IV
When from his pulpit the Reverend Elmer Gantry announced that the authorities of Zenith were “deliberately conniving in protected vice,” and that he could give the addresses and ownerships of sixteen brothels, eleven blind tigers, and two agencies for selling cocaine and heroin, along with an obscene private burlesque show so dreadful that he could only hint at the nature of its program, when he attacked the chief of police and promised to give more detailed complaints next Sunday, then the town exploded.
There were front-page newspaper stories, yelping replies by the mayor and chief of police, re-replies from Elmer, interviews with everybody, and a full-page account of white slavery in Chicago. In clubs and offices, in church societies and the backrooms of “soft-drink stands,” there was a blizzard of talk. Elmer had to be protected against hundreds of callers, telephoners, letter writers. His assistant, Sidney Webster, and Miss Bundle, the secretary, could not keep the mob from him, and he hid out in T. J. Rigg’s house, accessible to no one, except to newspaper reporters who for any Christian and brotherly reason might care to see him.
For the second Sunday evening of his jeremiad, the church was full half an hour before opening-time, standing-room was taken even to the back of the lobby, hundreds clamored at the closed doors.
He gave the exact addresses of eight dives, told what dreadful drinkings of corn whisky went on there, and reported the number of policemen, in uniform, who had been in the more attractive of these resorts during the past week.
Despite all the police could do to help their friends close up for a time, it was necessary for them to arrest ten or fifteen of the hundred-odd criminals whom Elmer named. But the chief of police triumphed by announcing that it was impossible to find any of the others.
“All right,” Elmer murmured to the chief, in the gentleness of a boxed newspaper interview in boldface type, “if you’ll make me a temporary lieutenant of police and give me a squad, I’ll find and close five dives in one evening—any evening save Sunday.”
“I’ll do it—and you can make your raids tomorrow,” said the chief, in the official dignity of headlines.
Mr. Rigg was a little alarmed.
“Think you’re going too far, Elmer,” he said. “If you really antagonize any of the big wholesale bootleggers, they’ll get us financially, and if you hit any of the tough ones, they’re likely to bump you off. Darn dangerous.”
“I know. I’m just going to pick out some of the smaller fellows that make their own booze and haven’t got any police protection except slipping five or ten to the cop on the beat. The newspapers will make ’em out regular homicidal gangsters, to get a good story, and we’ll have the credit without being foolish and taking risks.”