1894 mayoral race, William L. Strong, a merchant and banker, took the office from the Democrats. Parkhurst pronounced the victory “nothing more nor less than a vote on the Ten Commandments.”

The incoming administration named a new four-man police board that included the young Theodore Roosevelt, who made a name for himself by skulking around the Tenderloin vice district at night in disguise, trying to catch police officers neglecting their duty.

Parkhurst continued his pastorate of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church for a period of thirty-eight years. He staged a second antivice crusade in 1904, this one aimed at poolrooms and the back rooms of saloons, but it made scarcely a ripple. He retired in 1918 when his congregation was absorbed by the Old First Presbyterian Church and began writing a column for his old enemy William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper publisher.

Ellen Parkhurst died in 1921; she had been for many years president of the American McCall Association, an organization that assisted Protestant missions in France. In April 1927 Parkhurst married his secretary Eleanor Marx. During the 1920s he attacked prohibition, arguing that drinking was an evil to be approached by education, not by legislative fiat.

Parkhurst made his last public statement at the age of ninety, in 1932. Still associated with the Society for the Prevention of Crime, he deplored conditions in New York City, which he blamed on the new Tammany Hall, saying, “We ought to feel, all of us, that we belong to the New York police force, and were given that appointment at birth by the Almighty.” Parkhurst, a somnambulist, died at the age of ninety-one when he walked off the roof of his daughter’s porch while sleepwalking.

Parkhurst’s publications included Analysis of the Latin Verb Illustrated by the Forms of the Sanskrit (1870); What Would the World Be Without Religion? (1882); The Blind Man’s Creed and Other Sermons (1883); Guarding the Cross with Krupp Guns (1900); and A Brief History of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church and Its Activities (1906). He was a trustee of Amherst College from 1892 to 1902.

Although a Puritan by conscience, Parkhurst was a progressive by temperament. He preached the social gospel to a citywide congregation whose greatest need, in his opinion, was clean government. Some of his critics considered him a hypocrite because he refused to condemn the individuals that inhabited the vice district; in his mind they were victims, not victimizers. His defeat of Tammany Hall, and of vice, was shortlived, but not fruitless. It helped establish a norm of decent behavior for public servants and paved the way for other civic reformers yet to come.

The most useful of Parkhurst’s works for biographical information are Our Fight With Tammany (1895) and My Forty Years in New York (1923). C. W. Gardner, The Doctor and the Devil; or Midnight Adventures of Dr. Parkhurst (1931), is a firsthand account of his investigation of the vice district. M. R. Werner, It Happened in New York (1957), contains a long account of the Lexow committee’s activities. The New York Public Library owns a scrapbook of clippings about Parkhurst. See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1934); National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 4 (1897); and The New York Times, April 17, 1932 and September 9, 1933.