The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  In other words, the division of social class that separated the “rich” from the “poor” of this story’s title was more apparent than real. Not only did these poor children behave like well-trained members of respectable society—that is actually what they were. The real problem that the wealthy man in the story had to deal with was not that of social class but of family dynamics. The cathartic gesture he makes at the end is one in which he forgives his daughter, after fifteen years of exile, and takes her back into the family. Of course, he feels relieved and cleansed by this act, but his catharsis, and that of the story’s readers, have little to do with the expectations raised by the story’s title and its accompanying illustrations.43

  “Christmas for Rich and Poor.” This pair of pictures were printed on two opposing pages of Godeys Lady’s Book for December 1858. They provided the illustration for the story of the same title. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

  THE JADED RICH

  At the same time that Christmas stories appeared about poor children who were patient and grateful, other stories were appearing that portrayed the jaded responses of more prosperous children. By the 1850s, fictional accounts about such jaded rich children were becoming commonplace. An 1854 children’s book written by Susan Warner, the author of the 1849 best-seller The Wide, Wide World, drove this point home. In this book, Carl Krinken: His Christmas Stocking, Warner indicated that the presents received by the children of the rich made them feel “discontent.” Such well-off children were hard to please, Warner wrote; they generally “fretted because they had what they did, or because they hadn’t what they didn’t have.” The Christmas stocking of a typical rich child was stuffed with “candy enough to make the child sick, and toys enough to make him unhappy because he didn’t know which to play with first….”Warner added sarcastically: “It was a woful [sic] thing if a top was painted the wrong color, or if the mane of a rocking-horse was too short, or if his bridle was black leather instead of red.”44 Several decades later, no less popular a writer than William Dean Howells would write a delightful story about a little girl who expresses a wish that Christmas could come every day—and who has her wish fulfilled in horrific fashion. After a few weeks, the girl and her friends become so sick of receiving “disgusting presents” that they begin to throw them out on the street unopened, and soon the police began to warn the children “to shovel their presents off the sidewalk, or they would arrest them.” Before long, the overworked garbage collectors of the city are refusing to pick up any more Christmas trash! Eventually, of course, the little girl learns her lesson.45

  On a more modest scale there was the story that Harriet Beecher Stowe had written in 1850, “Christmas; or, The Good Fairy.” In that story (discussed in Chapter 4), Stowe indicated that Christmas shopping for one’s own family and friends had become difficult, since such prosperous folk were “sick, and sated, and tired with having everything in the world given [them]” at Christmas. But Stowe’s tale went on to propose a solution to this problem. Its plot hinged on just that point: It was easy enough, after all, to find people who had not been sated by Christmas presents, people who could be counted on to be intensely grateful for even the smallest trifle.

  Those people, of course, were the poor. The language Harriet Beecher Stowe chose to describe them is quite suggestive. A poor person offered the prosperous shopper a “fresh, unsophisticated body to get presents for;” the poor as a class provided the rich with a supply of “unsophisticated subjects to practice on.” And that is just what this story is about. Its prosperous main character becomes a “good fairy” for a poor family who lives in the neighborhood—and, indeed, the poor family does respond with all the gratitude anyone could wish.

  Unsophisticated subjects to practice on. This may sound like strange language. But others were making much the same point. Take Louisa May Alcott, for example. The four young heroines of Little Women, in the opening chapters of that novel, do the very thing that Stowe proposed: They go off on Christmas morning (after receiving their own presents of the New Testament) and bring gifts to a poor family in the neighborhood. There is evidence that many Americans shared this concern. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, there was something of a movement to form Christmas clubs for prosperous children, clubs that were designed to foster selfless behavior during the Christmas season by encouraging their members to hold Christmas parties for their less-privileged peers, and to give away some of their own old Christmas presents. The Children’s Christmas Club of Portland, Maine, organized in 1882, pressed its members “to save [old] toys, books, and games, instead of carelessly destroying them,” and to present these castoffs at a Christmas dinner held for the children of the local poor. A similar club was later formed in Washington, D.C., with the daughter of the U.S. postmaster general serving as its president, assisted by the daughter of the U.S. president himself, Chester Arthur.46

  Such material suggests that some members of the American bourgeoisie were facing a real Christmas dilemma. Their own children had become jaded with presents. On the other hand, the actual poor—who were unlikely to be surfeited with gifts—were a sea of anonymous proletarian faces, and in any event they were as likely to respond to acts of token generosity with embarrassment or hostility as with the requisite display of hearty gratitude. Giving to the children of the needy would solve the dilemma neatly.

  Typically, the children selected to participate in such events (as in the case of the Portland Children’s Christmas Club) came from a pool that had been carefully screened by charitable organizations. These needy children made ideal recipients of face-to-face charity. They could be counted on to be both well behaved and truly grateful. They would respond neither with the jaded indifference of more privileged children nor with the guarded resentment their own parents might display. And they would show their gratitude, with touching smiles and exclamations. Face-to-face charity—the exchange of gifts for goodwill—could be made to work in mid-nineteenth-century America, after all. But the economic divide could be bridged only by going across generational lines. In shorthand language, class had to be mediated through age.

  In any case, from mid-century on—and with what appears to have been increasing frequency into the 1890s—some well-to-do Americans devoted part of their Christmas days to visiting the children of the poor. These visits were ordinarily encouraged and arranged by the charitable agencies themselves. The first instance I have found of what would become the standard ritual took place in 1844, when Margaret Fuller chose to spend part of Christmas Day with the children in New York’s Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb—and to report on her visit in the New York Tribune (this episode is recounted in Chapter 5). After 1850, New York’s charitable agencies for children institutionalized this kind of event. They began to hold formal open houses that more prosperous residents of the city were invited to visit on Christmas Day, open houses that received lots of publicity (they also served as effective fund-raisers).

  A favorite place to visit was the children’s nursery on Randalls Island, the municipal establishment in the East River (it also contained the city hospital, insane asylum, and almshouse). On Christmas Day, 1851, the New York Tribune reported that “quite a large party of ladies and gentlemen” attended “a capital entertainment” given to the children at the municipal nursery and hospital. The following year, too, the Tribune reported that the children on Randalls Island were visited by “several dignitaries, including several merchants of the City,” who brought “a supply of juvenile presents suitable to the season.” On this occasion the children “marched in procession to meet them at the dock.” And of course they “most gratefully accepted and heartily enjoyed” the dinner that followed.47

  And so on in subsequent years (the Randalls Island open houses continued into the twentieth century). Of course, Randalls Island was physically cut off from the rest of the city. But charitable institutions located within the city, even in its less savory areas, also invited visitors on Christmas Day.48
The most heavily publicized of these was in the Mission House located in the Five Points section, the most notorious slum area in the city (in the entire nation, for that matter). But the terms in which the Tribune reported the first such occasion, in 1853, are revealing. The report, headed “CHRISTMAS AT THE FIVE POINTS,” indicated that the Mission House (located on the site of a former brewery) was “open all day” and received many visitors. In fact,

  [t]he streets were thronged in that neighborhood with well-dressed ladies and gentlemen, and some of the richest carriages of the City; the effect of which was to make the topers [i.e., drunkards], male and female, shrink back into their dens, while the children saw and felt the effects of such visits to the House of Industry, which was crowded to excess all the afternoon, while several hundred Christmas presents were bestowed upon the scholars of that school….49

  This was an intriguing description. It assured its readers that the Five Points area was transformed on this occasion, its menace momentarily defused. The more unpleasant denizens of the neighborhood simply withdrew from sight when the respectable outsiders came to visit, and only the presence of children was felt.50

  What impelled people to make such visits? Pangs of conscience certainly played a part, but there is surely more. (To ease one’s conscience, it would have been enough to have made a substantial contribution, and stayed at home.) The visitors—and, just as important, the many others who merely read about them in the newspapers—seem to have needed to experience, in person or by report, the “gratefully accepted and heartily enjoyed” gifts, the “happy faces and joyful voices.” Such a need may have addressed an unspoken fear that was shared by many Americans in just these decades—a fear that the urban social order was coming apart, that industrial capitalism was leading to social collapse. From that angle, visits to poor children offered a kind of symbolic reassurance that the social order still held together, after all. It was not only a merry Christmas that the happy faces demonstrated; it was the viability of industrial capitalism itself.

  But I suspect that such a “political” motivation is not the whole answer. The grateful exclamations and smiles of the poor children may have fulfilled another need as well—a need to experience spontaneous affectionate gratitude in itself; to participate in social interactions that evoked a powerful emotional response that was difficult to achieve within middle-class family life. Charles Loring Brace had written about the absence of truly warm social relations among American families, the forced and “hollow” nature of domesticity. During the latter part of the century, other commentators made similar points. The very importance that domestic life had taken on in nineteenth-century American society had led many people to harbor a set of powerful expectations that real families found it difficult to fulfill. The middle-class family was becoming a victim of its own Utopian fantasies.51 Here, too, Christmas became a volatile flash point.

  To glimpse something of what may have been at stake, let me cite a rare personal account of one of these Christmas visits. In 1875 the press reports about the annual Christmas pilgrimage to Randalls Island noted the presence among that year’s visitors of a celebrity, Louisa May Alcott. (Alcott was now living in New York, eight years after the publication of Little Women had propelled her into literary stardom.) Alcott and her party visited first the municipal orphanage, then the children’s hospital, and finally the home for retarded children. Alcott herself carried a large box of dolls and a bundle of candy. At every stop, one newspaper reported, “Miss Alcott… mingled with the little ones, giving to each a doll and some candy, accompanying each gift with some kind greeting.” Alcott was deeply moved by the experience, and she wrote a lengthy private letter to her family describing it. Her letter is filled with graphic descriptions of the children’s gratitude, intense and helpless—the sudden “cry of delight,” the outstretched “groping hands,” the sighs of “oh! oh!,” the “cheer of rapture,” the “silent bliss.” (One little girl was “so overcome” by the present Alcott gave her that “she had an epileptic fit on the spot.”) It was the first Christmas Alcott had spent “without [family] dinner or presents,” but she liked it “better than parties”: “I feel as if I’d had a splendid feast,” she concluded, “seeing the poor babies wallow in turkey soup, and that every gift I put into their hands had come back to me in the dumb delight of their un-childlike faces trying to smile.”52

  It is easy to look back at this with distaste. From one angle, Alcott was exploiting the youthful recipients of her benevolence—using them as what I’m tempted to call “charity objects,” almost an economic equivalent to the sexual representation of women in pornography. Alcott appears to have deeply craved the overwhelming gratitude displayed by the objects of her charity. In contrast to the aggressive begging of wassailers in pre-nineteenth-century Christmas rituals, these Gilded Age dependents took the role of passive, responsive instruments on whose emotional vulnerability Alcott seems to have “played.”

  But that isn’t entirely fair. People like Louisa May Alcott had good reason to feel stifled by the constraints of domesticity, even as they were unable to liberate themselves from its assumptions. By the final decades of the nineteenth century, women were bearing the brunt of the tension (and the labor) that the Christmas season ordinarily entailed in prosperous households. The Ladies’ Home Journal actually published an article in 1897 that acknowledged this as a cultural problem. Men in “thousands of homes” across America would be “truly thankful when this Christmas business is over,” the article began (it was written by a man). Why so? “[B]y seeing their wives, mothers, sisters, or daughters reach Christmas day utterly tired out, [and] with the prospect of a siege of illness as soon as Christmas is over.”53

  These were women on whom the emotional work of Christmas had devolved, along with the bulk of the shopping and the cooking—women who felt themselves chiefly responsible for making sure that their husbands and their children (or, as in Alcott’s case, their fathers) were satisfied with the holiday experience. The task was daunting, and even partial failure (or anxiety about the prospect of failure) meant that guilt would be added to fatigue. Little wonder that Christmas was so often followed by “a siege of illness” for middle-class women.

  Such women wished for a little relaxation, surely. But they also welcomed any opportunity to see their efforts rewarded with the kind of intense response their own families were often unable to provide. They were seeking intense sensation along with social justice. Not long afterward, some of these women would manage to link those dual urges together by turning to such activities as social work (in places like Jane Addams’s Hull House) or the radical Christian Social Gospel movement, which openly addressed the issue of bringing a capitalist social order into conformity with the teachings of Jesus (Charles Loring Brace can be considered a forerunner of this movement). Or, farther afield, these same women might have joined such emerging enterprises as the Colonial Revival and other forms of what the historian Jackson Lears has termed “anti-modernism.”54

  In any event, the problem was not of their making. These women (and some men, too) were doing the best they knew how. The problem was not with their needs but with the dynamics of the society in which they lived. The problem was with a constricting domestic ideology that caused many people of means to harbor unsatisfied expectations of achieving personal fulfillment through family life alone. And the problem was also with an inequitable economic system that caused many of the same people—those, indeed, with the strongest ethical sense—to experience profound guilt, a guilt that, for good reason, could not be easily assuaged.

  CHARITY AS SPECTATOR SPORT

  By the final decade of the nineteenth century, well-to-do New Yorkers had begun to arrange new and larger kinds of Christmas visitations to the poor, and these gala events reeked—strongly—of exploitation. During the 1890s some New Yorkers began to treat charity, almost literally, as a kind of spectator sport, performed on a large scale in arenalike spaces before a paying audience. On Christm
as Day, 1890, a midday dinner was served to 1,800 poor boys (many of them newsboys) at Lyric Hall, a theater at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street. A newspaper account made clear what was taking place: “Every floor was crowded with lookerson, principally members of the Children’s Aid Society and other charitable people.” This meal was followed, that same evening, by the traditional dinners held at every Newsboys’ Lodging House in the city. It was as if the newsboys were being asked to put on performances at different holiday venues—as if there were something erotically charged about watching hungry children eat.55