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Although the term “Social Justice Warrior” was not in vogue (or in disrepute) at the time, the Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst might well have identified with the label. Parkhurst served as pastor of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church in New York City from 1880 to 1918, during which time he not only preached the gospel from the pulpit but also, beginning in 1892, famously took on municipal corruption in the form of Tammany Hall.
Vice and crime, as well as unjust law enforcement, had long been a concern of Christians in New York. The Rev. Howard Crosby preached a November 1883 Thanksgiving Sermon at the Fourth Avenue Presbyterian Church titled The City’s Disease and Remedy. After Crosby’s death in 1891, it was Parkhurst who succeeded him as President of the Society for the Prevention of Crime.
In surveying the situation around him, Parkhurst began to realize that so much of the corruption he and his parishioners encountered was not only protected but supported and encouraged by the very officials charged with upholding and enforcing the law. This led to a remarkable sermon preached on February 14, 1892 based on the text “Ye are the salt of the earth” (Matt. 5:13) which he was later to refer to as “The First Gun of the Campaign” against Tammany Hall. His direct assault on city leaders ignited a firestorm of criticism and media attention. In fact, city leaders convened a grand jury to force him to either substantiate his accusations of corruption from the pulpit or else face possible charges himself for perjury.
Madison Square Park c. 1908
Within one week he was indeed subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury and was not able to offer any substantive evidence to support his claims apart from “uncontradicted newspaper reports,” and thus a week later the grand jury issued a report completely rebuking him and apparently vindicating city leaders. Parkhurst looked upon this development not as a defeat, however, but as an encouragement to go out and investigate the matter himself (he did hire private detectives to assist) and to gather the direct evidence needed to show the link between criminal operations and police involvement. Meanwhile, he continued to preach denunciations of “municipal misrule” from the pulpit. On March 13, 1892, Parkhurst again proclaimed that it was his Christian duty to oppose the corruption that he saw around him.
I do not speak as a Republican or a Democrat, as a Protestant or a Catholic, as an advocate of prohibition, or as an advocate of license. I am moved, so help me Almighty God, by the respect which I have for the Ten Commandments, and by my anxiety as a preacher of Jesus Christ, to have the law of God regnant in individual and social life; so that I antagonize our existing municipal administration, because I believe, with all the individual exceptions frankly conceded four weeks ago, that administration to be essentially corrupt, interiorly rotten, and in all its combined tendency and effect to stand in diametric resistance to all that Christ and a loyally Christian pulpit represent in the world.
After Parkhurst presented evidence to a grand jury in March 1892, that grand jury issued a report which condemned the role of the New York Police Department in fostering and protecting vice and crime in the city. Newspapers took note of how the tables were turned. Public pressure continued to mount upon the Police Department and the Tammany Hall leaders, culminating in the Lexow Committee’s investigation of police corruption, including bribery and organized crime, which did much to expose the connections unearthed by Parkhurst and the City Vigilance League, of which he also served as President.
The boss of Tammany Hall, Richard Croker, was forced to leave the country and reside in Europe for three years following the work of the Lexow Committee. A new mayor was elected in New York City in 1894 who did much to reign in the abuses of Tammany Hall. Municipal reform achieved a great victory in these various ways, and much of that victory is attributable to the perseverance and unflinching determination of Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst in the face of great opposition from those who ran city hall.
He addressed an audience on May 14, 1894 at Union Theological Seminary on the topic of the place of the pulpit in the area of social reform.
I am to speak of the relation of the minister to good government. In order to avoid all misapprehension, let us start out by saying that nothing should be allowed to interfere with the pulpit's prime obligation to convert men, women, and children to Christ in their individual character. No one can have attended carefully to Christ's method of working in the world without appreciating the emphasis which he laid upon the individual, and without feeling the volume of meaning there is in the fact that so many of his finest words and deepest lessons were delivered in the presence of but a single auditor. There are no associate results which do not hide all their roots in the separate individualities that combine to compose such association.
At the same time, what God thinks most of is not a man in his individual character, but men in their mutual and organized relations. That is the idea that the Bible leaves off upon, and in that way throws upon the idea the superb emphasis of finality, culminating, as Scripture does, not in the roll-call of a mob of sanctified individualities, but in the apocalyptic forecast of a holy city come down from God out of heaven; not men, therefore, taken as so many separate integers, but men conceived of as wrought up into the structure of a corporate whole social, municipal, civic.
Men require to be sanctified, but the relations which subsist between them require to be sanctified also. Philemon was a Christian and Onesimus was a Christian; but Onesimus was still Philemon's slave. Philemon had been converted, and Onesimus had been converted, but the relation between them had not been converted. A good part of every man is involved in his relations, and heaven is not arithmetic but organic.
Wherever men rub against one another, therefore, the pulpit has something to say, or ought to have something to say.
Read the story of his reform efforts in his own words in Our Fight With Tammany (1895) and My Forty Years in New York (1923).
