In Chapter XXVII.1 of his 1927 novel ELMER GANTRY author Harry Sinclair Lewis wrote as follows:

     "Elmer had become so distinguished that the Rotary Club [of Zenith] elected him to membership with zeal.

     "The Rotary Club was an assemblage of accountants, tailors, osteopaths, university-presidents, carpet-manufacturers, advertising men, millinery-dealers, ice-dealers, piano salesmen, laundrymen, and like leaders of public thought, who met weekly for the purposes of lunching together, listening to addresses by visiting actors and by lobbyists against the recognition of Russia, beholding vaudeville teams in eccentric dances, and indulging in passionate rhapsodies about Service and Business Ethics. They asserted that their one desire in their several callings was not to make money but only to serve and benefit a thing called the Public. They were as earnest about this as was the Reverend Elmer Gantry. [See Note #1 in Commentary below.]

     "He was extraordinarily at home among the Rotarians; equally happy in being a good fellow with such good fellows as these and in making short speeches to the effect that 

'Jesus Christ would be a Rotarian if he lived today--Lincoln would be a Rotarian today--William McKinley would be a Rotarian today. All these men preached the principles of Rotary: one for all and all for one; helpfulness towards one's community, and respect for God.'

     "It was a rule of this organization, which was merry and full of greetings in between inspirational addresses, that every one should, at lunch, be called by his first name. They shouted at the Reverend Mr. Gantry as "Elmer" or "Elm," while he called his haberdasher "Ike" and beamed on his shoe-seller as "Rudy." A few years before, this intimacy might have led him into indiscretions, into speaking vulgarly, or even desiring a drink. But he had learned his role of dignity now, and though he observed, "Dandy day, Shorty!" he was quick to follow it up unhesitatingly with an orotund, "I trust that you have been able to enjoy the beauty of the vernal foliage in the country this week." So Shorty and his pals went up and down informing the citizenry that Reverend Gantry was a 'good scout, a prince of a good fellow, but a mighty deep thinker, and a real honest-to-God orator.'

     "When Elmer informed T.J. Rigg of the joys of Rotary, the lawyer scratched his chin and suggested, "Fine. But look here, Brother Elmer. There's one thing you're neglecting: the really big boys with long pockets. Got to know 'em. Not many of them Methodists--they go out for Episcopalianism or Presbyterianism or Congregationalism or Christian Science, or stay out of the church altogether. But that's no reason why we can't turn their money Methodist. You wouldn't find but mighty few of these Rotarians in the Tonawanda Country Club--into which I bought my way by blackmailing, you might say, a wheat speculator.

     "'But--but--why, T.J., those Rotarians--why there's fellows in there like Ira Runyon, the managing editor of the Advocate,and Win Grant, the realtor--'

     "'Yeh, but the owner of the Advocate and the banker that's letting Win Grant run on till he bankrupts, and the corporation counsel that keeps 'em all out of jail, you don't find those malefactors going to no lunch club and yipping about Service! You find 'em sitting at small tables at the old Union Club, and laughing themselves sick about Service. And for golf, they go to Tonawanda. I couldn't get you into the Union Club. They wouldn't have any preacher that talks about vice--the kind of preacher that belongs to the Union talks about the new model Cadillac and how hard it is to get genuwine Eyetalian vermouth. But the Tonawanda--They might let you in. For respectability. To prove that they couldn't have the gin they've got in their lockers in their lockers.'

....."Elmer felt ennobled by belonging to the same club with a Rolls-Royce.
..... 

"A group of weighty-looking men of fifty, near him, were conversing on the arts and public policy. As he listened, Elmer decided, "Yep, Rigg was right. Those are fine fellows at the Rotary Club; fine, high-class, educated gentlemen, and certainly raking in the money; mighty cute in business but upholding the highest ideals. But they haven't got the class of these really Big Boys."

..... 

[From Chapter XXVII.3] "The new Ku Klux Klan, an organization of the fathers, younger brothers, and employees of the men who had succeeded and become Rotarians, had just become a political difficulty. Many of the most worthy Methodist and Baptist clergymen supported it and were supported by it; and personally Elmer admired its principle--to keep all foreigners, Jews, Catholics, and negroes in their place, which was no place at all, and let the country be led by native Protestants, like Elmer Gantry."

[ Elmer brilliantly avoided the problem of taking a stand on the KKK.]

"So everywhere he took a message of reconciliation to the effect:

'regarding religious, political and social organizations, I defend the right of every man in our free America to organize with his fellows when and as he pleases, for any purpose he pleases, but I also demand the right of any other free American citizen to demand that such an organization shall not dictate his mode of thought or, so long as it be moral, his mode of conduct.'

[from Chapter XXX:  After Elmer is granted an honorary doctorate of divinity by Abernathy College, Rotary makes its last appearance in the pages of the novel.

"It was a great relief at the Rotary Club. They had long felt uncomfortable in calling so weighty a presence 'Elmer," and now, with a pride of their own in his new dignity, they called him 'Doc.'"

Henry Sinclair Lewis published Elmer Gantry in 1927 and accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930.

Lewis was a systematic planner of his novels. Most began abstractly as "theme" novels. Elmer Gantry was, for instance,  Lewis's "preacher novel." He went deeply into its milieu for months, even preached personally in pulpits and wrote up copious notes. He did not, therefore, invent Rotary Clubs, revivals, newspapers or churches from whole cloth. 

The novel has three obvious sequential divisions.

--(1) From birth through college and Baptist ministerial school, his first pulpit and ending in his escape from a woman not good enough for him to marry. The novel begins in 1902 with the words, "Elmer Gantry was drunk."

--(2) Elmer then becomes a businessman, a top aide of woman evangelist and feminist Sharon Falconer and laments her death by burning.

--(3) Elmer continues his deliberate plan to rise socially through religion, clubs, connections and showmanship. He engages in the business of New Thought, then climbs to a Methodist minister, husband and father, a crusader against vice during the Prohibition era, a Rotarian, a golfer, a philanderer. His sights are on becoming a bishop. The books concludes (apparently in 1926) with Elmer preaching, "We shall yet make these United States a moral nation!"

[See Elmer Gantry citations above, NOTE # 1] 

When founded by Paul Harris and others in 1905, the Rotary Club of Chicago was a non-religious organization with 

(a) "boosterism" as its core value. 

(b) fun and uninhibited fellowship and 
(c) intense concern for members and their personal and moral well being. 

(a) booster club, 
(b)  college fraternity and 
(c) Masonic Lodge or other fraternal organization--without their rituals and secrecy.

New in 1907 was Chicago Rotary's addition of a fourth core value:
 

(d) concerted service by the club to non-members, persons outside the club (through leading an urban coalition to place public toilets in Chicago's Loop district.)

In 1935 the book Rotary? recorded the judgment of sociology professors of the University of Chicago (commissioned by the Chicago Rotary Club) that 

(1) it was possible for Rotary to combine fellowship (including deep concern for the good of other members) with boosterism (helping one another's profit financially).

(2) it was also possible to combine fellowship (service to club members) with external service (doing good to people and organizations outside the club).

(3) it was, however, well nigh impossible to combine boosterism (dealing with club members as customers) and altruism (external service to non-members with no view to personal profit).

One can argue with the book Rotary? But by the 1940s the leaders and members of all 12 types of service club had, in effect, accepted the professors' thesis. Either self-interest or altruism had to go. Altruism stayed. Self-interest was removed as a core value of all service clubs, starting with Rotary.

As the earliest and for a long time by far the largest and most prestigious of the service club types, Rotary was examined and picked over by writers such as H.L. Mencken, Henry Sinclair Lewis, John Marquand, George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton--to name but a few. The "First Rotarian," lawyer Paul Percy Harris, himself did battle with Chesterton over the phrase "this Rotarian Age."

Some observers believe that Babbit (1922) and  Elmer Gantry (1927) did their part to remove boosterism from among the core values of Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, Civitan, Soroptimists, Zonta and others. 

For Sinclair Lewis presents business leaders as relentlessly cynical, self-seeking and hypocritical. As self-assessed captains of business and industry, Rotarians were fair game.

Elmer Gantry, the 1960 film starring Burt Lancaster (Academy Award for Best Actor) and Jean Simmons, is highly regarded. Shirley Jones also won an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Lulu, one of Elmer's spurned women. 

Director Richard Brooks and his writers preserve the recognizable preacher/hypocrite of the novel while taking considerable liberties with the plot. They also humanize and soften Gantry the man. 

The film's focus is the second (central) part of the novel and shows the interaction of Gantry (Burt Lancaster) and feminist, virtually schizophrenic revivalist Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons). The film ends with Elmer walking away from ministry and the ashes of Sharon's revival building on a New Jersey pier.

As in the novel itself, the film repeats over and over Gantry's shameless plagiarizing from the essay on love by atheist Robert G. Ingersoll. "Love...is the Morning and the Evening Star."

[The film may be rented at http://www.netflix.com.]

-OOO-

For Rotarians and Friends of Rotary Everywhere

[TPK 06/13/2001;
revisited 05/17/2005]