New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal that Launched the Progressive Era

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 resolve...