When Rev. Charles Parkhurst entered the pulpit at the packed Eighteenth Street Methodist Episcopal Church in 1894, he had policing on his mind, not comedy. He had been leading a campaign to reform the New York police for several years, urging enforcement of vice laws and governmental oversight for fighting corruption. For this effort, he was lauded by sympathetic Protestants and lambasted by police leaders and their allies in city newspapers.Footnote 1
But Parkhurst also had jokes. In his address he recounted a “homily” he had received from Police Superintendent Thomas Byrnes, who, according to Parkhurst, had said vice in the city was inevitable (and, presumably, not worth the police addressing). Parkhurst’s sarcastic reply followed: “What has Superintendent Byrnes got to do with that? If this municipality wants philosophy, we’ll hire a philosopher … If there is a need of police preaching, we’ll hire a police chaplain.” His riposte landed, the crowd erupting in laughter. To Parkhurst and his gathered devotees, the idea that the police themselves had philosophical or theological reflections to offer on the roots of vice and law enforcement’s response was absurd. Police were to be crime fighters, not pastors. The idea of a police chaplain was a joke, and a throwaway one at that.Footnote 2
A few years earlier a Kansas City newspaper column had similarly poked at police, with chaplaincy as the punchline. Given the unnecessary expenditures the department had been making of late, such as a new wagon, it would not be out of character for the department to make some similarly wasteful hires: “Pray, let us have a police chaplain, barber, baker and so on … why not have a few gatling guns?”Footnote 3 For the newspaper editors, the idea of a chaplain was a ridiculous, a superfluous accretion only slightly more wasteful than new policing technologies.
The New York Police Department (NYPD) did not get the jokes. Just over a decade later, it announced that it was appointing two chaplains, one Episcopal and one Catholic clergyman. These were the first police chaplains appointed in the United States. Five years later, the NYPD would announce its appointment of a Jewish chaplain. Though newspapers at the time were atwitter over the novelty of it all, over the next few decades chaplains would appear in several other American police departments, both in larger urban ones (including Kansas City) and in rural locales. The national number of police chaplains would steadily grow throughout the twentieth century. Though exact numbers are difficult to come by, today the International Conference of Police Chaplains (ICPC) reports 2000 member chaplains in fourteen countries from across the religious spectrum (the actual number serving beyond the ICPC in the United States is much larger – not all chaplains belong to the organization).Footnote 4 Since their inception, police chaplaincy roles have evolved and have varied in scope. Chaplains have prayed with individual officers and convened gatherings of thousands. Some have had minor departmental roles, and others have been popular public commentators on law enforcement concerns. The role has been featured in prominent publications, from the FBI Bulletin to The New York Times, and even the TV show Dragnet. And while police chaplains have often hailed from Christian traditions, they have routinely expressed ecumenical sensibilities, particularly in diverse urban locales. Today, the NYPD Chaplains Unit has several chaplains, from Muslim, Catholic, Lutheran, Greek Orthodox, Pentecostal, and non-denominational Protestant traditions.Footnote 5 The NYPD’s Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Alvin Kass, served in that role from 1966. He died in late 2025, following a chaplaincy career of nearly sixty years, the longest-serving employee in the department.Footnote 6
The story of the early days of the NYPD’s chaplaincy offers a window into the emergence of an important religious role in both American law enforcement and American religion. Chaplains have been an important feature of other modern American institutions, such as prisons, hospitals, factories, and the military. Each of these forms has its own unique history. For example, Ronit Stahl has shown how modern military chaplains emerged in the wake of World War I, as a Protestant hegemony was challenged by the presence of Catholic and Jewish soldiers. These chaplains, in turn, helped develop a “moral monotheism” that guided soldiers, one that stressed respectable belief in God and American belonging.Footnote 7 Similarly, the emergence of full-time industrial chaplains in the 1940s offered factory employees an array of religious services, from daily chapels to counseling to weddings. Evangelical Protestant in their origins, industrial chaplains “negotiated blue-collar and white-collar worlds,” helping resolve strikes and increase worker productivity.Footnote 8 Other iterations of chaplaincy generally shared a common trajectory of development of a “ministry of presence” as a defining feature. This phrase, one that has been frequently deployed by chaplains themselves to indicate their desire to walk alongside those they serve, typically refers to the ministerial orientation that chaplains have had: proximate and attentive, often steeped in therapeutic psychological concepts, and not aggressively evangelistic. The phrase also indicates the legal limits of chaplains’ work.Footnote 9 Police chaplains’ emergence has some parallels with all of these stories. Similar to military chaplains, early police chaplains worked to realize an idealized moral monotheism that could aid in assimilative and coercive state efforts. Early police chaplains also resembled the modernizing hopes of industrial chaplains, not only in their efforts to mediate conflicts but also in their aspirations to create new religious forms that ran alongside developments in modern life (not simply reacting against them). Just as industrial chaplains aided in the work of creating a modern “industrial religion,” with its own aims of regulation, police chaplains helped make a no less regulatory modern police religion.Footnote 10 However, this quintessentially modern religious manufacture was also tied to the necessities of the local context in turn-of-the-century New York. These chaplains emerged and formalized as products of negotiations around matters such as the inclusion or exclusion of immigrants; the profiling of religious minorities; and the personal vendettas of pastors and police alike. All wanted various forms of increased personal, communal, and professional security, and all saw law enforcement as a site with religious potential in that regard.
Attending to police chaplaincy’s emergence not only helps us to understand the origins of an important yet understudied institutional site for chaplaincy work; it also gives us a sense of how policing itself changed through the development of its religious consciousness and its introduction of clerical roles. The turn of the twentieth century is often referred to a period of growing police modernization, with the advent of new law enforcement technologies, such as radios, classification, and rank systems. Modernization also encompassed expanding public expectations that police serve as an institution of public safety separate from local political machines. This paralleled a growing modern consensus in criminology and penology more broadly, with crime being increasingly understood in scientific terms. It is particularly significant, then, that, in this modernizing moment in American policing, new religious roles were being introduced as guides and guardrails for police. Religion was not being eclipsed by modern state bureaucracies but being adopted and adapted to it.
On this note, this article also offers insights into the development of modern American religion. Chaplains’ emergence in the NYPD tells us something about policing at this moment. But it also tells us something about religion itself, particularly about how religion is organized and managed by the modern state. Recent scholarship on policing has helpfully shown how police intersected with other shifting domains characterizing modern American life, such as modern notions of race, colonial expansion, and liberal political ideologies. For instance, in his work on the early NYPD, Matthew Guariglia demonstrates how “police became an engine of racial management and race-making” as they attempted to address New York’s racial and ethnic diversity through particular forms of officer recruitment, strategies of policing particular neighborhoods, and knowledge production on the linkage of race and crime.Footnote 11 This article aims to show something analogous with reference to religion: through chaplaincy, the NYPD became an engine of religious management and religion-making. In effect, chaplains were the NYPD’s attempt to solve problems of religious diversity, resolving Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish tensions that existed with regard to policing and offering a distinctly local rendering of a “tri-faith America” in service to the American city and its law enforcement. This article’s local, multireligious, and turn-of-the-twentieth-century focus showcases a different context for discussing religion and law enforcement from that given in other leading accounts, which have tended to stress the Cold War or the federal context, or which have focused on the actions of postwar evangelicals.Footnote 12
Parallelling Ronit Stahl’s charting of the moral monotheism of military chaplaincy, Kevin Schultz’s work on the emergence of “tri-faith America” has shown how, from roughly the end of World War I to the early Cold War, a new national image of religious unity emerged in the United States, one that moved away from the idea that the nation was a Protestant one that simply accommodated Catholics and Jews to one in which Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism were all viewed as authentically American faiths.Footnote 13 Police chaplaincy’s emergence showcases a different kind of tri-faith consensus. This was one with an earlier start date, not during the nationalist fervor of world wars or the pluralist rebukes of the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1930s, but amid the local religious fractures and alliances of New York City. And, with police chaplaincy, a tri-faith ministry emerged not out of an obliging liberal Protestant establishment but from a predominately Catholic police force that was addressing challenges from religious outsiders. Before the tri-faith power of America was heralded amid international wars with fascism and communism, the NYPD found the tri-faith model useful for its own negotiations with religious constituencies and reformers, as well as for its own wars on crime.
Nevertheless, though tri-faith rhetoric was powerful, it did not guarantee an equal playing field for its exponents. Catholics had demographic strength in the NYPD, a fact some Protestants lamented. Jews were a growing presence in the force as well. Yet Protestants still found ways to exert power disproportionate to their numbers. They did so by contending for Protestant accommodation and by making arguments for the value of religious diversity (with the hope that the latter would guarantee the former). This approach was a forerunner of later liberal Protestant ecumenical work, with its “sympathetic exploration of wider worlds,” as David Hollinger has put it.Footnote 14 But this advocacy for religious accommodation also was, as Tisa Wenger has shown, a way for white Protestants to retain power amidst a modernizing state project, one that depended upon “classification and control.”Footnote 15
Scholarship on policing has shown how, throughout the twentieth century, police modernized and professionalized not just through uniforms, firearms, and radios, but through new forms of categorization and deployments of “soft” power. Policing, as with the carceral state more generally, was ideologically flexible, aligning with the forces of modernity and liberalism. Police engaged communities beyond simple punitive responses, from immigrant employment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to community policing efforts in the 1960s and ’70s. Some have argued that these forms of policing were little more than fronts for expanded surveillance or covers for repression; the iron fist wore a velvet glove.Footnote 16 But, with regard to chaplains in the early NYPD, this was a contested and complex process. Chaplains counseled, preached, and served officers in various ways, and at times this work functioned to embolden police power and embed police more deeply into American communities. But, at the same time, chaplains were also understood as holding reformist roles, as potential checks on police misconduct, and as sources of moral inspiration. It was believed by police leaders that chaplains could help make officers better men and mediate conflict between police and the communities they served. Chaplains tried to have it both ways. They argued that police deserved respect, rebutted critics, and helped frame police work as sacred. In this way, they were the forerunners not only of loud national religious voices promoting the work of law enforcement and “law and order” later in the twentieth century but, on a local level, of more recent religious advocates of police in New York City.Footnote 17
By contrast, the official NYPD narrative is one that sees chaplaincy as spiritual, above the fray of politics and the rough-and-tumble tussles of departmental governance. This was true in 1906, when the chaplaincy program began. And it was true in 2006, when then-mayor Michael Bloomberg characterized chaplains as those who “provided spiritual guidance and strength of character for police officers and their families during the most vulnerable of times.”Footnote 18
To be sure, this is how most institutions and people have understood chaplaincy. It is a ministry of pastoral care and accompaniment, focused on personal spiritual connection and engagement. Chaplains in the NYPD and elsewhere have done and continue to do this kind of work; indeed, perhaps most of their work fits this description: counseling, praying, inspiring, burying, and so forth. And they did a lot of praying, so much so that chaplaincy leaders in the 1970s disparaged this earlier generation of chaplains as simply invocational in nature.Footnote 19 But prayer always happens in a context, and those prayers and who prays them always have a political valence. This article therefore seeks to detail the context of police prayer and its accoutrements, to better understand why a role that began as a joke later came to have such lasting significance.
Tensions to Be Resolved
The modern NYPD emerged amid intense local and national nativist fervor concerning Catholics and Jews. Its emergence was also plagued with problems of police misconduct and corruption. Both would be crucial backdrops for the emergence of chaplaincy as well.
The New York Municipal Police Department was founded in 1845, amid a large influx of immigrants into the city.Footnote 20 The department drew heavily from these immigrant groups, particularly the Irish, many of whom were fleeing their homeland to escape famine and oppressive British rule. For them, a job in the police department promised a steady paycheck and a sense of civic belonging.Footnote 21 One 1855 report by the police chief stated that, of the 1149 officers in the department, 718 were born in the US and 417 in foreign countries. Of the latter, 305 were born in Ireland (with the next highest being Germany, with 51).Footnote 22 This high ratio of Irish officers in New York persisted into the twentieth century.Footnote 23 And, since most Irish immigrants were Catholic, those who took jobs on the police force were too. Estimates in the early 1860s put the approximately 2000-man New York force at around half Catholic.Footnote 24
Native-born Anglo-Americans feared that this Irish Catholic influx would upset the political order of the city. These worries informed the state legislature’s creation of a rival police force in New York, the Metropolitan Department, in 1857. Nativist complaints about Irish Catholic police persisted throughout the rest of the century. For example, in multiple articles in the 1890s, the nativist American Protective Association decried Catholic police presence in the US, from the Denver mayor in 1893 for appointing a Catholic police chief to alleged coverups of clergy misconduct by Catholic police in Boston. As one headline read, it was a “shameful spectacle” that “Roman Catholic Priests Have no Fear of the Police, as They Are All Roman Catholics.”Footnote 25
Amid this ongoing nativist furor, two soon-to-be famous New Yorkers, Charles Parkhurst and Theodore Roosevelt, led reform projects in the New York police that helped set new terms for modernization and for religious accommodation in the department. These were crucial yet incomplete antecedents for the emergence of NYPD chaplaincy.
Late nineteenth-century New York Protestants were less focused on the nativist worry the police posed as a predominantly Catholic force and more on the matter of police corruption. This concern was articulated most forcefully by Parkhurst, who led a highly publicized effort to reform the NYPD at the close of the nineteenth century.
Parkhurst had accepted a call to Manhattan’s Madison Square Presbyterian Church in 1880. Throughout the following decade, he became increasingly concerned about the moral state of the city. His most famous effort to expose vice in New York came in 1892, when he and a small group of other investigators donned disguises and visited brothels and bars in order to expose the unregulated presence of sex and alcohol and the ignorance of police officials (who, Parkhurst would claim, were in on the take). Parkhurst outlined his findings in sermons, which enraged citizens likewise frustrated with police corruption (often fellow elite Protestants) but made him the enemy of Tammany Hall, the police, and many working-class immigrants (who saw it as puritanical meddling in neighborhood politics and their beloved pubs).Footnote 26 Parkhurst’s accusations of corruption ignited a firestorm, which led eventually to the founding of the Lexow Committee by the state senate. Named for Senator Clarence Lexow, the committee called hundreds of witnesses who testified in graphic detail to the department’s misconduct and violence. The result was a dramatic shift in popular opinion in the city against Tammany Democrats (who relied on Irish Catholics for votes) and a new openness to reform of police and civic life more broadly. As Daniel Czitrom has argued, this marked the beginning of the Progressive Era, which “flowered in the political soil first plowed by Parkhurst and the Lexow revelations.”Footnote 27
Parkhurst’s complaints against the systemic evils of urban policing’s political machinations aligned well with larger nativist sentiment that saw urban immigrant Catholics and police as corrupt co-laborers.Footnote 28 His “liberal evangelicalism,” as Matthew Bowman has called it, channeled the earlier legacy of northern Protestant reform efforts that spanned the nineteenth century, which in turn helped lay the foundation for the Progressive Era’s social change efforts. This broader religious reform effort was concerned with rectifying social injustices, increasingly those associated with industrialization and urbanization. But it also sometimes evinced paternalism and middle-class moralism, especially regarding the plight of newly arrived non-Protestant immigrants. At times, this vision of Protestant social Christianity embraced full-on nativism.Footnote 29 However, Parkhurst worked to ensure that his approach appeared nonpartisan and avoided religious tensions: “I do not speak as a Republican or a Democrat, as a Protestant or a Catholic, as an advocate of prohibition, or as an advocate of license.” Instead, he was simply moved “by my anxiety as a preacher of Jesus Christ,” concerned only about combating corruption.Footnote 30 Elsewhere, he contended that reform must be “broad enough for Republican or Democrat, Prohibitionist, Catholic, or Hebrew” and spoke of his reverence for the “longing deep down in many good Catholics’ hearts for better municipal conditions.”Footnote 31 Even though he shared speakers’ platforms with nativists, he generally avoided incendiary anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic rhetoric.Footnote 32 On the cusp of the Progressive Era, Parkhurst helped suggest the possibility that reform of police was possible in nonpartisan, ecumenical terms.
Though Parkhurst was a pastor, Theodore Roosevelt was the one who more directly confronted the religious prospects of the NYPD. Roosevelt was appointed president of the four-man police commission for the city in 1895, in the aftermath of the Lexow investigation. He had previously made a name for himself in civil service reform, cleaning up corrupt government agencies. His appointment as a police commissioner, where he focused on increasing police professionalism and enforcing laws restricting alcohol, was an extension of this reformist work.Footnote 33 One goal was revamping the system of appointments. In the past, the department had been staffed through machine politics and patronage; police jobs would often go to men based on their connections to Tammany Hall, not their skill. Roosevelt wanted to enforce a different model.
As historian Ben Wetzel has shown, though not often thought of as religious, Roosevelt framed this reform work as police commissioner in such terms. The police department would be animated by biblical virtues, Roosevelt said, in particular the Ten Commandments and the New Testament’s golden rule.Footnote 34 However, his contribution was less the religious ideals stimulating his reformist work and more his championing of religious diversity on the force. Roosevelt knew the force was majority Irish, and their large presence inextricable from the political power wielded by Tammany Hall. But, as he began to enforce civil service law and worked to reduce corruption, “no heed whatever was paid to the politics or religion of applicants, or anything else except their qualification for the place they sought.” Officers earned promotion without reference to their nationality or religion, “whether they were Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Gentile, or of no recognized faith at all.” He told a story of a Catholic priest who had thirty parishioners appointed to the force, “simply on their merits,” as “young fellows of fine physique and good character, who possessed fair intelligence and school training.” No longer was the “saloon-keeper or professional politician” of use for gaining admission to the force, or a clergyman, for that matter, who “cheerfully recommend any man, wholly without regard to the facts.” At the same time, Roosevelt decried those who would impugn Catholic officers, especially the “professional know-nothing.”Footnote 35 Nothing mattered but professional fitness.
Roosevelt saw ethnic and religious diversity on the force as an asset. He listed the leading ethnic groups on the force in terms of representation: Irish, followed by native-born “old-stock” Americans, and Germans. After these, “the most important is the Jewish,” of which there were a large number on the force. Roosevelt was proud of his willingness to promote Jewish officers: if “the ten best candidates for promotion were Jews, they would secure all the prizes.”Footnote 36
Roosevelt was also proud of his diverse force, and he believed he could mobilize religious constituencies within the police to rebut public intolerance. Once, when an antisemitic speaker visited New York, Roosevelt was asked by Jewish community members to prevent the address. He declined, on account of wanting to protect freedom of speech, but stationed a number of Jewish police to guard the speaker, who “delivered his violent harangues against the men of Hebrew faith, owing his safety to the fact that he was scrupulously protected by men of the very race he was denouncing.” Jewish newspapers would later hail Roosevelt’s actions, naming them as evidence that he was a “consistent friend” of American Jews. Similarly, he assigned a group of Catholic policemen to guard a nativist speaker.Footnote 37 Although perhaps not what Jewish or Catholic advocates had in mind, actions like these were a source of pride for Roosevelt. In his 1897 letter of resignation to the mayor (published in the New York Evening Post), he heralded his administration’s practice of administering the police force “without regard to politics … in promotions and appointments alike we have disregarded wholly all considerations of political or religious creeds.” This was a vision of unity of purpose in diversity: “working with all men, rich and poor, priests and laymen, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Gentiles, who are striving to make our civic conditions better, who are striving to raise the standard of living, of morality, and of comfort among our less fortunate brethren.”Footnote 38
Roosevelt’s proud ruminations on police diversity may have been a rebuke of overt nativist sentiment, but they were nonetheless proscribed within racial and religious hierarchies. Roosevelt trafficked in common racial assumptions regarding Anglo-American, Irish, and Jewish physical characteristics and mental capacity. To him, Anglo-American police were the ideal, as they are “on average, men of superior intelligence to any other class.” He believed Irish police were valuable because of their physical prowess, which Jews often lacked, owing to the fact that they “have not yet gotten far enough away from their centuries of oppression and degradation to make good policemen.”Footnote 39 However, Jews could still be “excellent material for the force” because of their intelligence, or if they had past experience in more physically demanding professions. Roosevelt did not even mention the possibility of Black police, despite the fact that the growing Black population of the city numbered tens of thousands.Footnote 40 He imagined religious and ethnic police diversity within the frame of whiteness, albeit with gradations. This imaginary resulted in a “self-affirming loop,” in which new appointments were disproportionately Anglo-Irish and promotions were offered more often to old-stock white immigrants. The imaginary of whiteness would persist into the early days of police chaplaincy.Footnote 41
Even with Roosevelt’s limited guarantees of police inclusivity, the relationship of Jews to law enforcement in New York remained fraught. In 1906, police commissioner Theodore Bingham refused to allow Jewish police time off for Rosh Hashanah.Footnote 42 How many Jewish police there were is difficult to ascertain, though in 1895 the Sun mentioned “many” Jewish police in the department. By 1911, a few years later, reports listed more than 500 men serving. In 1907, Bingham doubled down but, perhaps in response to criticism, made a minor accommodation: Jewish police would not get the holiday off but could conduct their patrols at their synagogues.Footnote 43
Bingham framed his comments with reference to the shortage of police and his belief that, if he granted Jews leave, he would have to do the same for Christian officers on their holidays.Footnote 44 Yet Bingham would have a harder time disclaiming antisemitism after his publication of a controversial piece a few months later in the North American Review. In it, he named “Russian Hebrews” and Italians as the leading sources of criminality in New York City (the former committed more crimes, especially theft, Bingham claimed, though “the Italian malefactor” was “the greater menace to law and order” with their more violent crimes). Jews made up “perhaps half” of New York’s criminals, he contended.Footnote 45 The negative response from New York’s Jewish community and their allies was swift and fierce, with all major Yiddish newspapers in the city declaring Bingham antisemitic. Bingham later released a retraction, apologizing for offending the various communities he profiled and blaming his conclusions on improperly gathered statistics.Footnote 46
Chaplains’ Emergence
The debates about police misconduct on the one hand, and those around the relationship of minority faiths to law enforcement on the other, created the context by which the emergence of police chaplaincy became intelligible and possible. Following Parkhurst’s campaign and the Lexow Committee efforts (with their associated Protestant vs. Catholic overtones), and religious conflicts regarding police (both Catholic and Jewish), the NYPD had two tensions it needed to resolve as it sought modernization. First, it needed to find a way to reduce misconduct, but on its own terms and through its own means. Second, it needed a way to engage religious traditions in an official capacity that leveraged their power for spiritual care of police while at the same time demarcating categories of religion (and its associated roles) that the department could use to its advantage. Chaplaincy roles went a long way in addressing each of these tensions and, overall, bolstered the power of the department and jumpstarted the cultural linkage between police and religion for the remainder of the twentieth century.
In February 1906, Commissioner Bingham announced, via General Order No. 20, his appointment of Rev. John D. Chidwick, a Catholic, and Rev. John A. Wade, an Episcopalian, as chaplains for the department.Footnote 47 These were, newspapers reported, “the first police chaplains in the United States.” Sworn in by the mayor, their responsibilities were to “visit the sick, the injured, and the dying,” and to “offer spiritual aid to those who may need or desire it,” chiefly at large disturbances such as fires and riots, though also at station houses. They would have the “assimilated rank of inspectors,” though they could not issue orders. Chaplains would also serve without pay, instead remaining affiliated with their churches and ministry day jobs. Wade worked for the Protestant Episcopal City Mission Society and served as a chaplain in the Tombs prison, while Chidwick was the pastor at St. Ambrose’s (and had previously served as a navy chaplain onboard the Maine battleship before it had exploded in Havana eight years earlier). Both were relatively young, though accomplished and highly regarded, having been recommended for the roles by their bishops.Footnote 48
The first recorded worship service led by a chaplain for policemen was held on May 27, 1906. It was an unpromising start. Chaplain Wade’s name was misspelled in the Sun’s news report (“Waite”) and, while Commissioner Bingham and Deputy Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo attended, just five or six policemen showed up (and only one of them was in uniform).Footnote 49 That same week, Wade and Chidwick were given horse riding lessons so that they might make an appearance in a police parade later in the year. When Wade asked Chidwick how he liked the lesson, Chidwick replied, with a reference to his tour of duty on the Maine, “Well just between ourselves, I think I would rather be back in the navy.”Footnote 50 The early state of police chaplaincy seemed to confirm Parkhurst’s joke.
But in mid-1906 the tide started to turn, at least for Catholic chaplaincy. Chidwick held a series of worship services for police at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. At the first, 1000 showed up; at the second, 1500. Chidwick’s sermon indicated an emerging theme: when it came to policing, religion was not a joke. “A policeman with religion,” he preached, “makes a better policeman than one who has not religion.”Footnote 51 The 1909 service brought 2000 attendees, all in dress uniform, led into the cathedral by Chidwick while the police band played “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”Footnote 52 Newspapers noted the dramatic turn from a few years before and reported that the large presence of policemen, all there voluntarily, was a testament to the popularity of Chidwick.Footnote 53 As one sergeant told a Sun reporter: “all th’ rummies on the pavement know a square man an’ a good priest when they meet up with him.”Footnote 54 Indeed, it would have been hard for Catholic police not to like Chidwick, given how seriously he took them. In late 1906, he managed to gain an audience with the pope, who urged him to give the papal blessing to all New York police he met. Subsequently, Chidwick would stop policemen on the street and quickly transmit the blessing to each.Footnote 55
Chidwick resigned in 1909–10. His Catholic replacement, Francis Sullivan, maintained his momentum.Footnote 56 Sullivan preached his first sermon to police at the 1910 annual memorial police service at St. Patrick’s, this time with 4000 uniformed men in attendance. The sermon echoed Chidwick’s emphases: praising the bravery of police, while also urging a deepening of moral mettle—“courage to resist the briber, who would lure you from the path of duty; courage to resist the temptations of lust.”Footnote 57 Through sermons like Chidwick’s and Sullivan’s, police would find their accountability neither in Tammany nor in Lexow but in religion.
Sullivan believed that more intimate assemblies would be valuable in addition to large public worship. In 1911, he pioneered his next project: a Catholic police fraternal organization. It would be a branch of the Holy Name Society, a Catholic men’s organization with roots among thirteenth-century Dominicans that was revitalized in the late nineteenth century with a New York charter in 1871.Footnote 58 The Society was dedicated both to reverence of the name of Jesus and eradication of blasphemy and obscenity. Sullivan’s work here had its genesis in Baltimore in 1911, where he joined 3000 delegates gathered for the Society’s first national congress.Footnote 59
Catholic leaders in the city found that Catholic civil servants were ideal constituencies for Holy Name organizing; there were Holy Name Societies in the fire department, post office, and police department. Holy Name Societies met routinely for communion and breakfast, gatherings that “served as imposing demonstrations of Catholic clout,” and at which the gathered civil servants could hear from church leaders who “affirmed the dignity of their work.”Footnote 60
The founding of the Holy Name Society and the entrepreneurial ministry tactics of Catholic police chaplains resulted in a proliferation of large Catholic police gatherings. Newspapers regularly reported on parades and assemblies of thousands of Catholic police at sites like St. Patrick’s, where they sang hymns, received communion, and heard sermons. Police and city officials took note, often attending the gatherings themselves.
These gatherings and the Holy Name Society police organization were not only symbolically powerful in their direct connection of Catholic faith to police culture. They also offered a context to contest the charges frequently levied against Catholic police, whether by nativists or by reformers. In April 1919, the Holy Name Journal praised the NYPD Society for its work and highlighted a sermon lately preached at the Society’s Memorial Mass. As Father Healy honored those police who had recently lost their lives, he also praised the NYPD for its courage and its kindness, even toward criminals. These men, Father Healy preached, were unfairly being attacked by critics and “so-called reformers.”Footnote 61
These Catholic gatherings were important forerunners of what later became known as the “Blue Mass,” a police worship service usually dated to 1934 in Washington, DC (and widely celebrated today). But it was in these services nearly three decades earlier that Catholic police first gathered en masse. Here, in police masses at St. Patrick’s and Holy Name Society breakfasts, no nativist or Protestant reformist criticisms were heard. Instead, Catholic police proudly claimed their faith as an asset for their law enforcement work.
This attempt to rebut nativist critiques through development of Catholic lay movements that interfaced with the state tracked with broader trends in Gilded Age and Progressive Era American Catholic organizing more generally. Catholics at this time worked hard to demonstrate that they belonged in various American state-building projects, from western and imperial expansion to immigration regulation. These “nationalist Catholics,” William Cossen has shown, “argued that Catholics should play an integral role in spreading Christian civilization across the American frontier … and then advancing the civilizing project within their own ranks to prove to non-Catholics that Catholicism was a quintessentially American community worthy of taking its place alongside Protestantism in the administration of the country’s civil religion.”Footnote 62 Similarly, Catholic lay groups developed their own Progressive reform push via programs of settlement, temperance, and women’s charitable work, all of which stressed both the need to maintain immigrants’ European ethnic ties and the compatibility of their Catholic faith with American values.Footnote 63 These movements, as with the development of a Catholic police subculture, challenged elite Protestants’ claim to have a monopoly on Progressive reform and the administration of the American state.
The Reformist Work of Chaplains
From the outset, police chaplaincy in the NYPD was envisioned as a moral enterprise. Chaplains, it was hoped, would have a positive effect on patrolmen, and their spiritual influence would lead them away from corruption and brutality.
The chaplains’ reformist aims were recognized and lampooned by outsiders. One newspaper cheekily discussed this “new scheme of making every man patrol his beat faithfully every night instead of sleeping peacefully in a cozy back room over a stein of beer.” Police roundsmen watching over their patrolmen “would be unnecessary hereafter, for every policeman will be good.” Because of chaplains, who would “visit the policemen on their day off and converse with them on pious subjects,” policemen would now reject bribes and “strictly” obey orders. The happy result: “Commissioner Bingham can point to himself with pride and say ‘Damn it, sir, I have purified the police force!’”Footnote 64
And yet, the reformist chaplaincy work started in earnest. Chaplain William McGuirl, appointed by Bingham in Brooklyn, was a “daily visitor” at State Street headquarters and went to trials for police misconduct. A Brooklyn paper noted that “By a wink of Father McGuirl’s eye the trial commissioner understands that a lecture or a caution may be the means of preventing the policeman from breaking the rule a second time.”Footnote 65 Police chaplains’ ongoing presence in the station house and visitations with officers, one official city government publication noted soon after the initial appointments, had been exceedingly helpful in elevating the “tone of the men.”Footnote 66
Chaplains’ reformist appeals and presence rarely faced resistance from police themselves. This was likely because they functioned as internal critics of individual officers, and generally did not challenge the image or power of the department. In May of 1907, Chaplain Chidwick preached a sermon at St. Patrick’s to a large assembly of policemen that showcased both the hopes of religious reform and, at the same time, the way religion worked to bolster the authority of the police through dismissal of challenges to their power. With nearly every seat taken in the cathedral, Chidwick spoke to the assembly with a message about authority. The policeman was accountable “first and foremost” to God, and only second to the public. It was a falsehood that authority came from the people: “the people may elect, men may appoint, but once the person who is selected comes into a position of official authority he is responsible … to God and must do as God wills, and not as may will the people.” To do otherwise was to forsake eternal justice; after all, “Often the people may be wrong.” Chidwick then criticized the “slanders that have filled the public press” against police. Those who shook “public confidence” in police were guilty of the “darkest of crimes.” To be sure, Chidwick admitted, there were individual “blacklegs” among the police. But this was true of every organization. Overall, “There is no cleaner body of men” than New York’s police.Footnote 67
Versions of this same argument appeared elsewhere. At Chaplain Wade’s appointment, he told reporters that “I do not believe the police of New York are so corrupt as they are painted … Of course, there are black sheep among them, just the same as you find unfaithful men in the ministry, but I have a great respect for the policeman.”Footnote 68 A few years later, Chaplain McGuirl hosted a service for 500 policemen in which a guest preacher admonished the gathered faithful to “let conscience be your guide” as they considered their “tremendous responsibilities.” Policemen who found joy in using violence or joined the force to simply make a living were “disgraces to the force.” Their work was a “calling” that required “moral courage.”Footnote 69
The complicated state of chaplains’ reform efforts could be seen in one 1918 incident. A Brooklyn patrolman, Joseph J. Murtha, had been accused of assault of another officer, E. J. Jameson, while under the influence of alcohol. Two women witnessed the assault. However, Jameson declined to testify against Murtha at the police station trial and asked the commissioner to give Murtha another chance (Murtha also contended that he had simply been drunk after imbibing brandy to help him with an illness). The commissioner then looked to the chaplain (unnamed in press accounts, but likely Chaplain McGuirl). The chaplain defended Murtha and his record. In response, the commissioner told the chaplain, “You can take care of him for one year. He must report to you at least once every two weeks. If after a certain period you find that he is walking the straight path, it will not be necessary for him to call upon you.”Footnote 70
In 1920, the police department published its annual report, and in this particular year offered a detailed summary of the chaplaincy program. Language of both spiritual and moral uplift was everywhere. The five police chaplains were “not only spiritual advisors, but welfare workers of the finest type as well.” That year, the chaplains made 2550 hospital visits and 300 visits to families of policemen who had had a family member die. They performed eighty-five funeral services for officers who had died. Chaplains conducted “personnel work,” helping police with problems “whenever sympathy, counsel and aid are needed.” But they were also there to surveil and discipline: “In watching over those who might be tempted to break the departmental rules,” the report read, “the chaplain frequently saves a man from a foolish mistake and the possibility of dismissal.” When an officer violated a department rule, the chaplain acted “as a probation officer.” It was assumed that part of this work involved attending trials and investigating the “causes of delinquency.” Overall, the report concluded, given that “the Police Department is continually seeking to perfect its organization and raise its standards; in this, it has been aided greatly by the splendid assistance of its chaplains.” They were “Invaluable Aids to the Department.”Footnote 71
These appeals worked in two registers. On the one hand, by calling attention to police accountability to God, chaplains showcased the moral demands of policing. This was not simply a job; it was a calling. On the other hand, the sacralizing of police work downplayed public accountability, albeit in a particularly professionalizing mode. Police were being envisioned as having an authority that was detached from the community that surrounded them. It was disconnected from the political whims of the Tammany machine, but also from the rebuke of reformers and democratic politics more generally. Police had authority that came from God, and therefore they did not have to answer to anyone else. Indeed, given that they heard from chaplains that they were an upstanding organization with only a few bad apples (who could be reformed with pastoral attention), there was little pressure to change the way the department functioned as a whole. After all, God was on their side.
Protestants, Jews, and Problem of Inclusion
Chaplains were tasked with hailing the important work of police at the same time that they were seen as exhorters who called these men to account. This was not the only tension, however. Achieving an inclusive, peaceably ecumenical police force had its challenges, particularly regarding the presence and influence of Jews and Protestants.
Initially, the New York police selected only Catholic and Protestant chaplains, but they soon added a Jewish one. Though Commissioner Bingham had published his controversial North American Review article blaming Jews for crime in the city in 1908, the police department signaled a new course with the hiring of a Jewish chaplain just three years later. In 1911, the new commissioner, Rhinelander Waldo, appointed Abraham Blum as chaplain, who had previously served as rabbi for a Bronx Reform congregation and chaplain for several New York hospitals.Footnote 72 This was an appointment that grew out of the commissioner’s sensitivity to the sizable Jewish representation on the police force.Footnote 73 Over the next few years, Blum would successfully push the department in subtle ways to ameliorate its fraught relationship with Jews and build a strong sense of Jewish police culture. He successfully lobbied to have all Jewish officers excused from duty on Yom Kippur.Footnote 74 With Blum’s help, Jewish NYPD members followed the convening pattern of Catholics. In 1917, 500 Jewish police gathered at Temple Beth-El, where Blum memorialized fallen officers from the past year.Footnote 75 With Blum’s appointment, the focus was not on the religion of New Yorkers that might need particular kinds of surveillance but on how the religion of police officers should be accommodated.
However, Blum was at once pastoral and politically savvy with his ministry, meeting Jewish officers’ religious needs but in ways that meshed well with the dominant Christian culture in the force and city. He invited the police commissioner and his deputies to attend a Hannukah service with the rest of the Jewish force.Footnote 76 Newspapers noted how Blum was “popular with most of the men on the force,” “Jewish and Christian alike,” and that the services for Jewish officers included “a representation of all creeds.”Footnote 77 Though he likely saw his focus on ministering to members of his own faith, part of that work also entailed making it clear to the rest of the NYPD and the city more generally that Jews belonged on the force and that they shared the same goals for public safety. As Reform Rabbi Joseph Silverman, a guest preacher at one police gathering put it, “It is religion that makes the American people loyal to God and His commandments. Without religion ten times 10,000 policemen could not protect the city.”Footnote 78
A striking display of this particular form of police inclusion, as well as its potential limits, was on display in August 1917. A patrolman had been shot and killed by a burglar he had been chasing ten days before, and police leaders and patrolmen gathered at a church to commemorate their fallen comrade. The officer who was killed was Robert H. Holmes, the second African American police officer hired by the NYPD, and the first killed in the line of duty. Twenty thousand mourners lined the streets of Harlem. Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church held the funeral service, with police leadership and men from Holmes’s unit in attendance. The church’s pastor, Rev. A. R. Cooper, officiated. Cooper was assisted in his religious duties at this Christian funeral not by the Protestant or even the Catholic chaplains from the police department but by the Jewish Chaplain Blum.Footnote 79
Why the police department saw that its religious representative for the day, to assist a Black pastor leading a funeral in a Black church for a Black Christian officer, would be Jewish, was never made clear. Though institutional chaplains after the mid-twentieth century would increasingly envision themselves less as representatives of their own traditions who ministered to members of their own faith, this was not nearly as common in 1917, and certainly not in the NYPD chaplaincy. It was possible that the other chaplains were busy; another police funeral had taken place the night before, which a Catholic chaplain presided over. The other possibility was that Blum, as a representative of a minority faith that was perceived as racially ambiguous, was deemed the most appropriate representative for this non-white officer. Despite the recognition of Holmes’s heroism by police officials, African Americans still faced tremendous problems in their relationship with the NYPD. Accusations of brutality and racism were common and, despite the department’s recent hiring of a few Black officers (not nearly in proportion to the city’s Black population), promotions were nearly impossible. On that note, it seemed clear more generally where the other New York borough’s chaplains’ priorities were; according to newspaper accounts, a number of them had gathered for the white police detective’s funeral mass the night before at St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church (the detective had died of complications related to appendicitis).Footnote 80 Though Holmes had been killed in action, only Rabbi Blum was present at this Black officer’s funeral.
As with Catholic police, Jewish officers soon wanted more than a chaplain. In 1924, with the assistance of Rabbi Isidore Frank (who had taken over from Blum in 1922 as chaplain), Jewish NYPD members founded the Shomrim Society, a parallel to the Catholic officers’ Holy Name Society.Footnote 81 Its ultimate goal, according to a later interview with Frank, was “to promote a religious spirit among Jewish police,” with an eye toward “charity, Zionism, and … a deep interest in Jewish affairs.”Footnote 82 The first meeting saw 240 Jewish policemen join.Footnote 83
Shomrim Societies modeled on New York’s emerged in the following years across the country. Shomrim newsletters from the 1950s onward indicated a well-organized Society, with connections throughout the NYPD. Members in Shomrim found resources and motivation to seek promotion, and resultantly Society members were “superior officers in every high rank.” By 1964, one report stated that the Society had 2000 members, both active and retired (including both men and women), “all of whom have been ‘welded’ into a single unit, and respected by other denominations in and out of the PDNY.”Footnote 84
Though in the early twentieth century the NYPD commissioner had seen Jews as a source of criminality, by the mid-twentieth century there had been a profound shift. Through a chaplain and Shomrim, the presence of Jews in the NYPD was recognized and formalized, not only by the acknowledgment of the department authorities but also through the work of Jewish officers themselves. It was not simply that Jews could obey the law; they could enforce it. Other scholars have puzzled over the growing comfort of the NYPD with Jews, and vice versa, with economic pressures of the Great Depression cited as a reason why Jews entered the “classically Irish police force” in greater numbers.Footnote 85 The history of police chaplaincy and Shomrim shows, however, that more was at stake than simply finding a well-paying job. Long before the Depression, Jews were wrestling with the questions of law and order and were seeking out ways to exert their influence and find community among New York’s finest.
The first Protestant chaplains in the NYPD had their own challenges. Theirs was a complex situation: though Protestants were powerful in New York, they lacked the religious constituency of Catholics in terms of numbers of officers, and their own churches (via figures like the Presbyterian Rev. Parkhurst) had for years been antagonists of the police. Though exact numbers are hard to come by, in the 1930s it was reported that there were 13,500 Catholic officers compared to around 4000 Protestants. Likely the numbers were even more disparate in earlier decades. TIME reported that this division left Protestant officers “perennially suspicious” that Catholic police had an advantage in terms of salaries and promotions.Footnote 86
For decades, Protestant police chaplains were drawn from the ranks of New York’s Episcopal clergy. Exactly why police officials did not select chaplains from the city’s other Protestant denominations is unclear, though likely the high status of Episcopalians in the city played a part. Perhaps the educated clergy and structured polity and liturgy of Episcopalians were also appealing, in their similarity both to Catholicism and to the professionalizing police force (which had its own aims of training and regimentation). However, none of these reasons guaranteed that the rank-and-file would journey down the Canterbury trail. This was not for chaplains’ lack of trying, and they had some early successes. But the more Protestant chaplains attempted to involve themselves in the department, the more they found themselves embroiled in highly publicized controversies that complicated the relationship of Protestants to the NYPD.
The intertwined saga of two Episcopal chaplains, William Morrison and John Wade, is illustrative. Chaplain Morrison, rector of a church in Brooklyn, worked hard to endear himself to his police parishioners. A few months after his appointment in July 1911, he wrote a public letter, published in the Brooklyn Daily Times, to Mayor William J. Gaynor. There he wrote about a cause dear to his heart, one that stemmed from the promise he had made to police to “do what I could to defend their good name against statements reflecting unjustly on any officer.” Morrison had learned about an officer who had had an arrest he had made for highway robbery and assault dismissed by a magistrate in court. Morrison was incensed, and he told the mayor that this magistrate was “not only inconsiderate” but “has no sense of dignity for his office.” The chaplain urged the mayor to rectify the wrong done to the policeman. Mayor Gaynor refused to comment publicly, but the magistrate responded the next day. He contested Morrison’s understanding of the case, saying that he had dismissed the highway robbery charge but instead went forward with just an assault charge (which better fit the evidence of the case). “I have done my duty,” the magistrate wrote, “and I hope that an investigation will be made to show the public that those who have seen fit to publish letters before ascertaining the facts are doing grievous harm to those accused.”Footnote 87
A few weeks later, Morrison went public again, this time with a defense of a police captain who had stopped an illegal boxing match held at the Trinity Club in Brooklyn, connected to the Trinity Episcopal Church. Church members at the match were upset by police interference (as was the church’s pastor). But, for the Episcopal chaplain Morrison, his own allegiances were clear: the police captain had simply been following the law and doing his duty.Footnote 88
Morrison’s initial attempt to stand up for police had resulted in his rebuke, and his public silence afterward likely indicates that he saw that he had overreached on the matter. Similarly, the Trinity Club case had put him in an awkward spot with his own denomination. But Morrison had nevertheless gone on record as a defender of police officers, and this likely helped bolster his popularity among police and that of Protestantism in the department more generally.
A month later, Morrison held a memorial worship service at St. Ann’s Protestant Episcopal Church for officers from Brooklyn and Queens. The New York Times noted that it was the “first in a Protestant church,” and Morrison told newspapers that he had hoped it would be pleasing for the Protestants on the force who wanted to have a special service. Some 500 men showed up in uniform, as well as a number of high-ranking police officials. Morrison preached, praising the force and urging them to cultivate virtue in their service to society and to God.Footnote 89
Five years after the initial chaplain appointments, Protestants were emerging as a force to be reckoned with. But Protestant ministry to police was soon impaired by two public relations nightmares. In 1912, the Episcopal chaplain John A. Wade found his name printed on the front pages of newspapers nationwide for a rather embarrassing reason: he wanted to ride a horse in the police parade. The front page of The New York Times said Wade had been fired because he wanted to ride the horse but wanted the department to pay for its rental.Footnote 90 Other newspaper accounts seemed to indicate embarrassing self-absorption on Wade’s part, a stark contrast to the sacrificial work that policing entailed. “My kingdom for a horse,” the Brooklyn Citizen teased.Footnote 91
According to Wade, the horse story was a lie and the truth more disturbing. He said he was, in fact, a “good equestrian” and did “not need to practice riding, and never asked for a police horse.” The real reason for his dismissal, Wade argued in a letter published in city papers, was that the commissioner wanted to curry favor with the city’s Catholic voters in his goal to become mayor. Only having the Catholic chaplain march in the police parade would be a powerful signal to that end (and, he argued, that was why the Jewish chaplain did not march in the parade either).Footnote 92 According to Wade, his larger problem with lack of popularity among officers was less about his own ministerial skill and had more to do with his marginalization by police administration, who he claimed were withholding ministry opportunities among officers.Footnote 93
Wade’s accusations seem plausible. But his personality may also have also had something to do with the conflict. Like Morrison, he had a knack for speaking his mind, even being critical of the institutions he found himself working in. Unlike Morrison, he even had a surprising critical edge when it came to institutions of American criminal justice more broadly. Wade served as a chaplain in the penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island, and though his 1907–8 annual report spoke positively of the wardens, it also excoriated the conditions of the facility and the prison system more generally (“it is grossly, foully wrong and a burning disgrace to our civilization”). The next year he blasted criminal defense in the city, singling out the corruption of lawyers who took large sums of money and offered little to no help to their clients. The battle with the police commissioner was in keeping with Wade’s critical spirit.Footnote 94
Since Wade was out, Chaplain Morrison took over his duties on the force as Protestant representative (with newspapers noting that Morrison was better connected to Mayor William Gaynor, perhaps implying that he was more politically savvy).Footnote 95 However, Morrison soon found himself embroiled in trouble once again. His own seemingly close relationship with the mayor spiraled out of control when Gaynor accused Morrison of inappropriately using his name in a letter (related to some work Morrison had done in his other professional role as secretary of the city Board of Inebriety). Morrison denied the accusation, and suggested he might pursue libel charges and even give up his secretary and chaplaincy roles.Footnote 96 His actions over the next few days were erratic. He showed up at city government office to make demands for investigations of the mayor and to deliver a confusing array of materials to reporters and officials that he claimed proved his innocence. Newspaper reports had trouble following the controversy, primarily because of Morrison’s unpredictable statements and behavior, but they printed a number of stories that chronicled Morrison’s diatribes about being the victim of a “conspiracy.”Footnote 97 The saga ended when Morrison showed up at the mayor’s office and threatened suicide, while also blaming evil spirits that were tormenting him; he was arrested and taken to the hospital for observation. He was committed to a sanatorium for treatment; once pronounced cured of “nervous trouble,” he embarked on a trip to Europe. Morrison would die in Ireland in 1915.Footnote 98
Eventually, things began to change for Protestants in the NYPD for the better. In April of 1922, A. Hamilton Nesbitt, pastor of a Methodist church in the Bronx, was appointed chaplain by Commissioner Enright.Footnote 99 A few months later, Nesbitt went public with a plea to the mayor for the raising of police and firemen’s salaries. He hailed the character of these public servants as deserving of more financial support, a move that no doubt endeared him to his uniformed parishioners.Footnote 100 Nesbitt was active in civic organizations that had police members (including the Police Square Club), and rubbing shoulders with officers likely further bolstered his credibility.Footnote 101
Chaplain Nesbitt was also a popular force in the NYPD because of his tough personality, which seemed of different mold from that of the Episcopalians who had previously occupied the Protestant position. He was born in Ireland (similar to many of the Catholic officers and a few chaplains, a fact that newspapers liked to point out), emigrated to America at the age of twenty-three, and attributed his fighting spirit to this background (the fact he was a former footballer and wrestler also likely helped). He opposed Prohibition and was called the “fighting Protestant” not only for his vocal advocacy of “muscular Christianity” but also for his willingness to use brute force when dealing with problematic opponents, even a “sock on the jaw” if needed. He would physically clear streets of delinquents who were bothering passersby and would challenge street gangs to fight. His approach: take out the leader. “Hit them first if they want trouble … the biggest man, the hero of a gang always swaggers forward. Hit him, and when the leader is down your gang is defeated.” “Unlike some of his colleagues,” one newspaper noted, “there is as much policeman as chaplain in him … Too many bravos and gang leaders have felt the hard Irish knuckles of the Rev. A. Hamilton Nesbitt.” For Nesbitt, this was ultimately a way to win the respect of ruffians and to better connect with them: “the way to a bad man’s heart is through his jaw.” Nesbitt could also advocate for lawbreaking youth, once appearing before a magistrate to (successfully) ask for leniency for a young truck driver’s reckless driving charge (on account that he provided for his mother and siblings). This was the kind of tough, community-focused religious presence that New Yorkers wanted. It was no wonder that, in 1946, TIME magazine opened their lengthy profile with “He looks like a Roman Catholic priest after Hollywood’s heart.” He was the “Methodist Nesbitt” but “With Catholic methods.”Footnote 102
But Nesbitt was indeed a good Methodist and, as he looked at Catholic police guilds, he saw potential for Protestants. The Holy Name Society was his model, and in 1937 he gathered 500 Protestants and formed the St. George Association. By 1946, the Association boasted 3000 police members, with twenty-three chapters across the cities, and had expanded to include other municipal government workers, from firemen to post office employees (all told, TIME reported, there were 20,000 members, with aspirations to expand nationally).Footnote 103
Nesbitt also indicated that he was more willing to foster ecumenical connections than Protestant predecessors. Once, when he arrived at the scene of a car accident, he learned that the dying driver was Catholic. Nesbitt raced to the local Catholic church, found a priest, and then sped with him in tow to overtake the ambulance, whereupon the priest was able to administer last rites.Footnote 104 Similarly, in a sermon reprinted in the Catholic Advance, Chaplain Nesbitt told a story of how he and Jewish chaplain Isidore Frank arrived at St. Vincent’s hospital to visit their gravely ill Catholic chaplain colleague John J. Coogan. Upon entering his room, they saw that Coogan was near death, but they also saw family members, another priest, and two nuns, all of whom were saying prayers for the dying man. Feeling a bit out of place in this Catholic environment, Nesbitt and Frank backed out of the room. But they were invited back in by a sister: “You come and pray with us.” So, Nesbitt recounted, “the Jewish rabbi and the Protestant preacher knelt by the side of Father Duffy and merged their prayers with those of the Catholic priest for their dying fellow chaplain.” Later Nesbitt and Frank would join with other Catholic chaplains in the funeral procession for Coogan, through 42nd Street and up 5th Avenue. For Nesbitt, this was clear evidence that the NYPD had achieved its ecumenical potential and had conquered the spirit of nativist division. “No,” he concluded his sermon, with a reference to surging contemporary nativist movements, “there is no Ku Klux Klanism in the New York police department.”Footnote 105
However, Nesbitt was also the subject of controversy. In 1924, the same year as his interreligious prayer, a large funeral procession for deceased Black World War I veteran Samuel Ovington, who served in the 369th Infantry (a famed Black division), wound its way through the city. Chaplain Nesbitt, who was not attending the funeral, attempted to drive his car through the funeral line. A Black veteran tried to stop the car and Nesbitt shouted a slur at him, “Get off this car, you n—!” The veteran “replied in kind,” according to one newspaper report, though no physical harm or threat was recorded by observers. Nevertheless, Nesbitt drove to regimental headquarters, reported the incident, and requested investigation. Col. Arthur Little, a white leader in the division, wrote an apologetic letter to Nesbitt concerning the “unpleasant and disgraceful scene in which you were the victim.” The apology was extremely contrite, with Col. Little expressing “his sympathy and regret for the injury you must have suffered in your feelings … permit me to offer to you my compliments and admiration for the dignity of the self-possession in which you suffered them.”Footnote 106
These two incidents were emblematic. Overt religious tensions had lessened, and Protestants, Catholics, and Jews eventually all found their place in the NYPD. In this way, Nesbitt’s interfaith prayer was telling; religious nativism increasingly seemed to be a sin of the distant past. Religion had found its way into the NYPD, along the lines of an ecumenical tri-faith America. To be sure, it was a cooperation that depended upon Protestant presence and narration. But it was still a moment of fellowship that showcased a new religious reality.Footnote 107 Now, there was another dividing line, one indicated by Nesbitt’s racial slur and targeting of a Black veteran (and hinted at in the lack of Christian chaplaincy participation in the memorial service for Black patrolman Robert H. Holmes). That line was race. In sum, police religion, at this transformative moment for law enforcement in the early twentieth century, was envisioned as white.
Though there were numerous Black churches and religious movements present in New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was no recorded attempt by the NYPD to seek out religious guidance from Black clergy. This reflected the racial divides of the department (in its reluctance to hire Black officers) but also the fraught relationship the NYPD had with New York’s Black communities more generally. It was not until 1939, amid a regime of “racial liberalism” instituted by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, that Rev. John Howard Johnson, the first Black police chaplain (also an Episcopalian), would be appointed.Footnote 108 Here, a new era of the NYPD’s religious history, and the history of policing more broadly, would begin. This would be the early stages of a “colorblind” era of law enforcement, where Black officers and clergy alike would find their place in the NYPD. Policing increasingly became a means of securing a new liberal political and social order, one that was non-partisan and yet emphasized a constructive role for state involvement in the lives of citizens. This meant, as Emily Brooks has shown, expanded police power: “a large, aggressive, nonpartisan police department was an essential component of municipal order and safety.” With regard to racial minorities, especially Black New Yorkers, La Guardia worked to address representation, adding Black police and city government officials. But little was done in the way of the larger social structural obstacles that Black New Yorkers faced, and little was done to address the predisposition of police and white New Yorkers more broadly to view Black residents as criminal. Within this framework, police leaders stressed non-political service to citizens, but were given free range to police Black neighborhoods with aggressive tactics.Footnote 109 Johnson’s elevation to chaplain was a sign of a new openness to racial inclusion alongside the tri-faith ecumenism of the past generation. But classic problems plaguing American policing remained.
Conclusion
Chaplaincy in the NYPD was birthed in political calculation and turmoil. It was a role that aimed to smooth over simmering conflicts, build rapport with slighted communities, and showcase the department’s willingness to reform. It was a bumpy road along the way, to be sure, especially as chaplains like Wade and Morrison chafed at the various restraints placed upon them. But, in a sense, their eclipse proved the point: while chaplains were supposed to reform the wayward, those who were not useful for the department’s designs could be discarded. By the 1930s, chaplains were part of the police establishment, and religion in police departments was a given. Police chaplains were no longer a joke, as Rev. Parkhurst had incorrectly contended. But perhaps that was the problem. His joke initially landed because his particular brand of reformist religion had previously been seen as incommensurate with the rough and tumble of urban policing. Now, through chaplaincy, religion had found a permanent place among the boys in blue.
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