On a Sunday morning in early 1892, Reverend Dr. Charles H.
Parkhurst ascended to his pulpit at the Madison Square Presbyterian
Church in New York and delivered one of the most explosive sermons
in the city's history. Municipal life, he charged, was morally
corrupt. Vice was rampant. And the city's police force and its
Tammany Hall politicians were"a lying, perjured, rum-soaked, and
libidinous lot." Denounced by city and police officials as a
self-righteous "blatherskite," Parkhurst resolved to prove his
case. The bespectacled minister descended his pulpit and in
disguise visited gin joints and brothels, taking notes and
gathering evidence. Two years later, his findings forced the New
York State Senate to investigate the New York Police Department.
The Lexow Committee heard testimony from nearly 700 witnesses, who
revealed in shocking-and headline-dominating-detail just how deeply
the NYPD was involved in, and benefited from, the vice economy.
Parkhurst's campaign had kick-started the Progressive Movement. New
York Exposed offers a narrative history of the first major crusade
to clean up Gotham. Daniel Czitrom does full justice to this
spellbinding story by telling it within the larger contexts of
national politics, poverty, patronage, vote fraud and vote
suppression, and police violence. The effort to root out corrupt
cops and crooked politicians morphed into something much more
profound: a public reckoning over what New York-and the American
city-had become since the Civil War. Animated by as vivid a cast as
New York has ever produced, the book's key characters include
Police Superintendent Thomas Byrnes and Inspector Alexander
"Clubber" Williams, the nation's most famous cops, as well as
anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman, the zealous prosecutor John
W. Goff, and an array of politicos, immigrant leaders, labor
bosses, prostitutes, show-business entrepreneurs, counterfeiters,
and reformers and muckrakers determined to change business as
usual. New York Exposed offers an unforgettable portrait of a city
in a truly transformative moment.
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