Elmer Gantry (34 page)

In the autumn of his first year in Zenith Elmer started his famous Lively Sunday Evenings. Mornings, he announced, he
would give them solid religious meat to sustain them through the week, but Sunday evenings he would provide the best cream
puffs. Christianity was a Glad Religion, and he was going to make it a lot gladder.

There was a safe, conservative, sanguinary hymn or two at his Lively Sunday Evenings, and a short sermon about sunsets,
authors, or gambling, but most of the time they were just happy boys and girls together. He had them sing “Auld Lang Syne,”
and “Swanee River,” with all the balladry which might have been considered unecclesiastical if it had not been hallowed by
the war: “Tipperary,” and “There’s a Long, Long, Trail,” and “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag and Smile, Smile,
Smile.”

He made the women sing in contest against the men; the young people against the old; and the sinners against the
Christians. That was lots of fun, because some of the most firmly saved brethren, like Elmer himself, pretended for a moment
to be sinners. He made them whistle the chorus and hum it and speak it; he made them sing it while they waved handkerchiefs,
waved one hand, waved both hands.

Other attractive features he provided. There was a ukulele solo by the champion uke-player from the University of
Winnemac. There was a song rendered by a sweet little girl of three, perched up on the pulpit. There was a mouth-organ
contest, between the celebrated Harmonica Quartette from the Higginbotham Casket Factory and the best four harmonicists from
the B. & K. C. railroad shops; surprisingly won (according to the vote of the congregation) by the enterprising and
pleasing young men from the railroad.

When this was over, Elmer stepped forward and said—you would never in the world have guessed he was joking unless you
were near enough to catch the twinkle in his eyes—he said, “Now perhaps some of you folks think the pieces the boys have
played tonight, like ‘Marching Through Georgia’ and ‘Mammy,’ aren’t quite proper for a Methodist Church, but just let me
show you how well our friend and brother, Billy Hicks here, can make the old mouth-organ behave in a real highbrow religious
hymn.”

And Billy played “Ach Du Lieber Augustin.”

How they all laughed, even the serious old stewards! And when he had them in this humor, the Reverend Mr. Gantry was able
to slam home, good and hard, some pretty straight truths about the horrors of starting children straight for hell by letting
them read the colored comics on Sunday morning.

Once, to illustrate the evils of betting, he had them bet as to which of two frogs would jump first. Once he had the
representative of an illustrious grape-juice company hand around sample glasses of his beverage, to illustrate the
superiority of soft drinks to the horrors of alcohol. And once he had up on the platform a sickening twisted motor-car in
which three people had been killed at a railroad-crossing. With this as an example, he showed his flock that motor speeding
was but one symptom of the growing madness and worldliness and materialism of the age, and that this madness could be cured
only by returning to the simple old-time religion as preached at the Wellspring Methodist Church.

The motor-car got him seven columns of publicity, with pictures of himself, the car, and the killed motorists.

In fact there were few of his new paths to righteousness which did not get adequate and respectful attention from the
press.

There was, perhaps, no preacher in Zenith, not even the liberal Unitarian minister or the powerful Catholic bishop, who
was not fond of the young gentlemen of the press. The newspapers of Zenith were as likely to attack religion as they were to
attack the department-stores. But of all the clerics, none was so hearty, so friendly, so brotherly, to the reporters as the
Reverend Elmer Gantry. His rival parsons were merely cordial to the sources of publicity when they called. Elmer did his own
calling.

Six months after his coming to Zenith he began preparing a sermon on “The Making and Mission of a Great Newspaper.” He
informed the editors of his plan, and had himself taken through the plants and introduced to the staffs of the
Advocate–Times, its sister, the Evening Advocate, the Press, the Gazette, and the Crier.

Out of his visits he managed to seize and hold the acquaintanceship of at least a dozen reporters. And he met the
magnificent Colonel Rutherford Snow, owner of the Advocate, a white-haired, blasphemous, religious, scoundrelly old
gentleman, whose social position in Zenith was as high as that of a bank-president or a corporation-counsel. Elmer and the
Colonel recognized in each other an enterprising boldness, and the Colonel was so devoted to the church and its work in
preserving the free and democratic American institutions that he regularly gave to the Pilgrim Congregational Church more
than a tenth of what he made out of patent medicine advertisements—cancer cures, rupture cures, tuberculosis cures, and the
notices of Old Dr. Bly. The Colonel was cordial to Elmer, and gave orders that his sermons should be reported at least once
a month, no matter how the rest of the clergy shouted for attention.

But somehow Elmer could not keep the friendship of Bill Kingdom, that peculiarly hard-boiled veteran reporter of the
Advocate–Times. He did everything he could; he called Bill by his first name, he gave him a quarter cigar, and he said
“damn,” but Bill looked uninterested when Elmer came around with the juiciest of stories about dance-halls. In grieved and
righteous wrath, Elmer turned his charm on younger members of the Advocate staff, who were still new enough to be pleased by
the good-fellowship of a preacher who could say “damn.”

Elmer was particularly benevolent with one Miss Coey, sob-sister reporter for the Evening Gazette and an enthusiastic
member of his church. She was worth a column a week. He always breathed at her after church.

Lulu raged, “It’s hard enough to sit right there in the same pew with your wife, and never be introduced to her, because
you say it isn’t safe! But when I see you holding hands with that Coey woman, it’s a little too much!”

But he explained that he considered Miss Coey a fool, that it made him sick to touch her, that he was nice to her only
because he had to get publicity; and Lulu saw that it was all proper and truly noble of him . . . even when in the church
bulletins, which he wrote each week for general distribution, he cheered, “Let’s all congratulate Sister Coey, who so
brilliantly represents the Arts among us, on her splendid piece in the recent Gazette about the drunken woman who was saved
by the Salvation Army. Your pastor felt the quick tears springing to his eyes as he read it, which is a tribute to Sister
Coey’s powers of expression. And he is always glad to fellowship with the Salvation Army, as well as with all other branches
of the true Protestant Evangelical Universal Church. Wellspring is the home of liberality, so long as it does not weaken
morality or the proven principles of Bible Christianity.”

As important as publicity to Elmer was the harassing drive of finance.

He had made one discovery superb in its simple genius—the best way to get money was to ask for it, hard enough and often
enough. To call on rich men, to set Sunday School classes in competition against one another, to see that every one received
pledge-envelopes, these were all useful and he pursued them earnestly. But none of them was so useful as to tell the
congregation every Sunday what epochal good Wellspring and its pastor were doing, how much greater good they could do if
they had more funds, and to demand their support now, this minute.

His Official Board was charmed to see the collections increasing even faster than the audiences. They insisted that the
bishop send Elmer back to them for another year—indeed for many years—and they raised Elmer’s salary to forty-five hundred
dollars.

And in the autumn they let him have two subordinates—the Reverend Sidney Webster, B. A., B. D., as Assistant Pastor, and
Mr. Henry Wink, B. A., as Director of Religious Education.

Mr. Webster had been secretary to Bishop Toomis, and it was likely that he would some day be secretary of one of the
powerful church boards—the board of publications, the board of missions, the board of temperance and morals. He was a man of
twenty-eight; he had been an excellent basket-ball player in Boston University; he was tight-mouthed as a New England
president, efficient as an adding machine, and cold as the heart of a bureaucrat. If he loved God and humanity-ingeneral
with rigid devotion, he loved no human individual; if he hated sin, he was too contemptuous of any actual sinner to hate
him—he merely turned his frigid face away and told him to go to hell. He had no vices. He was also competent. He could
preach, get rid of beggars, be quietly devout in death-bed prayers, keep down church expenses, and explain about the
Trinity.

Henry Wink had a lisp and he told little simpering stories, but he was admirable in the direction of the Sunday School,
vacation Bible schools, and the Epworth Leagues.

With Mr. Webster and Mr. Wink removing most of the church detail from him, Elmer became not less but more occupied. He no
longer merely invited the public, but galloped out and dragged it in. He no longer merely scolded sin. He gratifyingly ended
it.

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 bent-wood 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. Every one 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 sub-committees 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-inall; 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 come-back—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.”