A 1926 piece explaining why Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist who has been caught in a love-nest that year, needed Los Angeles to succeed in her holy calling.
...Los Angeles was a pasture fore-ordained for evangelists, and she was the first one to give it anything low enough for its taste and comprehension. The osteopaths, the chiropracters, and other suck quacks, had long marked and occupied it. It swarmed with swamis, spiritualists, Christian scientists, crystal-gazers and the allied necromancers. It offered brilliant pickings for real-estate speculators, oil stock brokers, wire-tappers and so on. But the town pastors were not up to its opportunities. They ranged from melancholy High Church Episcopalians, laboriously trying to interest retired Iowa alfafa kings in ritualism, down to struggling Methodists and Baptists, as earnestly seeking to inflame the wives of the same monarchs with the crimes of the Pope. All this was over the heads of their trade. The Iowans longed for something they could get their teeth into. They wanted magic and noise. They wanted an excuse to whoop.
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