III
When he had been in Zenith for a year and three-quarters, Elmer formed the Committee on Public Morals, and conducted his raids on the red-light district.
It seemed to him that he was getting less publicity. Even his friend, Colonel Rutherford Snow, owner of the Advocate-Times, explained that just saying things couldn’t go on being news; news was essentially a report of things done.
“All right, I’ll do things, by golly, now that I’ve got Webster and Wink to take care of the glad hand for the brethren!” Elmer vowed.
He received an inspiration to the effect that all of a sudden, for reasons not defined, “things have gotten so bad in Zenith, immorality is so rampant in high places and low, threatening the morals of youth and the sanctity of domesticity, that it is not enough for the ministry to stand back warning the malefactors, but a time now to come out of our dignified seclusion and personally wage open war on the forces of evil.”
He said these startling things in the pulpit, he said them in an interview, and he said them in a letter to the most important clergymen in town, inviting them to meet with him to form a Committee on Public Morals and make plans for open war.
The devil must have been shaken. Anyway, the newspapers said that the mere threat of the formation of the Committee had caused “a number of well-known crooks and women of bad reputation to leave town.” Who these scoundrels were, the papers did not say.
The Committee was to be composed of the Reverends Elmer Gantry and Otto Hickenlooper, Methodists; G. Prosper Edwards, Congregationalist; John Jennison Drew, Presbyterian; Edmund St. Vincent Zahn, Lutheran; James F. Gomer, Disciples; Father Matthew Smeesby, Catholic; Bernard Amos, Jewish; Hosea Jessup, Baptist; Willis Fortune Tate, Episcopalian; and Irving Tillish, Christian Science reader; with Wallace Umstead, the Y.M.C.A. secretary, four moral laymen, and a lawyer, Mr. T. J. Rigg.
They assembled at lunch in a private dining-room at the palatial Zenith Athletic Club. Being clergymen, and having to prove that they were also red-blooded, as they gathered before lunch in the lobby of the club they were particularly boisterous in shouting to passing acquaintances, florists and doctors and wholesale plumbers. To one George Babbitt, a real estate man, Dr. Drew, the Presbyterian, clamored, “Hey, Georgie! Got a flask along? Lunching with a bunch of preachers, and I reckon they’ll want a drink!”
There was great admiration on the part of Mr. Babbitt, and laughter among all the clergymen, except the Episcopal Mr. Tate and the Christian Scientific Mr. Tillish.
The private dining-room at the club was a thin red apartment with two pictures of young Indian maidens of Lithuanian origin sitting in native costumes, which gave free play to their legs, under a rugged pine-tree against a background of extremely high mountains. In Private Dining-room A, beside them, was a lunch of the Men’s Furnishers Association, addressed by S. Garrison Siegel of New York on “The Rented Dress Suit Business and How to Run It in a High-class Way.”
The incipient Committee on Public Morals sat about a long narrow table in bentwood chairs, in which they were always vainly trying to tilt back. Their table did not suggest debauchery and the demon rum. There were only chilly and naked-looking goblets of ice water.
They lunched, gravely, on consommé, celery, roast lamb, which was rather cold, mashed potatoes, which were arctic, Brussels sprouts, which were overstewed, ice cream, which was warm; with very large cups of coffee, and no smoking afterward.
Elmer began, “I don’t know who is the oldest among us, but certainly no one in this room has had a more distinguished or more valuable term of Christian service than Dr. Edwards, of Pilgrim Congregational, and I know you’ll join me in asking him to say grace before meat.”
The table conversation was less cheerful than the blessing.
They all detested one another. Everyone knew of some case in which each of the others had stolen, or was said to have tried to steal, some parishioner, to have corrupted his faith and appropriated his contributions. Dr. Hickenlooper and Dr. Drew had each advertised that he had the largest Sunday School in the city. All of the Protestants wanted to throw ruinous questions about the Immaculate Conception at Father Smeesby, and Father Smeesby, a smiling dark man of forty, had ready, in case they should attack the Catholic Church, the story of the ant who said to the elephant, “Move over, who do you think you’re pushing?” All of them, except Mr. Tillish, wanted to ask Mr. Tillish how he’d ever been fooled by this charlatan, Mary Baker Eddy, and all of them, except the rabbi, wanted to ask Rabbi Amos why the Jews were such numbskulls as not to join the Christian faith.
They were dreadfully cordial. They kept their voices bland, and smiled too often, and never listened to one another. Elmer, aghast, saw that they would flee before making an organization if he did not draw them together. And what was the one thing in which they were all joyously interested? Why, vice! He’d begin the vice rampage now, instead of waiting till the business meeting after lunch.
He pounded on the table, and demanded, “Most of you have been in Zenith longer than myself. I admit ignorance. It is true that I have unearthed many dreadful, dreadful cases of secret sin. But you gentlemen, who know the town so much better—Am I right? Are Conditions as dreadful as I think, or do I exaggerate?”
All of them lighted up and, suddenly looking on Elmer as a really nice man after all, they began happily to tell of their woeful discoveries. … The blood-chilling incident of the father who found in the handbag of his sixteen-year-old daughter improper pictures. The suspicion that at a dinner of war veterans at the Leroy House there had danced a young lady who wore no garments save slippers and a hat.
“I know all about that dinner—I got the details from a man in my church—I’ll tell you about it if you feel you ought to know,” said Dr. Gomer.
They looked as though they decidedly felt that they ought to know. He went into details, very, and at the end Dr. Jessup gulped, “Oh, that Leroy House is absolutely a den of iniquity! It ought to be pulled!”
“It certainly ought to! I don’t think I’m cruel,” shouted Dr. Zahn, the Lutheran, “but if I had my way, I’d burn the proprietor of that joint at the stake!”
All of them had incidents of shocking obscenity all over the place—all of them except Father Smeesby, who sat back and smiled, the Episcopal Dr. Tate, who sat back and looked bored, and Mr. Tillish, the healer, who sat back and looked chilly. In fact it seemed as though, despite the efforts of themselves and the thousands of other inspired and highly trained Christian ministers who had worked over it ever since its foundation, the city of Zenith was another Sodom. But the alarmed apostles did not appear to be so worried as they said they were. They listened with almost benign attention while Dr. Zahn, in his German accent, told of alarming crushes between the society girls whom he knew so well from dining once a year with his richest parishioner.
They were all, indeed, absorbed in vice to a degree gratifying to Elmer.
But at the time for doing something about it, for passing resolutions and appointing subcommittees and outlining programs, they drew back.
“Can’t we all get together—pool our efforts?” pleaded Elmer. “Whatever our creedal differences, surely we stand alike in worshiping the same God and advocating the same code of morals. I’d like to see this Committee as a permanent organization, and finally, when the time is ripe—Think how it would jolt the town! All of us getting ourselves appointed special police or deputy sheriffs, and personally marching down on these abominations, arresting the blood-guilty wretches, and putting them where they can do no harm! Maybe leading our church members in the crusade! Think of it!”
They did think of it, and they were alarmed.
Father Smeesby spoke. “My church, gentlemen, probably has a more rigid theology than yours, but I don’t think we’re quite so alarmed by discovering the fact, which seems to astonish you, that sinners often sin. The Catholic Church may be harder to believe, but it’s easier to live with.”
“My organization,” said Mr. Tillish, “could not think of joining in a wild witch-hunt, any more than we could in indiscriminate charity. For both the poverty-laden and the vicious—” He made a little whistling between his beautiful but false teeth, and went on with frigid benignancy. “For all such, the truth is clearly stated in ‘Science and Health’ and made public in all our meetings—the truth that both vice and poverty, like sickness, are unreal, are errors, to be got rid of by understanding that God is All-in-all; that disease, death, evil, sin deny good, omnipotent God, life. Well! If these so-called sufferers do not care to take the truth when it is freely offered them, is that our fault? I understand your sympathy with the unfortunate, but you are not going to put out ignorance by fire.”
“Golly, let me crawl too,” chuckled Rabbi Amos. “If you want to get a vice-crusading rabbi, get one of these smart-aleck young liberals from the Cincinnati school—and they’ll mostly have too much sympathy with the sinners to help you either! Anyway, my congregation is so horribly respectable that if their rabbi did anything but sit in his study and look learned, they’d kick him out.”
“And I,” said Dr. Willis Fortune Tate, of St. Colomb’s Episcopal, “if you will permit me to say so, can regard such a project as our acting like policemen and dealing with these malefactors in person as nothing short of vulgar, as well as useless. I understand your high ideals, Dr. Gantry—”
“Mr. Gantry.”
“—Mr. Gantry, and I honor you for them, and respect your energy, but I beg you to consider how the press and the ordinary laity, with their incurably common and untrained minds, would misunderstand.”
“I’m afraid I must agree with Dr. Tate,” said the Congregational Dr. G. Prosper Edwards, in the manner of the Pilgrim’s Monument agreeing with Westminister Abbey.
And as for the others, they said they really must “take time and think it over,” and they all got away as hastily and cordially as they could.
Elmer walked with his friend and pillar, Mr. T. J. Rigg, toward the dentist’s office in which even an ordinary minister of God would shortly take on strangely normal writhings and gurglings.
“They’re a fine bunch of scared prophets, a noble lot of apostolic ice-cream cones!” protested Mr. Rigg. “Hard luck, Brother Elmer! I’m sorry. It really is good stuff, this vice-crusading. Oh, I don’t suppose it makes the slightest difference in the amount of vice—and I don’t know that it ought to make any. Got to give fellows that haven’t our advantages some chance to let off steam. But it does get the church a lot of attention. I’m mighty proud of the way we’re building up Wellspring Church again. Kind of a hobby with me. But makes me indignant, these spiritual cold-storage eggs not supporting you!”
But as he looked up he saw that Elmer was grinning.
“I’m not worried, T. J. Fact, I’m tickled to death. First place, I’ve scared ’em off the subject of vice. Before they get back to preaching about it, I’ll have the whole subject absolutely patented for our church. And now they won’t have the nerve to imitate me if I do do this personal crusading stunt. Third, I can preach against ’em! And I will! You watch me! Oh, not mention any names—no comeback—but tell ’em how I pleaded with a gang of preachers to take practical methods to end immorality, and they were all scared!”
“Fine!” said the benevolent trustee. “We’ll let ’em know that Wellspring is the one church that’s really following the gospel.”
“We sure will! Now listen, T. J.: if you trustees will stand for the expense, I want to get a couple of good private detectives or something, and have ’em dig up a lot of real addresses of places that are vicious—there must be some of ’em—and get some evidence. Then I’ll jump on the police for not having pinched these places. I’ll say they’re so wide open that the police must know of ’em. And probably that’s true, too. Man! A sensation! Run our disclosures every Sunday evening for a month! Make the chief of police try to answer us in the press!”
“Good stuff! Well, I know a fellow—he was a government man, prohibition agent, and got fired for boozing and blackmail. He’s not exactly a double-crosser, lot straighter than most prohibition agents, but still I think he could slip us some real addresses. I’ll have him see you.”