New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal that Launched the Progressive Era by Daniel Czitrom (review)

Police brutality. Urban inequality. In some ways the only unfamiliar aspects of Daniel Czitrom's New York Exposed is the power and gumption displayed by the newspapers which, more than a hundred years ago, reported on and helped direct a sensational campaign against corruption within New York City law enforcement. Using the Lexow hearings of 1894 as its centerpiece, New York Exposed examines how this campaign both reflected and transformed the broader social and political context of Gilded Age America.

Czitrom's first three chapters examine the man, institution, and political situation around which the police scandal revolved. The man was Charles H. Parkhurst, reverend of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church and member of the blue-blooded Society for the Prevention of Crime. Over the course of a four-night investigation in the spring of 1892, Parkhurst saw first-hand how the city's underground vice economy was being profitably managed in the form of payoffs and protection money, by the New York City Police Department. The NYPD was itself protected, however, by bipartisan political interests; both Republicans and Democrats had long viewed the department as a source of patronage and spoils and had long deflected efforts to purge it of corruption. This changed in the Fall of 1892, when upstate Republicans—alarmed by a Democratic surge in the polls which threatened to upset this balance and place the NYPD (and with it, supervision of the city's millions of votes) in the hands of the Tammany Hall—joined Parkhurst's crusade and formed the Lexow Commission into police corruption in New York City.

In the following chapters, Czitrom recounts and summarizes the lengthy commission, which collected 4,000 pages of testimony from 787 witnesses over 78 sessions spanning two years. German-American brothel owners, immigrant saloon keepers, African-American sex workers, and many more gave horrific (and historically invaluable) accounts of police corruption and brutality—even as the broader violence of the police against labor movements and the gendered politics of sex-work criminalization went undiscussed. In the short run the Lexow Commission placed the city's Democratic organization on the backfoot as anti-machine reformers took advantage of the scandals to swing the city's "Tenement Districts" against the machine. All the same, the effects of the Lexow Commission on the NYPD itself was minimal. All the policemen fined for corruption or brutality during the hearings were reinstated with backpay, while Republicans ensured that the institution itself remained a source of partisan patronage for years to come.

As his book's title indicates, however, Czitrom places a broader significance upon the Lexow Commission than mere police house-cleaning—he argues that it helped launch the broader Progressive era of the early 20^th century. He links back to the Commission many of the tropes we associate with Progressivism, including the commissioner's faith in empirical facts, Parkhurst's moralism and invocation of a civically virtuous public against corruption, and the use of publicity and the press as an instrument of reform. In making this claim, however, Czitrom winds up painting a somewhat dated portrait of what Progressivism was. Historians have long realized that this movement cannot be reduced to a tight set of core principles and actors, but have realized that like all capacious movements—such as Liberalism or even Socialism—it was both contradictory and capacious.¹ Reverend Parkhurst might have come from a rural background, but he called for a diverse urban constituency to back his reforms. Conversely, the paradigmatically "urban" political machine he fought against had been founded by Irish immigrants who, in Czitrom's words, "grafted the world of rural Irish villages—tight boundaries, stable social relations, and constant surveillance of village elders—onto the work of New York's precinct politics" (78). The analytic purchase Czitrom hopes to make by back-dating the Progressive Era's origins would be improved by developing a subtler understanding...