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Jennifer Trost, Daniel Czitrom. New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal That Launched the Progressive Era., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Page 238, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.238
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Daniel Czitrom’s chance finding of the multi-volume official transcripts of the Investigation of the Police Department of the City of New York, 1894, serves as the basis of this crossover book. Even in its title, New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal That Launched the Progressive Era demonstrates an academic historian trying to cross over to a broader audience by appealing with sensational stories and their compelling personalities. Although the ostensible subject of Czitrom’s book is the moral indignation of one such personality, the Reverend Doctor Charles Parkhurst of New York City, the larger story is about Americans who lose out when the mechanisms of democracy are abused by those in power.
Czitrom’s cast of characters includes the usual suspects of turn-of-the-century urban reform. Originally from rural Massachusetts, Reverend Parkhurst was shocked by the big-city immorality he witnessed as minister at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church (8). The key outrage for Parkhurst was his realization that “the profits to be had from managing the city’s vice economy dwarfed all other police entrepreneurial activity” (180). Brought into the reform community by the Society for the Prevention of Crime, which was founded in 1877 by New Yorkers to push the police to enforce excise laws governing saloons, Parkhurst used his pulpit to create his own organization, the City Vigilance League. Along with police chiefs and beat officers, groups of state and local politicians with ominous names such as the Committee of Thirty, the Committee of Seventy, and the Committee of Five all jockeyed to protect their interests as the investigation unfolded. And that’s not even to mention the participation of Chamber of Commerce businessmen, brothel keepers, or abortion providers.
