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.”