Chapter 7

Acceptance, Resistance, Flight

The setting is the living room of a large Victorian-era house in Brooklyn, the home of two aging spinsters, Martha and Abby Brewster, and their middle-aged nephew who believes he is Teddy Roosevelt. The Brewster sisters cling to an old-fashioned gentility and a sense of charitable responsibility that happens to include dispatching lonely old Protestant men to a better world. Their method is a glass of Martha’s elderberry wine, the recipe for which includes a teaspoon of arsenic, half a teaspoon of strychnine, and a pinch of cyanide. The men are buried in the cellar (their graves dug by Teddy, who believes he is digging locks for the Panama Canal and interring yellow fever victims), with the Brewster sisters conducting funeral services appropriate to each gentleman’s Protestant denomination. The play is Arsenic and Old Lace, Joseph Kesselring’s Broadway hit comedy of the early 1940s.

The Brewsters are an old Brooklyn family with New England roots extending back to the Mayflower. Their home is next door to an Episcopal church, and the play opens with the sisters serving tea to its vicar, the Rev. Dr. Harper, whose daughter Elaine is the love interest of Mortimer Brewster, a newspaper theater critic and another of the sisters’ nephews. Rev. Harper is comfortable in the Brewster house, which has hardly changed since Grandfather Brewster built it, except for the electricity the sisters seldom use. But he is troubled by Mortimer’s “unfortunate connection with the theatre.” He would be even more troubled if he understood his daughter’s preference for plays over prayer meetings and her delight in a romance that promises release from life in the vicarage.

The opening scene is simple enough, despite Teddy’s loud bugle-blowing as he charges up San Juan Hill (the staircase). The real farce begins when Mortimer discovers a corpse under the large window seat and learns that this Mr. Hoskins, a Methodist, will soon join eleven other recipients of the sisters’ charitable work. The farce accelerates with the arrival of Jonathan, a third nephew who has spent many years in an Indiana prison from which he has recently escaped. Jonathan is accompanied by Dr. Herman Einstein and a lifeless Mr. Spenalzo, the latest of Jonathan’s own murder victims. Dr. Einstein’s role is to perform plastic surgery on Jonathan’s face to help him evade capture by the police. At present, he resembles Boris Karloff (who, in a lovely touch, played Jonathan in the original Broadway production). Jonathan and Dr. Einstein plan to smuggle Mr. Spenalzo into the grave intended for Mr. Hoskins. The sisters discover the plan and refuse to allow it. To Abby, “It’s a terrible thing to do—to bury a good Methodist with a foreigner.” Martha “will not have our cellar desecrated!”

After a good deal more coming and going Jonathan is arrested, Dr. Einstein flees, Mortimer and Elaine get engaged, and Teddy and his aunts are committed to the Happy Dale Sanitarium. Teddy thinks going there is “bully,” and the sisters are happy as well, because “the neighborhood here has changed so.” When Mr. Witherspoon, who runs the sanitarium, comes to collect them and the sisters discover that the elderly gentleman is a Protestant with no family, they offer him a glass of elderberry wine. The curtain falls as he raises the glass to his lips.

The Brewster sisters and Teddy belong to a world that no longer exists; their inability to inhabit any other drives the comedy of Arsenic and Old Lace. But the sisters’ murderous program and the antics of their deluded nephew amount also to the decidedly less comic “race suicide” that the real Theodore Roosevelt often warned against as he observed the “invasion” of Eastern and Southern European immigrants into places like Brooklyn, New York. Neither the spinsters nor Teddy nor Jonathan will leave behind any children. In a plot device borrowed from traditional melodrama Mortimer learns he is the bastard child of a family housekeeper who died in childbirth and is unburdened of the Brewsters’ tainted genes, just as he and Elaine escape the stultifying inheritance of Brooklyn’s Puritan past. Mortimer and Elaine will go to the theater as often as they like. They exit with a strong hint that they are going to bed together. Race suicide is not on their agenda.¹

New York audiences no doubt delighted in the Manhattan-born Kesselring’s send-up of a once-pretentious “moral suburb” made considerably less imposing—even ridiculous—by the Spenalzos and Einsteins who by then vastly outnumbered the Brewsters and Harpers among its people. Some years before writing Arsenic and Old Lace Kesselring lived in an old house much like the one described in his script while teaching at Bethel College in Kansas. A Moravian college in a small Kansas town would have made a good setting for Arsenic and Old Lace. But to Kesselring it could only have been set in Brooklyn.

We have uncovered no evidence of spinsters murdering old Protestant men in the real world of early twentieth-century Brooklyn. But we have discovered many responses by Protestants to a Brooklyn that was profoundly different from the city their fathers, mothers, and spinster aunts inhabited only a generation earlier. One of these responses, as we have seen in the settlement houses and some Americanization programs, was an acceptance of Brooklyn’s ethnic diversity and a willingness to help smooth immigrants’ transition to life in America with some appreciation for their cultural traditions.

That appreciation was by no means universal, but it could be forcefully expressed, even as an imperative of the Protestantism the immigrants threatened to displace. Maude White Hardie, an active Methodist and self-published poet and essayist, wrote of the need to embrace a Brooklyn transformed by immigration since her turn-of-the-century childhood in Stuyvesant Heights. A poem titled “My Country Is the World” concludes: “And all men are my kin / Since every man has been / Blood of my blood; / I glory in the grace / And strength of every trace / Of brotherhood.” And a passage in a “Choral Reading” titled “You Are My City, Brooklyn” proclaims: “You have been called the City of Churches, Brooklyn. May you earn the right to bear that title again. Catholic—Protestant—Jew—each and in his own way worshipping and serving the same God.” The chorus responds: “It is knowing the Fatherhood of God, / And practicing the Brotherhood of Man, / That makes a city great.”²

It is impossible to know how many Maude White Hardies resided in Brooklyn during the years of the New Immigration, or how many of her fellow Methodists endorsed her pious and inclusive “Choral Reading.” We assume there were more than a few, just as there were some old Brooklynites whose acceptance was based on a very different motive. Fueled mainly from the flow of foreign immigrants across the East River, Brooklyn’s population growth generated business opportunities, especially in the development and sale of real estate in the outlying former Kings County towns. In 1879, as the New Immigration was beginning to take shape, there were 409 farms in Kings County; by 1924, the year that immigration was all but shut down, the number had been reduced to 40.³ As Brooklyn’s rural landscape suburbanized, many property sales in Flatbush, Flatlands, New Utrecht, and other places involved older Brooklynites and immigrant speculators, developers, and prospective homeowners. The tenor of these transactions may have been friendly, chilly, or without affect, but clearly, as Jews and other immigrants found their way to the new suburbs, native landowners and real estate brokers profited from dealing with them. In quite different ways the owners of factories and refineries in Greenpoint and Williamsburg benefited from paying low wages to Polish, Hungarian, and Lithuanian workers. Contempt and resentment more than occasionally defined relationships between employers and employees, but the diversity of Brooklyn gave businessmen, most of them still Protestants, good reason to accept and even be grateful for the presence of so many people unlike themselves.

The reverse side of acceptance was a grudging resignation to a force that could not be controlled. Immigrants were arriving in an endless, seemingly unstoppable stream, and Brooklyn would never be the same. Even the full-throated embrace of immigrants by the likes of Maude White Hardie was tinged with nostalgia for a world that validated the mores of a once-dominant Yankee Protestantism. This nostalgia is evident in Yesterdays on Brooklyn Heights (1927), not only in James H. Callender’s recollections of a “bountiful hospitality and never-failing generosity” among like-minded (and uniformly Protestant and well-to-do) neighbors on the Heights, but also in those of friends and acquaintances who contributed to his book. Mrs. Thomas B. Hewitt, for example, celebrated the “beautiful refinement” of people living in “splendid homes,” and recalled hearing the claim of her pastor, the Rev. Charles Cuthbert Hall of the First Presbyterian Church, that “Brooklyn Heights had produced a splendid race of men and women.” Callender himself quotes Rev. Hall lauding the Heights for “the simple customs of New England finely blended with the flavor of European influence,” and for “the prevalence of broad-minded Christian sentiments.” Jessie Stillman remembered post-church promenades across the Heights when “cordiality was never warmer,” but emphasized as “the most important fact of all, … the existence in our community of so many churches, presided over by men who were real intellectual giants, … Richard S. Storrs, Henry Ward Beecher, Charles Cuthbert Hall, Chauncy Brewster, Dr. van Dyke and Mason Clarke. It seems to be an influence which many of us must regard as the most stabilizing of our lives, and I shall never cease to be thankful that I was brought up in the ‘City of Churches.’ ”

The Brooklyn Heights these older residents remembered was a comfortably homogeneous social world. It was also a world that was lost, and the forces of change were not hard to locate. Callender blamed “the influx of alien influences,” and Martha W. Olcott the apartment houses that replaced old and elegant single-family homes. An unidentified contributor stated it best: “Houses have gone, homes have gone, friends have gone, and today we of the silvering locks feel at times like pelicans in the wilderness of a new age, of which the delicatessen store and the three-room apartment are signs and symbols.”⁴

This same sense of loss was expressed in organizations formed to celebrate and in some ways perpetuate the old way of life, and in frequent retrospective articles on Brooklyn in the Eagle and Brooklyn Life. The Society of Old Brooklynites and a revived New England Society of the City of Brooklyn, both dating from 1880, survive into the twenty-first century (though with a less nostalgic mission than that of their founders). They were joined by other organizations, such as the Brooklyn branch of the National Society of New England Women, which was founded in 1905. This was part of a larger movement, but its president, Mrs. Stuart Hull Moore, gave the new organization a distinctly local rationale: “Brooklyn has in a measure lost her identity, and is just emerging to a new life, and is in a critical condition. Her position is difficult to define. Her prestige as the City of Churches has waned.” That lost identity could and must be reclaimed, she argued, through good works driven by “the spirit and truth and ideals inherited from our New England ancestry to which we proudly point.”⁵

This sentiment went beyond the evocation of the good old days of Yankee cultural domination in Brooklyn. It was a battle cry to restore that domination, although by the phrase “good works” Mrs. Moore might have meant a different form of Protestantism, the charitable and social reform initiatives generally subsumed under the term “Social Gospel,” rather than the more Calvinist strictures of her Yankee predecessors. Nonetheless, her intent to reestablish the old Yankee presence in Brooklyn was unmistakable.

The same mixture of nostalgia and resistance was expressed at meetings of other organizations, even the seemingly apolitical Society of Old Brooklynites, which in 1924 (with the Ku Klux Klan revival at its height) heard Frederick Boyd Stevenson argue for sturdy maintenance of “the supremacy of the Nordic races.”⁶ A report on the fiftieth-anniversary dinner of the New England Society lamented that Brooklyn as the “Gibralter of New England” had crumbled away, while “dominance has passed to racial groups hardly of considerable importance in 1880.”⁷ In these speeches and editorializing the sweetness of nostalgia receded before a sometimes bitter concern for what Brooklyn had become.

Nostalgia among the Dutch was generally less infused with messaging of this sort, perhaps because it more often took the form of festivals celebrating olden times, before New Englanders had largely displaced them, and where the proper costuming of children was more pressing than the remarks of after-dinner speakers. A 1908 celebration of the Dutch settlement of Flatbush (which included events in “the little village of Bruekelen”) was a great success, except for the painful wearing of old-fashioned wooden shoes by the women. In the following year the massive two-week Hudson-Fulton Celebration featured two parades on Eastern Parkway honoring Henry Hudson and old New Netherland.⁸ The Dutch were active in other historical pageants and formed a Kings County Historical Society in 1911, not to help regain long-lost influence but to preserve old Flatbush farmhouses threatened by suburban development. The list of members was dominated by the most prominent Brooklyn Dutch families—Bergen, Ditmas, Kouwenhoven, Lefferts, Van Brunt, Van Wyck—but was not exclusively Dutch. The Irish industrialist Charles M. Higgins was on it, as were two Jews, Louis L. Levine and Robert W. May.⁹

Nostalgia was a staple of the Brooklyn press during these years. In the Eagle, stories about Brooklyn’s past took various forms, including childhood reminiscences (the dreary Puritan Sundays of one correspondent were relieved by ringing doorbells, tipping over ash barrels, and breaking windows), descriptions of old Brooklyn institutions, and photographs of old homesteads, downtown buildings, even in one instance two policemen (“How Cops Looked Back in 1869”).¹⁰ The year 1930 was particularly rich in Brooklyn nostalgia. Articles on the arrival of the Low and Lefferts families, 101 and 270 years earlier, harbingered a series of “Stories of Old Brooklyn” by Maurice E. McLoughlin.¹¹ Brooklyn Life concentrated most of its reminiscences into the unusually long issue of June 1, 1915, with several articles, including Samuel B. Moore’s “Brooklyn—Past and Present,” which occupies more than forty richly illustrated pages. “The modern metamorphosis!,” Moore began. “Compare the Brooklyn of 1890 with the Brooklyn of 1915. A mere quarter of a century and scarce a vestige is left” of the unique qualities of the old, preconsolidation city. Moore makes scant reference to the arrival of New Immigrants and does not discuss the decline of Yankee influence. This topic was left to Edward Hungerford’s, “Across the East River,” which dwells briefly on the creation by New Englanders of churches, schools, and a society of remarkably high quality before concluding that Yankee Brooklyn is in its last days: “The New England strain of Americanism in Brooklyn is dying.” Despite this tone of regret Hungerford ends on a surprisingly positive note. The immigrants are a significant problem and the Yankees will not solve it; yet the transformation of Brooklyn will be for the good, with “the fusing of her hundreds of thousands of foreign-born into first-rate Americans.”¹²

Resistant native white Brooklynites did more than reminisce or complain. Some of those most deeply concerned over the increasing diversity of Brooklyn’s population took actions designed to preserve ethnically homogeneous, upper- and middle-class residential enclaves from encroachment by unwanted people. This “circle the wagons” strategy took several forms, including restrictive covenants in residential deeds, defensive practices by real estate agents, the formation of neighborhood associations, and the promotion of residential zoning intended to regulate the construction of apartment houses and other multi-family dwellings. In 1916 the Prospect Park South Association and the Ditmas Park Association petitioned the Commission on Building Districts and Restrictions to be placed in the commission’s Zone E, which made the construction of apartment houses economically unfeasible in most instances. The commission approved these petitions and four others as well—all from developing Flatbush neighborhoods—on the grounds that a large majority of property owners supported them.¹³ South Midwood was one of the rezoned neighborhoods, and the minutes of the South Midwood Residents’ Association include the achievement of an additional and long-sought zoning change preventing the construction of two-family houses on a major street running through this small neighborhood. They include as well a complaint by one of the members that the prospective opening of a beauty parlor violated both the zoning law and the property owner’s restrictive covenant.¹⁴

The neighborhood associations whose records survive did not spend much time on efforts to exclude identified subgroups of Brooklyn’s population but focused instead on promoting public amenities such as faster transportation, street paving, lighting, sewerage, school construction, and playgrounds, and on fostering warmer personal relations in what were often new neighborhoods. Their lists of officers, even in neighborhoods where Protestants were dominant, generally included several Irish and German and one or two Jewish or Italian names. Appointed to the executive committee of the Flatbush Taxpayers’ Association, Gregory Weinstein was a popular speaker at its annual dinners, causing “some merriment” at the 1909 affair by offering a resolution to rename the new East River bridge after Flatbush rather than Manhattan.¹⁵

But apart from the attacks on multiple-family dwellings, which were clearly understood as methods for excluding people of the wrong class, race, or ethnicity, a deep social prejudice occasionally broke into the otherwise progressive record. In a typescript incorporated into the 1910 minutes of the Flatbush Taxpayers’ Association, president John J. Snyder supported the public school system as “one of the great protections against the demoralizing influence of undesirable emigrants or the shifting to this section of the City, of inhabitants of the congested districts of Manhattan, saturated with ignorance, bigotry [!] and superstitions.”¹⁶ Fourteen years later, Lawson H. Brown of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce advised the Independent Civic Association of Sheepshead Bay to treat immigrants “in the same friendly way as we do our native born neighbors.” Noting an obvious ethnic diversity in his audience, Brown was happy to conclude that this was not a pressing problem in Sheepshead Bay. However: “In other parts of the city it is.”¹⁷

It certainly was in Gates Avenue and other areas in and near Clinton Hill, although in this more central district of Brooklyn the issue was not white ethnicity but race. The Gates Avenue Association dealt with subway service and street traffic, but its deepest concern by far was the possible “colored invasion” from adjacent Bedford (soon to be more commonly known as Bedford-Stuyvesant), where a number of African American families had settled. According to its minutes, the association spent most of its time trying to find ways to prevent Black people from moving into the neighborhood or taking ownership of two nearby churches that were on the market. At least three other associations in the area were consulted, as were real estate agents, who recommended care in placing local properties in the hands of “reliable” dealers. The churches were secured for white congregations through unreported means.¹⁸

Acting individually or through neighborhood associations, native white property owners largely succeeded in keeping African Americans out of their neighborhoods, but were far less successful in excluding white ethnics. Brooklyn’s Jews, Italians, and other New Immigrants greatly outnumbered African Americans, and their accumulation of wealth was achieved in the face of significantly less powerful prejudices than those faced by Black people. Despite zoning restrictions in many neighborhoods, apartment houses were built in large numbers in Brooklyn, generally on commercial avenues or the first residential streets behind them, and blocks of two-family homes (but generally not the three-family “father-son-holy ghost” houses common in New England) dominated in parts of Bedford, Bushwick, and other districts.¹⁹ Eastern and Southern European immigrants moved into these places and into many single-family homes all over the borough, suggesting that individual restrictive covenants were perhaps not as common or as rigidly enforced as many supposed. An Eagle article published in 1907 described Flatbush as “the section of ideal homes,” where, by law, “houses are detached; and lawns, as well as open spaces about residences, are compulsory.” In contrast to other sections of the city, particularly in Manhattan, “where ‘race suicide’ is encouraged and enforced” by building laws and economic conditions, Flatbush is a fifteen- or twenty-square-mile perpetuation of Brooklyn’s long-held suburban ideal.²⁰ Yet, within a half-dozen years, and increasingly in the years following, that ideal was modified to accommodate apartment houses, two-family homes, and new neighbors who raised the specter of “race suicide” among at least some of the remaining white Anglo-Dutch Protestants. Obviously, not everyone fretted equally about Flatbush’s growing diversity. The wagons had been imperfectly circled.

Going beyond these defensive neighborhood-based strategies were attacks by some of Brooklyn’s native Protestants on behalf of the old Yankee moral agenda—Sabbath observance; the preservation of Christianity in public schools; temperance (expanded now, as in the nation as a whole, into a campaign for an outright prohibition on drinking); and opposition to the theater (and now movies), gambling, and other amusements. At first glance, the vigor of these attacks seems to contradict claims of diminishing Yankee influence, but a closer look reveals the more challenging circumstances facing a new generation of enforcers. The size of the Yankee army was much reduced, and there were more diverse opinions within the evangelical Protestant community as to how—and whether—to pursue the old agenda. Some now spoke in the less severe tones of the Social Gospel, while a number of Protestant leaders coped with declining church attendance by focusing on sociability, entertainment (including church-sponsored theater!), and a more pleasant church-going experience.²¹ Others adhered to older doctrines of salvation and religious feeling, but—especially in response to the horrors of World War I and the unsettling demands of postwar urban modernism—used these doctrines and emotions to cultivate a more inward-looking spirituality. Still others looked beyond their immediate church communities to larger organizations such as the YMCA, the Salvation Army, national tract and Bible societies, and inter-denominational faith organizations, a type of activism that was not always designed to perpetuate the traditional Yankee crusade to impose behavioral strictures on the public at large.

One who did perpetuate that crusade was Canon William Sheafe Chase of Brooklyn’s Christ Episcopal Church. Born in Yankee-dominated northern Illinois, Canon Chase was educated at schools in Providence, Rhode Island (including Brown University), and the Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was an assistant pastor in Boston before assuming his first pastorate in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.²² His Yankee credentials, in sum, were as solid as any of the New England clergy who preceded him to Brooklyn. Chase did not lack allies and his was not always the strongest voice, but his visibility and prominence in so many areas reflected the reality that the broader and more unified evangelical base of the nineteenth century was missing from the new Brooklyn.

Protestant moral crusaders such as Chase needed to choose the right field of battle. Consolidation had removed the Brooklyn Common Council, and Chase and his friends often lacked sufficient support within the New York City Board of Aldermen sitting in Manhattan. They had more success outside the city, in Albany, where conservative (mainly Protestant) upstate legislators were dominant, and at times in Washington, when still larger forces aligned with their agenda. The enforcers succeeded on several of these fronts, but especially since they had gone far afield to do so doubts remained about how their reforms would be implemented in Brooklyn, and how long they would remain in effect. The moral crusade, in sum, was not as much a manifestation of local power—akin to the program of Yankee clergy and laymen of the nineteenth century—as it was a rear-guard protest against the loss of that power by a small number of people determined to wield it in the manner of their predecessors.

One battle that remained mostly if not entirely local involved religion in the public schools. Against Jewish objections to Christian daily prayers, Christmas carols, and other such elements of the school day and calendar, the Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis and other Protestant ministers invoked the widely held belief among Brooklyn’s Protestants that these practices were appropriate in the public institutions of a republic founded by Christian men and intended to be a Christian nation.²³ Around the turn of the century this dispute was joined to another that evoked substantial Protestant support—the closing of public schools during the celebration of Brooklyn’s much-cherished Anniversary Day. The issue arose shortly after the consolidation of the boroughs. New York City’s new charter called for the distribution of public school funds according to the number of days schools were open during the year. As Anniversary Day was unique to Brooklyn the loss of one day, or even half a day, would cost its schools a portion of their allocation.²⁴ This might have been a small matter, but it evolved quickly into an issue of religious privilege.

As in previous years, the celebration excluded Catholics, Jews, and non-evangelical Protestants such as Unitarians and Universalists. Should their children be required to stay home on behalf of a tradition of the evangelical community? In 1902 the school board ordered the Brooklyn schools to remain open on Anniversary Day, but after a barrage of protests from evangelicals reversed itself and ordered them closed. Three years later the state legislature, no doubt after some lobbying, declared the day a legal holiday in Brooklyn.²⁵ The issue flared up again in 1910 when the schools kept the children in session to take examinations after an agreed-upon noon closing, but was settled the following year when the schools were closed and President William Howard Taft reviewed a parade of one hundred fifty thousand Sunday school children. “Hello, Bill,” one little boy called out from within the parade. When the President responded with a smile and a chuckle the emboldened marcher continued, “My name’s Bill, too!”²⁶

Bookmakers and racetrack gamblers were not likely to greet William Sheafe Chase with a friendly “Hello, Bill.” Canon Chase was not active in the preservation of Christianity in the public schools or in the fight for Anniversary Day, but he was a long-standing opponent of racetrack gambling. New York State laws prohibited betting on horse races as early as the 1870s (even before Brooklyn’s three tracks opened), but gamblers, professional and amateur alike, found ways around them. In 1907, however, the attack became more serious, with the introduction of new legislation and hearings that included testimony from Chase that the racetracks were “legalized colleges of gambling.”²⁷ The legislation failed at first, but the active participation of Governor Charles Evans Hughes turned the tide. In June 1908 betting on horse races either at or away from the racetrack became a criminal offense in New York. The focus of the law was not on racing itself or on casual wagering among individuals, who could still bet as long as no paper record was created and no cash changed hands. But this was a small concession and the widespread awareness that large numbers of plainclothes policemen patrolled tracks to enforce the new law constituted a significant deterrent.

New laws in 1910 not only forbade oral betting but held the directors of the clubs that owned the tracks criminally responsible for illegal betting on their premises. That was the deathblow to horseracing in Brooklyn. The Brighton Beach track had closed in 1908; by September 1910 the Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay tracks shut down as well. The restrictive gambling laws were overturned in 1913, but the Brooklyn tracks did not reopen for horseracing. The Sheepshead Bay track hosted automobile racing for a time, but eventually all three tracks were demolished. The land on which they stood was sold to residential real estate developers.²⁸

The laws that led to the closing of racetracks were seen as victories for Brooklyn’s church leaders and the borough’s Puritan traditions. Canon Chase at legislative hearings in Albany, and others closer to home in their churches and church clubs, were clearly part of the attack on gambling. In March 1908 a meeting of the men’s clubs of Brooklyn’s Eastern District Protestant churches was called in support of Governor Hughes’ anti-gambling legislation. A thousand men heard Canon Chase and Reverend Samuel Parkes Cadman give speeches in support of the bill. Two months later a Brooklyn Citizens’ Anti-Race Track Gambling Committee arranged for simultaneous Sunday meetings in eighteen Protestant churches, including Plymouth Church (but oddly, not Chase’s Christ Church or Cadman’s Central Congregational Church).²⁹ Little wonder, then, that the Eagle, which opposed the new laws, grumbled that they “breathe a spirit of intolerance recalling the time when those who whistled on the Sabbath did so at their own peril.”³⁰

But nearly all contemporary reports on this anti-gambling crusade stressed the pivotal role of Governor Hughes. Hughes was an active Baptist and had lived in Brooklyn during part of his childhood, but he had no connection to Yankee Brooklyn. There is no indication that in framing and pushing through the legislation the governor consulted with or relied on Chase, Cadman, or any other local ministers, nor that the outcome turned on local mass meetings of churches and church clubs. Brooklyn’s Protestants may have offered support in various ways, but this was a civic movement, achieved mainly in Albany, a hundred and fifty miles from Brooklyn’s borders.

While the three horseracing tracks in Brooklyn lay almost a stone’s throw from each other at the southern edge of the borough, baseball was everywhere. And while horseracing was tightly controlled by the wealthy men who owned the tracks (and horses) and was brought to life by a professional cadre of trainers, jockeys, and stable hands, baseball ran the gamut from professional, semiprofessional, and amateur leagues and clubs to pick-up games of young men and boys in open lots and on city streets. Baseball could be played on any day of the week, but it was on Sunday that the largest number of players and fans were free to enjoy a ball game on a sunny summer afternoon. The pious, peaceful, and noncommercial Sabbath was a cornerstone of Brooklyn’s Yankee Protestantism. Sunday baseball threatened that Sabbath.

Sabbatarian sentiment had changed since the days when frivolities of any kind were prohibited by custom and by law. Most Brooklyn Protestants no longer saw playing ball on a Sunday afternoon (preferably after a morning spent in church) as a sin, not least because so many of them amused themselves on that day with golf, tennis, yachting, automobile excursions, and other secular pleasures. Sabbatarians focused instead on two other issues—whether a particular game disturbed the prayerful repose of other people, and whether it violated prohibitions against inessential Sunday commercial activity by charging an admission fee.

The first concern focused mostly on amateur baseball and casual pick-up games. Occasional complaints were made about the noise of the games, the profanity of the players, and balls hit into lawns and through windows. A Mrs. Mary Gilbert was sewing by the dining room window of her “handsome house” in Sheepshead Bay on a May afternoon in 1905 when a baseball crashed through the window and hit her under the eye. At the other end of Brooklyn the Rev. P. F. O’Hare of Greenpoint’s St. Anthony’s Church complained about gambling accompanying a game on a nearby vacant lot, but residents of the neighborhood were more concerned about “unbearable” shouting of players and spectators, which began at nine o’clock in the morning and continued until six o’clock in the evening. A Bath Beach lawyer named Robert O’Byrn was infuriated by a barrage of baseballs and bad language issuing from players within earshot of his house and young daughter. And in Bedford, Police Captain Miles O’Reilly stopped games on Howard Athletic Club’s fenced-in field on Saratoga Avenue because balls were hit into the street even after the club built a higher fence and topped that with a very high screen.³¹

The most persistent complaints came from homeowners adjoining Prospect Park parade ground, which, after Sabbath prohibitions of forty-five years, began hosting amateur Sunday baseball in 1912. After some two hundred noisy players showed up on the first Sunday the homeowners formed the Parade Park Association and sought an injunction against the games. They were not mollified by a hastily adopted rule that limited play to the afternoon. The dispute continued until 1914 when the Park Commissioner affirmed the right of amateur clubs to play on Sunday, but mandated they “exercise every care not to annoy more than possible the residents of the houses adjoining the Parade Ground by the careless knocking and throwing of balls into yards and through windows.”³²

To Brooklyn’s Sabbatarians a more important problem than profane shouts and errant baseballs was the charging of fees for the privilege of watching baseball games on Sunday. They pointed to Section 265 of the New York State penal code, enacted in 1787: “All shooting, hunting, fishing, playing, horse racing, gaming or other public sports, exercise or shows upon the first day of the week, and all noises disturbing the peace of the day are prohibited.”³³ When Brooklyn’s one professional team and many semiprofessional clubs sold tickets on Sunday to fenced and gated fields or advertised games on circulars and in the local papers, they were breaking the law that prohibited “public sports.”³⁴ Stopping their games drew the most attention from the borough’s Sunday enforcers.

Subterfuges devised by clubs to make money did not fool anyone who wished not to be fooled. One allowed spectators through the gate free of charge while insisting that each of them purchase a program at an inflated price before being shown to a seat. Fans understood the fifty or seventy-five cents to be the price of admission to the bleachers or grandstand. A second ruse placed a “voluntary” contribution box inside the gate, with an imposing guard to “suggest” the spectator drop in fifty cents. Less crude was the declaration that each Sunday game was free to club members and closed to non-members, with a stand outside the gate to enroll new members at weekly dues of fifty or seventy-five cents. Police responses to these tricks varied from stopping games to arresting program sellers, the visiting team’s leadoff hitter and the home team’s pitcher and catcher (after the first pitch had been delivered), team managers, and even entire teams. Interestingly, many arrests resulted in dismissals by local judges, some of them sympathetic to commercialized Sunday baseball.

In January 1907 state assemblyman Leo Mooney introduced a bill to legalize Sunday amateur baseball. An amateur club manager from Brooklyn, Mooney believed his colleagues would support a bill that explicitly excluded semiprofessional and professional games. He was mistaken, and when another bill was introduced in the State Senate the following year opposition speakers representing the Church Federation of Brooklyn, the Kings County Sunday Observance Association, the Kings County Sunday School Association, the New York State Sabbath Association of Richmond, the League of Episcopal Churches of Brooklyn, and the New York Sabbath Committee, all condemned the bill at a public meeting, most of them objecting to Sunday baseball in any form. One of the speakers was Canon Chase, who argued that the bill was really an attempt to authorize semiprofessional and professional games by making no reference to indirect methods of charging admission. Claiming that he was “all right” with truly amateur games, Chase offered his support for an amended bill with a provision “that no admission is charged directly or indirectly.” Apparently, Chase had identified the promoters’ real motive, and it is likely his testimony helped kill the bill. Two years later Chase used the same argument against another bill purporting to authorize only amateur baseball. The bill “is dishonest and deceptive,” he wrote, because “the words ‘No fee for admission to any such game shall be exacted’ directly permit various subterfuges for making money from the game.” Passage would end amateur Sunday baseball, he argued, because all the fields would be snapped up by semiprofessionals. Chase once again proposed an amendment to prohibit indirect methods of collecting admission fees. Assemblyman McGrath, the bill’s sponsor, replied “that he would accept the amendments if the churches would omit taking contributions on Sunday.” But when McGrath made the change the following year the bill did not pass. Apparently, Chase’s position on Sunday baseball was less influential than that of even more conservative rural upstate legislators.³⁵

Although Chase’s testimony highlighted the subterfuges of semiprofessional clubs, the lurking presence in the Sunday baseball controversy was Brooklyn’s major league team, the Superbas (not yet called the Dodgers), operated by chief owner and president, Charles H. Ebbets. Longing to make Sunday baseball a reality for his National League club, Ebbets tried the tricks used by the semipros and invented a few of his own. But the police were as active at the Superbas’ home field as they were elsewhere in the city and Ebbets was hauled into court on more than one occasion.³⁶ The few games he managed to get away with fell well short of the Sunday bonanza enjoyed by his league rivals in Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis. Ebbets Field, the grand new home of the Superbas, opened in April 1913, but Sunday laws remained in effect until Ebbets enlisted World War I patriotism to persuade the state legislature to change them.

At the end of June 1917, with American troops in France, Ebbets sold tickets to a Sunday sacred music concert at the stadium, to be followed by a “free” regular season baseball game against the Philadelphia Phillies. The proceeds were earmarked for the Naval Militia of Mercy, the Red Cross, and other war relief organizations. Ten thousand people showed up. Ebbets and team manager Wilbert Robinson were summoned to court and later convicted of conducting a public game on the Sabbath. (As was common in these cases, their sentences were suspended.) But Ebbets was winning in the court of public opinion. When the police shut down Ebbets Field on the following Sunday, the Eagle’s story followed the heading “No Sunday Game Tomorrow; Red Cross Loses About $5,000.” Ten days later, an article on the second shutdown was headed “Sunday Law Agitators Hurt Every Brooklyn Regiment.”³⁷

The 1917–18 off-season was pivotal for the legalization of Sunday baseball in Brooklyn. Ebbets and club vice president E. J. McKeever began a public relations campaign that included an appeal to local clergy. “The undersigned,” their open letter began, “believing in the sanctity of the Sabbath, have no thought … of doing aught to interfere with God’s work being done in this community by you and your brethren.” All they sought was an amendment to the 1787 “blue law” that was now “a ‘dead letter’ with respect to every activity against which it is directed except baseball games in this community at Ebbets Field.” Two clergymen responded almost immediately. The Rev. T. J. Lacey of the Church of the Redeemer supported Sunday major league baseball in Brooklyn, and thought the opposition “senseless, intolerant and antiquated.” The other minister, Canon William Sheafe Chase, denounced Ebbets’s attempts to get around the existing law and commercialize the Sabbath.³⁸

In March 1918, Canon Chase appeared again in Albany to argue against a bill legalizing the charging of admission to professional baseball games played on Sunday. The bill was passed by the Senate in early April.³⁹ The Assembly approved in the following year and Governor Al Smith signed it into law. In a concession to upstate legislators the law included a local option, so the final word on Brooklyn Sunday baseball lay in the hands of the New York City Board of Aldermen and Mayor John F. Hylan. Chase argued for rejection by the aldermen, as did representatives from the Baptist Tabernacle Church of Brooklyn, the Methodist Ministers Association, the Presbyterian Ministers Association, and the Long Island Ministers Association. Nonetheless, the aldermen approved Sunday baseball by a vote of 64 to 0 and Mayor Hylan added his signature. On May 4, 1919, Brooklyn’s first indisputably legal professional Sunday baseball game was played at Ebbets Field. Some twenty-two thousand fans bought tickets to watch Brooklyn beat the Boston Braves by a score of 6 to 2.⁴⁰

The playing of that game, with the certainty of many more to come, was a significant loss to Brooklyn’s Sabbatarians. But at nearly the same time a more important issue was resolved in a far more favorable manner for Protestant traditionalists. The battle against alcoholic drink had been a centerpiece of the moral reform agenda, in Brooklyn and elsewhere in America, for nearly a century. It took many forms, including temperance societies, publications, lectures, and sermons, as well as the enactment of local licensing and Sunday closing laws. More than a dozen states imitated Maine’s 1851 law prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages in the entire state and persisted in prohibitory legislation when “Maine laws” were declared unconstitutional in state courts. This broad-based movement, in which the evangelical churches played a prominent role, was fairly effective in reducing the amount of alcohol Americans consumed in their daily lives.⁴¹

These victories emboldened total abstinence advocates, whose determination grew with increased immigration of groups that threatened not only the goal of reducing or eliminating alcoholic drink in America, but also the dominance of the evangelical Christianity from which the temperance movement had sprung. In 1874 the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded in Cleveland on total abstinence principles. Unlike earlier societies that made massive efforts to persuade individuals of the evils of drinking, the WCTU focused on the availability of alcoholic drink. Its constitution declared the purpose of the organization to be “the entire prohibition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors as a beverage.”⁴² The WCTU grew quickly through state and local chapters and was joined as a national organization in 1895 by the Anti-Saloon League. As the prohibition movement gained momentum it probably did more than any other political issue to pit rural and small-town America against the nation’s increasingly diverse cities. But the WCTU (more than the Anti-Saloon League) did continue to raise the issue in cities, where it sought out evangelical allies.

By 1912 several branches of the WCTU were active in Brooklyn, and the long-serving state chairwoman was Brooklyn resident Ella A. Boole.⁴³ When prohibition arrived in 1919 with the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution and the passage of the Volstead Act (formally the National Prohibition Act) a number of Brooklyn’s Protestant clergymen publicly supported the new measures. In May, after the amendment was ratified but before the Volstead Act was passed (both the amendment and the law granting enforcement powers to federal officers were to take effect on January 17, 1920), more than one hundred Protestant clergymen who had formed themselves into a Brooklyn Committee on Loyalty to the Constitution organized a mass meeting at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. An audience of eight hundred heard speeches by seven prominent organizers, including Canon Chase, who blamed the delay in ratifying the amendment on foreigners. We will live as “true Americans,” Chase promised, after we are done with “poisonous” German beer (to make sure his audience understood the problem lay with allies as well as enemies, Chase added English rum and French wine). Responding to frequent shouts from the audience of “We don’t want beer” and “We want prohibition,” the meeting adopted resolutions demanding compliance with the 18th Amendment as a civic duty, and described prohibition as keeping faith with “our brave boys in the Army and Navy.”⁴⁴

This Protestant mass meeting may have drawn some of its resolve from the well-publicized opposition of the Rev. John L. Belford of the Roman Catholic Church of the Nativity. Rev. Belford ridiculed “the bone dry amendment,” and noted that the Catholic Church had taken no position on prohibition. He had earlier attacked Protestant minister William H. Anderson, who had come from Baltimore to lead the Anti-Saloon League’s effort to persuade the New York State legislature to adopt the 18th Amendment.⁴⁵ But the battle lines over prohibition in Brooklyn cannot be simply drawn. Attitudes toward prohibition varied within religious denominations as well as between them, and the limits of Protestants’ influence over the new Brooklyn quickly became evident. In the fall of 1919 nine ministers of Protestant churches in Stuyvesant Heights read statements from their pulpits opposing the candidacy of Reuben L. Haskell, who was running for county judge on a “wet” platform. We have no evidence of Protestant clergymen from other districts publicly opposing Haskell; in any case, he won his race by one of the largest majorities ever recorded in Kings County.⁴⁶

Opposition to prohibition laws grew as their unintended consequences became evident. The bootlegging of whiskey and beer provided ample stock for thousands of speakeasies throughout New York City, including Brooklyn; it also fueled the growth of powerful and violent criminal organizations, including one that operated out of Chicago under the firm leadership of a Brooklyn native (born in Vinegar Hill, raised there and in Gowanus) named Al Capone. The Mullan-Gage Act, New York State’s initial attempt to align the state with federal prohibition law, was repealed in 1923. Subsequent proposals for replacing it revealed the strength of the “wet” opposition.

Some Brooklyn evangelicals refused to give up—Canon Chase, once again in Albany, was removed from the Assembly floor at one point for lobbying for such a bill—but public sentiment was not on their side, in Brooklyn and in the nation as a whole. Chase’s own denomination undermined his efforts to maintain prohibition. In 1927 the National Episcopal Temperance Church Society, meeting in New York, announced that two-thirds of the Episcopal clergy in the United States opposed the Volstead Act and that a majority of the church’s temperance society members had voted in favor of repealing the 18th Amendment. John A. Danielson, a lay member of the society, was applauded when he claimed “the growing demand for repeal of Prohibition is a sign of good American citizenship. A baser citizenship would be content to leave an unenforceable law on the statute books and continue to violate it.”⁴⁷ The 18th Amendment was repealed in 1933. As in the case of Sunday baseball, Canon Chase battled, with fewer and fewer allies, to the end—and lost.

In October 1916 a new moral issue arose in Brooklyn and then quickly, if temporarily, disappeared. Margaret Sanger, a nurse and advocate for sex education and birth control (the latter term was her coinage) opened America’s first birth control clinic in the crowded heart of Brownsville.⁴⁸ Sanger and her sister, Ethel Byrne, her partner in the venture, advertised the clinic in the press and passed out leaflets (in English, Yiddish, and Italian) on the street. On its first day the clinic received 140 visitors, mostly poor mothers who could not afford to have more children. The clinic performed no medical services and offered only oral advice and instruction to avoid violating Section 1142 of the state penal code, written in imitation of the federal Comstock Law, which outlawed not only the provision of contraceptive devices, recipes, or drugs of any kind, but also the provision of information about them, orally or in writing. Sanger was either unaware of the prohibition against oral advice or was provoking the police to arrest her. If the latter, she put on a good show when, ten days (and 450 visits by Brownsville women) later the police arrived to drag her, protesting “in a towering rage,” into a patrol wagon. The show had a sizeable audience of more than a thousand Brownsville residents who gathered outside the clinic after word got around that the police had arrived.⁴⁹

Sanger and her assistant and translator, Fania (Fanny) Mindell, were released from jail the following morning and soon reopened the clinic. On November 15 they were arrested again, this time for “maintaining a public nuisance.” Bail was promptly provided, and she left the court threatening to open fifty clinics in Brownsville if the police closed her down again.⁵⁰ But the clinic was shuttered, this time permanently, and no additional clinics appeared. Sanger stood trial in late January and was convicted of violating Section 1142. Refusing an offer of probation in return for her promise not to violate the state’s birth control law again, she served a thirty-day sentence in the city workhouse. Her conviction was upheld on appeal in January 1918, but not without a significant victory for the birth control movement, as the court ruled it was legal for physicians to prescribe birth control measures when they had a medical reason for doing so. This was the first step in the long process of disassembling the state’s version of the Comstock Law.⁵¹

After serving her sentence Margaret Sanger did not return to Brooklyn. Her presence in the borough was brief—about three and a half months from the opening of her clinic to her conviction in the Court of Special Sessions. But in that time (in addition to the help she may have given to 450 women) she garnered a good deal of publicity for a cause that had rarely been in the public eye. The Eagle’s coverage was almost always on the paper’s front page. Six days after the Brownsville clinic opened the paper published a long interview with Sanger without a word of condemnation, and two days later printed two articles describing the work she was accomplishing with poor women.⁵² The Eagle did not interview Catholic or Protestant leaders on the issue of a birth control clinic; nor did any priest or minister come forward during the clinic’s brief life or the arrests and trials that followed to condemn publicly this clear violation of a law which Catholic and evangelical Protestant clergy nearly unanimously supported. It is likely these leaders felt that Sanger posed little threat to the law, the actions of the police and the courts were sufficient to quell her threat to decency and morality, and it would be best to lie low and not give birth control the fuel of additional publicity.

If that was their strategy it worked for only a few years. In 1921 Margaret Sanger was back in the news with a conference in Manhattan to launch her new organization, the American Birth Control League. The closing session of the conference was scheduled as a public meeting at Manhattan’s Town Hall, a large auditorium just opened by the prosuffrage League for Political Action. This time the church, specifically the Roman Catholic Church, intervened. Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes, who Sanger had invited to the meeting, sent his secretary, Joseph P. Dineen, to coordinate with the police in shutting it down. Sanger managed to sneak into the hall and start her speech but was promptly arrested for disorderly behavior, which she later claimed was part of her plan. Previously covered in the press without much ado, the conference’s aborted finale was front-page news, as was the next day’s release of Sanger (by an Irish Catholic magistrate) because of insufficient evidence.⁵³ The American Birth Control League—which was later combined with another Sanger organization to form the Planned Parenthood Federation of America—had received valuable publicity, and it appears that Archbishop Hayes recognized he had made a public relations mistake. The meeting was reconvened five days later in another auditorium and drew a huge crowd. Archbishop Hayes was again invited. This time he sent a representative to attend the meeting.⁵⁴

The Roman Catholic Church was conspicuous in opposing the emerging birth control movement, but on this issue Protestant leaders, including those in Brooklyn, agreed with their Catholic counterparts. That they were opposed to Sanger’s movement even as the Catholics did the heavy lifting against her is evident not only from the support Protestant leaders had given to their fellow Protestant Anthony Comstock’s earlier crusade against birth control (among other sins), but also from Congressional testimony given some years after the Town Hall raid by Canon Chase.

By then retired from his Brooklyn pastorate and a resident of Washington, D. C., Chase testified in 1932 before a US House of Representatives committee on legislation to legalize the importation and distribution of contraceptives and literature explaining their use. Speaking as superintendent of the International Reform Federation Chase vehemently opposed the bill for “the havoc in manners and morals” it would inflict on the country by promoting illicit sex among the unmarried, promiscuity among the married, and “the bawdy-house business.”⁵⁵ Chase appeared again two years later before a US Senate subcommittee considering a bill to exempt contraceptives and other “Comstock items” sold or promulgated by doctors, hospitals, medical schools, and pharmacies. To his earlier argument Chase added a judgment, reminiscent of his testimony against the New York State bill purporting to legalize amateur Sunday baseball, that the proposed bill was corrupt. “Very great commercial interests are behind this bill,” he claimed, referring especially to those who would prosper from the sale of contraceptives.⁵⁶

Chase was a shrewd reader of legislation and in the secular precincts of legislative committee rooms he spoke the language of politics more frequently than the language of the pulpit. But he left no doubt about his commitment to old evangelical ideals. Best known for his fierce defense of the Puritan American Sabbath, in these hearings he embraced with equal fervor a traditionalist’s opposition to the modern birth control movement. That neither he nor his fellow evangelical Protestants spoke publicly against Margaret Sanger in 1916 and 1921—though they may have done so in their individual churches—suggests a caution born of the recognition of limited influence in the larger community. Archbishop Hayes went boldly forward in 1921, and his Protestant allies in the birth control opposition were no doubt glad to recognize him as the stronger force. That the Archbishop got burned in the process may well account for the Protestants’ continued reticence. Canon Chase was not known for caution. But when he finally spoke up about birth control, he was distant in time from the Brownsville clinic and the Town Hall raid, and distant in space from Brooklyn.

In his testimony before the Congressional hearings on birth control Canon Chase added comments about the immoral impact of movies. In 1932 he noted that the proposed bill “is, of course, favored by the producers of sex appeal motion pictures and immoral plays and the publishing of indecent literature.” In 1934 he focused on the first of the three: “I am deeply concerned about the motion picture, which teaches the young people that free love is a new idea, that the idea of marriage is old fashioned, and that divorce is a natural thing; and that you can’t make people good by law.”⁵⁷ This was a long-standing concern for Chase and a topic on which he was never reticent. Shortly after he assumed his Brooklyn pastorate he joined other local clergy in a protest against theatrical productions on Sunday, and within a few years helped expand its scope to include the increasingly popular medium of motion pictures. In December 1911 he presided over a public meeting sponsored by the Sunday Observance Association of Kings County that included movies as well as vaudeville shows and saloons as Sabbath violators.⁵⁸ In subsequent years his opposition extended to the purportedly salacious content of movies and the need to protect public morality through censorship.

A New York Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures was formed as early as 1909, but this name was deceptive. Neither a government agency nor a private-sector organization with censorship authority, the board was composed of a diverse group of progressive social workers, educators, and liberal churchmen assembled at the behest of movie executive William Fox to make recommendations to the mayor of New York City about films that contained immoral content. By 1916 it had become the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures and had shifted from a narrow focus on what might be wrong with individual movies toward promoting films of good quality and recognizing filmmaking as a valuable art form.⁵⁹ Responding to lobbying from evangelical Protestants led by Canon Chase and Catholic leaders from across the state, New York legislators passed the Cristman Bill in 1916 to fill the vacuum in film censorship, but the bill was vetoed by Governor Charles S. Whitman.⁶⁰

Early in the following year Frederick Boyd Stevenson called attention to this regulatory vacuum in an Eagle article illustrated with a drawing of a dense crowd of men, women, and children waiting to get into a movie theater festooned with a sign reading “Unmoral Muck-Raking Films Shown Here.” Superimposed on the crowd is a member of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice asleep at his desk. Stevenson (himself a member of Brooklyn’s Protestant Men’s Association and the Flatbush Gardens Civic Association) hoped a new committee of Brooklyn women led by Mrs. Clarence Pennoyer Waterman might waken Brooklyn’s slumbering moral enforcers.⁶¹

The nap continued a while longer. But in February 1921 the latest Stevenson article, “How Brooklyn is Getting into Action for Campaign Against Unclean Movies,” reported two large meetings of Protestant church clubs urging motion picture censorship, and printed laudatory letters from Canon Chase and a censorship committee of the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn. Eight days later, egged on by a speech from Stevenson, a meeting of more than one hundred representatives from Brooklyn churches condemned the National Board of Review as “a farcical camouflage for censorship” and called for passage of a state censorship law.⁶²

There appears to have been no Catholic presence at this meeting, but the coalition between Canon Chase and Catholic bishops reappeared in Albany at hearings for another attempt to create a movie censorship board. As it would be six years later in the fight over prohibition, Chase’s position was undermined by a group within his own denomination. Charles Lathrop, executive secretary of the Department of Christian Social Services of the Protestant Episcopal Church maintained that voluntary censorship by the movie industry was preferable to state regulation. “Lathrop’s opinion stood in stark contrast to the more emotional diatribes presented by Canon Chase,” but in the end the procensorship coalition prevailed. The Clayton-Lusk Bill establishing the New York State Censorship Commission was signed into law on May 15, 1921. An attempt to repeal the law in 1922 failed. One of the first witnesses to testify against repeal was William Sheafe Chase.⁶³

New York was one of only six states to create movie censorship boards during this period. In 1922 fear of federal regulation led to the creation of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (later the Motion Picture Association of America) to represent the industry’s interests. The studios induced Postmaster General Will H. Hays to leave the government to head the association. Hays developed a set of criteria for assessing—and self-censoring—the content of movies. Arguing that the process was not sufficiently rigorous, Canon Chase and others lobbied Congress to establish a national movie censorship board.⁶⁴ But Martin Quigley, a Catholic movie trade publisher, got there first. Quigley hired a Jesuit priest named Daniel Lord to write a more rigorous censorship code based on Catholic doctrine. This strengthened “Hays Code” was adopted by the association in 1930, heading off Congressional action. The code was strenuously enforced by another Catholic, Joseph Ignatius Breen, who was appointed head of a new Production Code Administration in 1934. Under Breen’s twenty-year leadership American movies were censored in ways that even Canon Chase would have approved, even though neither he nor any other Brooklyn Protestant leader had anything to do with the establishment of a system of moral supervision so reminiscent of Brooklyn’s old Yankee agenda.⁶⁵

Canon Chase’s battles expressed a fundamental discontent with the new Brooklyn, as did the efforts of some homeowners to circle the wagons around native white neighborhoods. But people who were unhappy or just uneasy with what Brooklyn had become had another option, one that was already coming to characterize the twentieth-century American metropolis—flight to the suburbs. Brooklyn, of course, had long been a prominent exemplar of suburban life, from the founding of Brooklyn Heights to the spread of residential neighborhoods into Flatbush, New Utrecht, and the other old Kings County towns. The sobriquet “City of Churches and Homes,” fully established by the last decades of the nineteenth century, expressed a dual identity that in many respects merged into one and was the frequent boast of Brooklynites who set themselves apart from the crowded Sodom across the river. A boast about superior morality, it was also about the beauty of sprawling, tree-lined neighborhoods made healthful by ocean and bay breezes. That boast endured during the early decades of Brooklyn’s development as a maritime and industrial center, even while thickening Irish and German immigrant neighborhoods offered contrast to upper- and middle-class suburbs inhabited mainly by native Protestants. It endured as well into the years when second generation Irish- and German-Americans moved from the South Brooklyn waterfront and industrial Williamsburg to Bedford, Flatbush, and other suburbs. The boast was much harder to maintain, however, when new bridges and subway tunnels brought masses of Jewish and Italian and Eastern European Catholic immigrants into increasingly crowded neighborhoods that could not be called suburban.

In 1930, under the title “Brooklyn Stands Out Prominently as a Great Center for Homes,” the Eagle tabulated 244,000 residential buildings in the borough, invoking the long-standing image of endless miles of single-family suburban homes. A closer look, however, evokes a different image. Just under 100,000 of those buildings, according to the Eagle, were built to house a single family—an impressive number and the numerically dominant form among Brooklyn’s domestic structures. But 80,000 were two-family houses and 65,000 were apartment houses, which means that (assuming roughly equal occupancy rates for each building type) apartment dwellers constituted a majority of the households living in Brooklyn in 1930, outpacing the maximum of 260,000 that lived in one- and two-family homes.⁶⁶ As we observed earlier, a number of Brooklyn’s apartment buildings were built on or just behind the commercial thoroughfares of suburban neighborhoods and did not compromise the openness of areas covered mainly by individual and duplex houses. But others, especially in the older wards, dominated whole districts of the borough. They did not always add to its beauty. Eight years earlier, Brooklyn was described as “one of the ugliest places in the world” by Frank Alvah Parsons, president of the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts.⁶⁷ Parsons was speaking primarily of two downtown eyesores, which hardly seems fair to the borough as a whole. But that it could be spoken at all was a stunning departure from self-congratulatory claims about Brooklyn’s beauty.

Brooklyn preserved much suburban space during these years, and even expanded that space into places like Canarsie, Sheepshead Bay, and Marine Park, although many of the homes built there were modest, and beckoned residents some old-stock Brooklynites preferred not to have as neighbors. Brooklyn was still a place to move to. But it was now also a place to move from.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, many middle-class and affluent Protestants concluded that Brooklyn, which by then was teeming with Jews, Italians, and growing numbers of Blacks, had ceased to be an acceptable domestic environment. And so they searched for and found places where they could create new and pleasant neighborhoods filled with people like themselves. This migration out of Brooklyn cannot properly be called “white flight,” a term that applies forcefully to the post–World War II decades, when African American, Black West Indian, and Hispanic communities approached a majority of the borough’s population. Ironically, during those decades, Jews, Italians, and other white ethnics were a large component of the stream of Brooklynites to more distant suburbs.

The transformation of Brooklyn in the early twentieth century affected the borough’s most exclusive neighborhoods. We have seen the reactions of some of the oldest residents of Brooklyn Heights to the large apartment buildings, the conversion of fine old brownstones to apartments and boarding houses, and even the corner deli. Some merely complained and hunkered down, but others, according to James H. Callender, moved to Park Avenue in Manhattan, where apartment houses defined the area rather than destroying it.⁶⁸ Others moved east to exclusive enclaves on Long Island’s North Shore, accessible now by the Long Island Railroad and new automobile parkways that made commutation feasible all the way to Manhattan. A Plymouth Church congregational meeting in 1922 appointed a committee to go over the membership rolls to drop the four or five hundred “who have moved out of Brooklyn and who have not been heard from in a number of years.”⁶⁹ Emblematic of these losses were merger discussions between the Heights’ most iconic churches: Church of the Pilgrims and First Presbyterian; Plymouth Church and Pilgrims. Neither of these mergers was carried out during the 1920s and the problem of fleeing membership remained, a continuing reminder that even this old redoubt of Yankee Protestantism had succumbed to the new Brooklyn.⁷⁰

The most significant migrations were directly eastward to the developing suburban towns of Queens County, and beyond Queens into the mid-island, North Shore, and South Shore towns of Nassau County. The Eagle article that tabulated the domestic building stock of Brooklyn boasted that “Brooklyn has more apartment houses than Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx and Richmond [Staten Island] combined. It has more two-family dwellings than the same boroughs together, and ranks second only to Queens in the number of one-family houses.”⁷¹ Apart from admitting that Queens had surpassed Brooklyn in single-family homes, the Eagle might have acknowledged that many former Brooklynites lived in those homes beyond the borough border.

It is impossible to say which Brooklynites moved to Queens, Nassau, or Suffolk (or the Bronx and Westchester north of Manhattan) during these years, or the degree to which they felt driven by discomforting changes in Brooklyn as opposed to the attractions of more closet space in the larger and generally cheaper homes of more distant suburbs. The US census does not speak of motive but does indicate that while less than one-fifth of Brooklyn’s residents in 1930 were native-born to native-born parents, the proportion in Queens was more than one-third. More telling are the advertisements for new homes in Queens and elsewhere. A 1922 Eagle article suggested that the critical questions for prospective movers to more distant suburbs involved transportation to Manhattan, healthful high ground, the prospects for increasing property value, and the fourth of a still longer list: “Is the surrounding property restricted so that the community will always remain the same kind and be attractive as at present”?⁷² Advertisers almost always stressed this element of their development’s appeal. Lynbrook Park in Nassau County, for example, stated in a 1927 full-page ad: “To insure congenial neighbors, it has always been our policy to restrict sales to people of character and refinement.”⁷³ The many advertisements for Jackson Heights in Queens stressed restriction, a 1925 ad listing it as the first of the reasons “Why so Many Brooklyn Families Have Moved to Jackson Heights”: “Because they found that they could purchase a new one-family English Garden House in the most carefully restricted residential section of New York City.” At the bottom of the ad, in capital letters, was the warning: “SOCIAL AND BUSINESS REFERENCES REQUIRED.”⁷⁴ “Restrictions” were generally understood to apply primarily to Jews and African Americans, and sometimes also to Catholics, especially those from Italy or Eastern Europe.

The developers of Queens and Nassau, in other words, were making special efforts to invite white Protestants, from Brooklyn and elsewhere, to their suburban residential projects. Buyers expressed a similar attitude toward the maintenance of their investment. In 1929 a resident of Forest Hills Gardens in Queens chaired a meeting of the Gardens Corporation that discussed a plan “wherein all purchasers of properties in the Gardens must be acceptable to a central committee of property owners, thereby keeping out undesirables and keeping up property values.” The chairman of the meeting was Lyman Beecher Stowe, grandson of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and grandnephew of Henry Ward Beecher.⁷⁵

Some of the Protestants still living in Brooklyn at the end of the Roaring Twenties could trace their lineage back to New England—perhaps even, like the Brewster sisters of Arsenic and Old Lace, to the Mayflower. For all their problems, Plymouth Church, the Church of the Pilgrims, and the First Presbyterian Church (late of Cranberry Street) did not fold their tents. But the Pilgrim Fathers no longer resonated so loudly in Brooklyn, even among its remaining Protestants. When Canon William Sheafe Chase left Brooklyn for Washington in 1932 he may have taken with him the last remnants of the old Protestant hegemony. But with him or without him the Brooklyn of 1930 was anything but a Yankee town.